If you really want to pray with earnestness here are four ways to start.

1. Pray for it. Ask God to show you His heart and ask Him to give you the same desires and burdens that He has. Then ask Him to give you the energy to pray concerning those burdens and to put His fervency and power into your prayers.

2. Be Obedient to pray whenever God calls you to pray. If we are obedient to pray when He calls us to pray He will be faithful to give us just the right amount of earnestness it takes to pray and bring the answer. Even if you don’t feel a lot of desire to pray at first, pray anyway, because your act of obedience will put the Holy Spirit to work in you. He will warm your prayers up, and the more you keep praying the more the Holy Spirit will bring burning fire to your prayers.

3. Love others fervently. The Greek word ektenos, translated as earnest, is used in Acts 12:5 to describe prayer. But the word is also used in 1 Peter 1:22 for how we are to love one another. Here Paul writes, “Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently [ektenoós] with a pure heart.”

So here we see that the fervent (or earnest) love we may have for someone is the same earnestness that we will have in our prayers for them. In fact, we cannot pray for someone with earnestness without loving them with the same earnestness.  Thus earnest prayer is born of earnest love. And even if we are not praying for a particular person, if we are just praying regarding something in our own life, we can still pray with earnestness; it comes out of our fervent love for God and for His will.

4. Abiding in God’s Word. When we spend time meditating on the Word and praying the Word into our life, God will show us His heart. Before long we will have the same (or a portion of the same) desires and burdens He does; and we will pray with the same earnestness that His Spirit prays for us (Rom. 8:26).