Is prayer a key to receiving the Baptism in the Holy Spirit?

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Prayer. One of the most frequent representations of obedience, which often appears as a separate condition, is prayer.60 This condition is usually built on the accounts in Luke 11:13 and Acts 1:14 where prayer precedes the impartation of the Spirit. 

It is held that the gift cannot ordinarily be received apart from prayer. The gift is “without money and without price,” writes Riggs (pp. 103–04), “but He will give it only to those who ask for it.” Skibstedt (p. 68) affirms that “God fulfills the promises of the baptism in the Holy Spirit as long as the candidate knows that he needs this power—and seeks it in intensive and persevering prayer.” 

As may be gathered from the latter part of the last remark, it is not simply prayer that usually obtains the gift, but a definite kind of prayer—“intensive and persevering prayer.” Riggs tells us emphatically that “we must ask importunately,” and queries, “Shall we consider that He gave the Spirit to us when asked once, even though there be no evidence then or thereafter that He came?” (p. 104).

If the spiritual evidence of Pentecost does not follow prayer, then either the faith or the prayer of the candidate must have been inadequate. For as there are kinds of faith—great faith and little faith—there are, in Pentecostal opinion, kinds of prayer—asking, seeking, and knocking (Matt. 7:7). 

The latter—seeking and knocking—are the types of prayer to which believers must extend themselves if they fully meet God’s requirement of importunate prayer. “This is God’s elimination test,” Riggs writes (p. 104), “to determine whom He considers worthy to receive this priceless gift.” Intensive and extensive prayer is active obedience brought to a head. In this kind of prayer, the candidate's soul begins to pass into passive obedience.

What is Passive Obedience? After there has been active obedience, the candidate for the promised baptism is instructed, as he now waits for the actual incidence of the gift, to become 

(1) as submissive as possible to the promptings of the Spirit 

(2) usually within the believing context of the Pentecostal fellowship. 

He is to yield himself entirely to God and to other Pentecostals' brotherly encouragement and prayer in the fellowship of what is usually called the “tarrying meeting.” 


60 In the largest circulating Pentecostal publication in North America, the weekly Pentecostal Evangel, there appears on the inside cover of each edition a creedal statement including, under the article on the baptism of the Spirit, only prayer as a condition: “We believe that the Baptism of the Holy Spirit according to Acts 2:4 is given to believers who ask for it.”

Bruner, F. D. (1997). A Theology of the Holy Spirit: The Pentecostal Experience and the New Testament Witness (pp. 98–99). Wipf and Stock Publishers.

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