The Prayer Jesus Used Before Every Miracle (They Stopped Teaching It)

Before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he prayed.

However, the method he employed in those moments—the interior shift that preceded the miracle—has been largely forgotten in modern Christianity.

This isn’t due to any deliberate concealment but rather because it requires a practice that most religious education no longer teaches.

If you’ve ever felt that your prayers echo into a void, that you’re speaking without being heard, you’re not alone.

Many have been taught that prayer is simply about talking to God—asking, pleading, hoping he might respond if it aligns with his will, if the timing is right, or if your faith is strong enough.

When answers don’t come, people are told it’s because God said no, or perhaps because their faith wasn’t sufficient, or that his plan is simply beyond human understanding.

Yet, what almost no one tells you is that this is not how Jesus prayed.

When Jesus stood outside Lazarus’s tomb, he didn’t plead with God to raise him from the dead.

Instead, John 11 records something remarkable.

Jesus lifted his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me.”

Notice the tense—past tense.

He expressed gratitude for something that hadn’t yet occurred, as if the miracle was already complete despite the absence of any physical evidence.

This is not a prayer of request; it is something entirely different.

If we revisit the Gospels, we observe a consistent pattern before every miracle performed by Jesus.

When he healed the paralytic in Mark 2, the text states that he saw their faith and then spoke.

However, between seeing their faith and speaking, something significant happened that the Gospel does not explicitly name.

When he fed the 5,000, he first looked up to heaven—not to ask, but to align.

Before walking on water, Matthew 14 tells us he went up the mountain alone to pray, preparing himself for the impossible act ahead.

There’s a consistent sequence here: withdrawal from the crowd, solitude, an interior shift, and then the release of power.

The question that remains unasked is this: If Jesus provided clear instructions about how to pray, why does modern Christianity treat it as a mystery rather than a method?

In Matthew 6, Jesus states, “When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret.”

Most people misunderstand this directive their entire lives.

They interpret it as advice about privacy—find a quiet place, avoid being showy, pray where no one can see you.

While this is true on one level, it misses the deeper meaning of what Jesus intended.

The Greek word for “room” that Jesus used is “tamon.”

This doesn’t refer to a simple bedroom or cupboard; it means an inner chamber or treasury—a hidden place inside something.

Jesus isn’t advising you on external locations; he’s providing a map to an interior space.

He’s instructing you to go inward, to the part of you that exists beyond your thoughts, beyond your identity, beyond the noise of your conscious mind.

When he says to “close the door,” he means to seal it.

Shut out the world of senses, the mental chatter, the version of yourself that is afraid, wanting, and asking.

The Father doesn’t exist out there somewhere, listening from a distance.

He exists in secret, in the inner room, in a place most people never access because they don’t even know it’s there.

Jesus accessed this place every single time before he performed a miracle.

This isn’t mere speculation; it’s a discernible pattern.

Every healing, every miracle, every moment where the invisible became visible followed the same sequence: inward first, alignment, silence, and then power.

However, herein lies the problem.

You were never taught how to go inward.

Instead, you were taught to close your eyes and start talking—to think about God, to imagine him listening, to hope he’s paying attention.

But thinking about God is not the same as entering the place where God is present.

This distinction is crucial; it is why miracles seem to have ceased.

It’s not that God stopped listening; it’s that the method—the practice of entering the inner room and closing the door—was gradually lost as Christianity transitioned from small, contemplative communities to a religion of empire.

You cannot systematize silence.

You cannot standardize interior development.

You cannot train priests to guide people into a space that many have never entered themselves.

Consequently, the instruction remained in the text, but the practice—the “how”—faded from common teaching.

What remained were rituals to perform, prayers to memorize, and forms to follow without ever developing the interior capacity Jesus described.

So, let me share what Jesus understood that is nearly absent from modern Christian teaching.

Prayer isn’t about persuading God; it’s about coherence.

Let me repeat that because it’s a pivotal point.

Prayer, the kind Jesus practiced, isn’t about convincing God to do something.

It’s about entering a state of alignment where you and the source are no longer separate entities, where your will and the Father’s will are in harmony, where there’s no gap, no distance, no division—just union.

From that place, when you speak, you’re not hoping reality will change; you’re recognizing that it already has.

This is why Jesus spoke in the past tense at Lazarus’s tomb and thanked the Father before the miracle occurred.

From the inner room, from a place of complete alignment, the present and future collapse into one.

What you see with your physical eyes hasn’t caught up yet, but in the realm of cause, in the invisible, it’s already finished.

Thus, you don’t speak from a place of want.

You don’t speak from hope or from the anxiety of asking.

You speak from agreement, from alignment, from the space where the Father’s will and your will are united.

Listen to how Jesus described this in John 14:10: “The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.”

He’s not taking credit or claiming personal power.

He’s communicating that he’s not doing this alone; the Father is working through him.

But crucially, he doesn’t say the Father is doing it for him or to him; he states that the Father is doing it through him.

Jesus became the vessel, the doorway, the place where heaven and earth met.

