Jeremiah 18:1 The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD saying, 2 “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will announce My words to you.” 3 Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something on the wheel. 4 But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make. 5 Then the word of the LORD came to me saying, 6 “Can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does?” declares the LORD. “Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel.”
The seeking of God as clay will result in painful trials which require self-denial and the crucifixion of self. The clay must be broken from hardness and rigidity and be soft and pliable in the hands of the Potter in order for it to be formed as the Potter desires. The Lord must take all vessels that He is going to use and break them and remake them into another vessel according to His good pleasure, but for human souls this breaking comes as a result of trials and being in the fire of those trials. While prayer is usually thought of as something easy and as relatively without cost, there are few things farther from the truth than that. True prayer is very costly in terms of pain and of trial. True prayer requires the one praying to be conformed to the Potter Himself, and even the Lord Jesus learned obedience through suffering. True prayer requires an eternal perspective and the Lord gives that by making the earthly perspective sour to the taste.
This death to self will require time and agony, and in fact must happen day after day. It is not beyond the scope of reality to think of a person needing to die to self each time s/he prays. While the Gospel is of free grace, it also costs the death of self which in one sense is to require all things. While prayer is pictured as coming to the throne of grace, this is not contradictory to the need to die to self in order for the soul not to rely on self or seek self while in prayer. Even more, this death to self does not come by the hand of self, but must come by the hand of grace. The soul must come to the throne of grace in order to seek grace to work the denial and/or death to self in order that one may pray out of love for God and His glory. After all, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. True prayer, then, can only come from a humbled heart and a humbled heart cannot be the work of a proud heart but instead it must be worked in the soul by grace.
It is necessary for the soul to seek self-denial and death to self in order to truly pray, which also demonstrates that the heart that desires God will be seeking the face of God at the expense of self. The soul cannot seek self as its chief love and goal at the same time it seeks God as its chief love and goal. Each time a soul goes to prayer and attempts to pray, it will be a spiritual battle and self must be denied. There can be no seeking of the face of God in prayer apart from humility and the denial of self. After the fall the human heart was and still is full of self, pride, and the interests and love of self and that will not be done away with in even regenerate men until eternity. Once the soul realizes that in its prayer the heart longs for the glory of either God or self, it will know that it must die to self and be humbled from seeking its own glory in prayer. Once the soul realizes that in its prayer it is seeking either the kingdom of self or the kingdom of God, it will know that it must die to self in order to seek the kingdom of God in truth and love. Once the soul realizes that in its prayer it is either seeking its own will and pleasure or the will and pleasure of God, it will know that it must die to self in order to truly seek the will and pleasure of God.
True prayer is a spiritual act and this requires the constant turning from the earthly self and its constant clinging to worldly things so that it may pray in a spiritual manner. As long as man does not realize just how proud s/he is in seeking God for the purposes of self in prayer, the need to die to self will not really be recognized. As long as man does not realize just how fleshly and self-seeking s/he is in prayer, the need to die to self will be thought of as a work in order to get something from God. True and spiritual prayer is very rare and at least part of that is because man does not really get just how pervasive the self and pride are in prayer, so man thinks he is praying without the denial of self but never really prays.
Prayer as clay is not easy, yet this must take place for the rest of our lives for true prayer to occur. We cannot come to God as we are and simply expect to stay that way and for Him to give us the things that our fleshly desires want, though it is also the case that it may be our fleshly religious desires that crave something from God. It is not just sinful self that we must die to if we are to be clay in the hands of the Divine Potter, but it is our proud self and our religious self that we must die to. It is impossible for man to change self to become clay. God alone can do that.
God Loves... Himself 
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