Melissa Joan Hart revealed she experienced a "born again" moment when she encountered the Holy Spirit.

The 47-year-old actress was raised Catholic and her husband Mark Wilkerson, was previously Baptist, but together they started attending a Presbyterian church and she says prayer has deepened her faith.

Speaking to the Christian Post, Melissa said: "Everyone's always talking about their moment of coming to Jesus or their moment of being born again. I feel like I've always walked with God, it's just gotten deeper and closer and more fulfilling.

"I did have a born again, Holy Spirit moment. I never really understood the Holy Spirit or the Trinity in a sense. One day, we were in Bible study and it just hit, like the Holy Spirit made sense to me all of a sudden!

"One day, I just felt it and I was like, "Oh my gosh, that’s the Holy Spirit talking to me. I get it now."

"Like a lightning bolt just hit me and I was like, 'The Holy Spirit!' I don’t know why it just hit me and I got it. Then I better understood the Trinity and all that."

She also credited her husband with guiding her prayers, saying: "I started to understand more about how to pray and then my husband also helped me. My husband taught me to pray for mercy."

However, there was a time when she almost gave up prayer because of anxiety but resumed it as she was worried about Satan "trying to take over".

She said: "I actually wanted to stop praying for a while because I was having such terrible thoughts that would frighten me so badly. I was like, ‘I'm not gonna pray anymore because I can't handle these thoughts. It's giving me anxiety. It's keeping me from sleeping. It's like, literally choking me with how scared it's making me. When I pray, these other thoughts are coming in. And that's when I realised that Satan is trying to take over so I have to keep doing it! I fought through it and that doesn't happen anymore."