He achieved this by entering the inner room and closing the door to everything that wasn’t God.

However, if you try to speak from your personality, from your ego, from your separated mind, nothing happens because you’re not aligned.

You remain outside the door, still operating from a place of lack and need.

The outer world does not respond to separation; it responds to source.

You only access source when you go inward, behind the door, into the silence that exists before thought, before identity, and before the noise of your own wanting.

This is why Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness before his ministry began.

This is why he went up the mountain to pray before choosing the twelve disciples.

This is why he withdrew to solitary places again and again, even when crowds were pressing in, desperate for his attention.

He wasn’t recharging or resting; he was realigning.

He was returning to the inner room, closing the door, and remembering who he was beyond his human personality.

Every time he did this, he returned with power.

Now, here’s what I want to give you.

Not the complete method, as the inner room only opens for those willing to stay at the threshold, but the entry point—the foundation that makes everything else possible.

If you want to go where Jesus went, you have to stop doing what you’ve been doing.

Stop talking to God in your head.

Stop asking.

Stop wanting.

Stop imagining him somewhere out there, listening from a distance.

Instead, do this: Sit somewhere you won’t be disturbed.

Be still.

Close your eyes.

And instead of launching into words, just breathe.

Not special breathing or a technique—just notice your breath.

Feel it move in and out.

With each exhale, consciously let go of one layer of noise.

Let go of thoughts about what you need to do later.

Let go of conversations you had earlier.

Let go of the version of you that worries about tomorrow or replays yesterday.

Just breathe.

As you do, begin to feel for the place behind your thoughts—the stillness that’s always present beneath the mental chatter, the silence beneath the noise.

It’s subtle.

You won’t hear a voice, see a vision, or have a dramatic experience.

But if you stay there, if you resist the urge to start talking, asking, or performing the prayer ritual you’ve been taught, you’ll begin to feel something—a presence, not external or separate from you, but closer than your own breath, closer than your heartbeat.

That’s the edge of the inner room.

When you feel it, don’t rush forward.

Don’t try to make something happen.

Don’t start asking for things or listing your needs.

Just be there.

Stay in that place.

Even if it feels like nothing’s happening, even if your mind tries to pull you back into thinking, wanting, or the familiar pattern of asking God for things, stay.

Because the door doesn’t open by force; it opens by recognition.

Recognition takes time.

You might sit there for five minutes and feel nothing.

You might sit for ten and think you’re doing it wrong, but you’re not.

You’re learning to be still.

You’re learning to close the door.

You’re learning to stop talking long enough to actually listen.

You’re learning what it feels like to not be the voice in your head, to not be the one who’s afraid, to not be the one who needs something fixed, provided, or changed.

You’re learning to rest in the presence that’s always been there, waiting for you to notice.

That’s the foundation.

Without this, nothing else works.

You can learn every prayer technique in the world.

You can memorize scripture, fast, worship, and serve, but if you never learn to enter the inner room, if you never learn to close the door and be still, you’ll always be praying from the outside.

And the outside has no power.

But once you’ve established that foundation, once you’ve learned to recognize the presence in the inner room, there’s a second movement that Jesus made after the stillness, after the alignment, after entering the inner room and closing the door.

It’s not a word, not a request, but a shift in awareness that turns alignment into authority.

It’s the difference between praying to the Father and praying as the Father.

When Jesus said, “The Father and I are one,” he wasn’t making a theological claim about his unique divine nature.

He was describing the state he entered before every miracle—the place where the boundary between self and source dissolved completely, where my will and thy will weren’t two different things being negotiated.

They were the same movement.

From that place of union, he didn’t ask for miracles; he recognized them.

He saw what was already true in the invisible realm and spoke it into the visible.

That’s why he could say to the paralytic, “Rise and walk,” with complete authority.

That’s why he could command the storm to be still.

That’s why he could call Lazarus out of the tomb.

He wasn’t hoping God would act; he was acting from the place where he and God were unified.

This is what the mystics knew, what the desert fathers practiced, what contemplative Christians have done in monasteries and hermitages for 2,000 years while the broader church forgot how to teach it.

But it was never meant to be locked away in monasteries.

It was meant for anyone willing to learn, anyone willing to stop talking long enough to listen.

So, here’s what I’m asking you to do: Don’t just watch this video and move on.

Actually try it tonight, tomorrow morning, or whenever you have 10 minutes of uninterrupted time.

Sit.

Close your eyes.

Breathe.

Let go of the noise.

Feel for the stillness behind your thoughts.

And when you find it, when you touch that presence, even for a moment, stay there.

Don’t ask for anything.

Don’t try to make anything happen.

Just be in that space.

Learn what it feels like.

Train yourself to recognize it.

Because once you know how to find the inner room, once you’ve closed the door, even once, you can always return.

The more you return, the more natural it becomes until one day you realize you’re not just visiting anymore.

You’re living there.

That’s when prayer stops being a practice and becomes your permanent state of being.

That’s when you understand what Jesus meant when he said, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Not coming someday, not somewhere else—right here, right now, within you.