The best aid to prayer is the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:26). But He does not work alone.  He will use our praise as His aid to help us pray—to energize our prayers.  Here is how I believe it works: the Holy Spirit first calls to us and shares God’s truth with us.  When we choose to sing and praise Him, as we rejoice over His truth, we are in a sense calling back to Him and telling Him that we love Him and adore Him.  We are inviting Him to come to us and love us and fill us up.  And so He does.  By praise then we are bringing the Holy Spirit into our prayers; and He energizes our prayers and makes the presence of God real to us.

Praise in the Holy Spirit we could say is the energy and the joy of prayer. It is also the hope and the promise of prayer.  By praise (in the Holy Spirit) prayer possesses the energy and the desire to be persistent and enduring to the end.  We see this exemplified for us by Jesus in Hebrews 12:2, which says, “…who for the joy set before Him endured the cross…”  Here we see that Jesus endured the pain of the cross through His prayers because of what was on the other side, which He set His mind to praise God for.  Hence, when He chose to rejoice and praise God for all that was awaiting Him in heaven, this I think empowered Him to endure the cross through much agonizing prayer.  The same is true for us; when we choose to praise God, especially when times are tough, this will help us to be strong in prayer.  It, in fact, is God’s designed way for us to pray through the difficult times.

Praise in the Holy Spirit is a great weapon of warfare against our enemy Satan, and against the world and the flesh. When we rejoice and praise God we are resisting the devil, for the devil hates the believer’s praises and runs away (Ja. 4:7-8).

Moreover, when we sing and praise God, using scripture songs, all our evil thoughts and arguments vanish away (2 Cor. 10:4-5). Praise is both our way of escape from sin’s temptations (1 Cor. 10:13) and is our best preparation for serious prayer.