How Long Should You Pray? What the Old Writers Actually Said
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How long should you pray? The question is nearly always asked with a stopwatch somewhere in mind — ten minutes, half an hour, whatever amount would finally count as enough — and the old devotional writers answer it in a way that disappoints stopwatches. They were far less interested in the length of the time than in the speed of it. The complaint that people pray too fast is not a modern complaint. It is one of the oldest in the devotional literature, and it was made most sharply by men who had no screens to blame.
Why this is an old question, not a modern one
J.C. Ryle, writing to English churchgoers in the 1870s, put it in one flat sentence: “Impatient hurry is the order of the day with many religionists.” — J.C. Ryle, Holiness. Note the word he chose. Not the worldly, not the careless. The religionists: the busily devout, the people whose diaries were full of good meetings. Ryle thought the disease was inside the church, not outside it, and he thought it was ordinary.
When the older writers attacked haste in prayer, then, they were not attacking an invention of the last twenty years. They were attacking a permanent human habit that religion is particularly good at disguising, because hurry in devotion looks like diligence.
Why “longer is holier” is not what the tradition says
Honesty first: the devotional tradition does not simply condemn speed, and any article that says so is selling something.
The oldest prayers in English-language worship are prayers for God to hurry. The Scottish prayer book preserves the ancient versicle at the opening of the office: “Haste thee, O God, to deliver me: make haste to help me, O Lord.” — Episcopal Church in Scotland, The Book of Common Prayer. Lancelot Andrewes, whose private devotions were as unhurried as any in the language, opened in the same key: “O God, make speed to save me, O Lord, make haste to help me.” — Lancelot Andrewes, The Devotions of Bishop Andrewes Vol. I. Generations of Christians began their prayers by asking God to be quick.
And the preachers used haste as a virtue when the occasion called for it. Spurgeon, pressing the urgency of the matter on his hearers, told them: “Therefore make haste, and escape for thy life.” — Charles Spurgeon, Select Sermons. That is not a man with a general objection to speed.
So the tradition holds two things at once. It is not that slow is holy and fast is worldly. Something more precise is going on.
The real question is pace, not length
Spurgeon set the two sides side by side in one of his short daily notes, under a heading about knowing how to wait and set against Isaiah 28:16. “He shall make haste to keep the Lord’s commandments; but he shall not make haste in any impatient or improper sense.” — Charles Spurgeon, Faith’s Checkbook.
There is the whole argument in a line. Haste in obedience: good. Haste as impatience: the thing being warned against. The old writers were not asking anyone to move slowly through the world. They were asking that the interior life not be conducted at the speed of anxiety.
Samuel Rutherford, whose letters were mostly written under confinement and forced idleness, reached for the same Isaiah text repeatedly. “But have patience, and stand still; he that believeth maketh not haste.” — Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford. And more simply, to a correspondent in trouble: “Haste not, and you shall see the salvation of God.” — Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford. Rutherford was not recommending a mood. He was telling someone with no power to fix their situation that the fixing was not theirs to do.
Alexander Maclaren, preaching in Manchester two centuries later, translated the same verse into plain English and, in doing so, wrote the best gloss anyone has managed:
I find it in an Old Testament promise: “He that believeth shall not make haste”–he shall not get into a fuss.
— Alexander Maclaren, The Friend on the Road
Not getting into a fuss is a modest ambition. It is also, on most days, the whole of it.
What a quiet time with God actually is
A quiet time is not a mood and not a spiritual temperature; it is a stretch of the day set apart on purpose for Scripture, prayer and silence, with the door shut and nothing else scheduled inside it. The older writers would have recognised the practice under other names — the closet, the office, the hour — and they assumed it had edges: a beginning, a place, an end. What they would not have recognised is the notion that it has to feel like anything in particular before it counts.
How to spend time in prayer: conditions, not techniques
Where this becomes practical rather than merely wise is in Andrew Murray, who wrote about prayer more concretely than almost anyone in the Victorian era. Murray’s counsel was rarely about feeling. It was about the clock and the room.
“Take quiet time, and be still before God, that He may take this matter in hand.” — Andrew Murray, The Ministry of Intercession. And in his book on waiting, put as a resolution in the first person: “I will take time, and just be still, and rest in the light of God.” — Andrew Murray, Waiting on God.
The verb is take. Time is not something that arrives; it is something a person removes from other uses. Murray, who spent the last decades of his ministry at Wellington in the Cape, treated unhurried time the way a farmer treats water rights: as a condition that has to be secured in advance or the crop simply does not come. Readers who want the whole of his thinking in order will find it laid out in the Stilling Waves complete reader’s guide to Andrew Murray, and something of the place he worked in the note on the Andrew Murray centre in Wellington.
Johann Arndt, writing in Lutheran Germany at the turn of the seventeenth century, had already stated the condition and its cost: “In order to this, however, the soul must be at rest, which it never can be till disengaged from the world.” — Johann Arndt, True Christianity. Disengaged is a hard word. Arndt is not describing a mood that descends on a person in a busy afternoon. He is describing something that has to be arranged.
This is the honest version of the claim, and it should be kept honest. The old writers did not teach breathing methods or body technique, and nobody should pretend they did. What they prescribed were conditions: a place, a shut door, a posture, a pause, an hour not already spoken for. Wesley, for instance, tied prayer to fasting as a matter of course — “And with fasting let us always join fervent prayer, pouring out our whole souls before God, confessing our sins with all their aggravations, humbling ourselves under his mighty hand, laying open before him all our wants, all our guiltiness and helplessness.” — John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions. A bodily condition, plainly stated, with no theory of the body attached.
Two limits: slow praying is not what does the work
Two warnings, both from inside the tradition.
The first is Wesley’s, and it is aimed squarely at anyone who begins to think that going slowly is what does the work: “Yea, thou art not able to quicken thy soul in any degree, no more than to give any degree of life to the dead body.” — John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions. Nobody prays themselves alive by lowering their heart rate. Stillness is a condition for communion in the way an open window is a condition for air. The window does not make the wind.
The second is Thomas Traherne’s, and it cuts against sentimentality about quiet: “The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed.” — Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations. Traherne is right, and the point is not decorative. Stillness sought for its own sake curdles quickly into idleness or self-observation. What the writers wanted was not a becalmed soul but an unhurried one — which is a different thing, and harder.
Maclaren caught the difference in his exposition of the second exodus, where a whole nation leaves captivity without running: “For ye shall not go out with haste, nor go by flight: for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your reward.” — Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture: Isaiah and Jeremiah. They are still going out. They are simply not fleeing. That is the pace the tradition is after: departure without panic, obedience without fuss.
So how long should you pray each day?
None of this asks for an hour. It asks that the first minute not be spent already behind.
That is the only reason a Stilling Waves journal day opens with a short pause before the reading rather than with the reading itself. It is not a technique and it makes no promises. It is a line on the page that gives back the half-minute most people skip, on the old and reasonable assumption that a person who arrives at a page out of breath will read it that way.
This article belongs to a series on what the older devotional writers actually taught about the body in prayer. The overview is here: Does the Body Matter in Prayer? What the Old Writers Said.
