Luke 4:42, When day came, Jesus left and went to a secluded place; and the crowds were searching for Him, and came to Him and tried to keep Him from going away from them.
Luke 5:16, But Jesus Himself would often slip away to the wilderness and pray.
Luke 6:12, It was at this time that He went off to the mountain to pray, and He spent the whole night in prayer to God.
Luke 9:18 , And it happened that while He was praying alone, the disciples were with Him, and He questioned them, saying, “Who do the people say that I am?”
Luke 9:28, Some eight days after these sayings, He took along Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray.
Luke 11:1, It happened that while Jesus a was praying in a certain place, after He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John also taught his disciples.”
Luke 21:37, Now during the day He was teaching in the temple, but at evening He would go out and spend the night on the mount that is called Olivet.
John 8:25-28 NASB, [26] I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you, but He who sent Me is true; and the things which I heard from Him, these I speak to the world.” [27] They did not realize that He had been speaking to them about the Father. [28] So Jesus said, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me. …
I know that this is a lot of verses for you to read, but I wanted to list all of them so that I could connect some dots. If you read the gospel of Luke you’ll discover a massive amount of accounts of Jesus ministering in signs and wonders, but in between those ministry times, as you see in the verses that I have listed, Jesus was always slipping away to be alone in prayer. One of the most important decisions that Jesus made was when he chose the 12 from among his disciples to be his apostles. Before he made that decision Luke 6 says that he spent all night in prayer. The point being, is that Jesus’s life was saturated in prayer. He was constantly getting alone with his father, cultivating his father’s presence, and nurturing his union with the father. As we have said before, it is important for us to remember that even though Jesus was never anything less than God, he lived on earth as a man filled with the Holy Spirit utterly dependent on his father. Jesus never initiated any, and Jesus said in John 14:10 that it was always the father doing the works in and through him. Jesus came, not just to die for us, but to also live for us, as the author and perfecter of faith, showing us how God intended for man to live in utter dependence. In those passages that I listed from John 8, Jesus said that he spoke the things he heard from the father and that he spoke the things that the father taught him. As God, Jesus did not need to be taught anything, but as man he needed to cultivate the father’s voice and presence, and nurture his union with the father. Where did Jesus learn from the father? He was taught by the father in prayer. Everything Jesus did and said in ministry flowed out of his extravagant life of intimacy with his father. Worship always comes before witness. Intimacy has to be the foundation from which ministry flows. Jesus only did those things he saw the father doing, and he only said those things he heard the father saying, but he learned how to operate that way by cultivating intimacy with his father in the secret place of prayer.
I’m not giving you this information just so that you can have some more knowledge, but I’m saying these things to stir you up. If Jesus flowed in the kind of anointing that he flowed in, because he had cultivated intimacy, and nurtured union with his father in prayer, then you and I can cultivate that kind of intimacy with Jesus. As we cultivate intimacy with him in the secret place, we are also nurturing our union with Christ, and the more we cultivate intimacy, and nurture union, the more we will manifest Christlikeness in life and in ministry.