How to Make a Prayer Closet: A Place, a Door, and an Hour
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Ask how to make a prayer closet and most of the answers arrive as decorating: a cleared shelf, a cushion, a verse painted on a board. The older answer is plainer than that, and harder to furnish. Christian prayer, in its most famous instruction, begins with a piece of household advice. Not a feeling to work up. Not a doctrine to affirm first. A room, a door, and the closing of it. The Sermon on the Mount tells the one who prays to go into a private place, shut the door, and speak to a Father who cannot be seen.
Whatever else that instruction is, it is physical. It assumes a body that can walk somewhere, a hand that can close something, and a stretch of time that somebody has agreed to defend.
The devotional writers who came after took it more literally than modern readers usually expect. What follows is what they actually said, including the places where they contradict each other.
What a prayer closet is, and where it comes from in the Bible
The phrase comes from the King James wording of the Sermon on the Mount, where the one who prays is told to go into his closet, shut the door, and pray to a Father in secret. The word did not mean a wardrobe. It meant a small private room — the sort of inner storeroom an ordinary house had, out of sight of the street and of the rest of the household — which is why the older writers render it as inner chamber and treat it as architecture rather than as a project. A prayer closet, in the sense these writers meant it, is a defensible place to be alone. That is the whole of the definition.
How to make a prayer closet: begin with an actual place
Charles Ebert Orr, writing for plain readers in How to Live a Holy Life, gives it as a direct instruction with no argument attached:
O beloved, when you pray, enter into your closet, and be sure to close the door.
— Charles Ebert Orr, How to Live a Holy Life
Andrew Murray, who used the phrase inner chamber so often that it became a kind of signature, compresses it to two clauses:
Enter thy inner chamber; be alone with the Father.
— Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer
Richard Baxter takes the same room and extends its use past prayer into meditation, on the reasoning that if the door is good enough for one it is good enough for the other:
If in private prayer, Christ directs us to _enter into our closet, and shut the door_, that _our Father may see us in secret_, … so should we do in this meditation.
— Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest
None of the three argues for the room. They assume it. It is not a technique for people who find prayer difficult; it is simply the ordinary shape of the thing.
Enter into thy closet: what the shut door is actually for
The door does more work in these writers than the room does. Spurgeon frames it not as a duty but as a relief, and puts it as a question:
When you have been fretted and troubled about worldly things, have you not found it pleasant to enter your closet, and shut to the door, and tell your Father in secret all your cares?
— Charles Spurgeon, Gleanings among the Sheaves
Shut to the door is the operative phrase. The door is not there to keep God in. It is there to keep the day’s business out, and the tradition is clear-eyed that the day’s business will otherwise walk in and sit down.
The hour: keeping an appointed time when you feel nothing
Then the third condition, the one most often dropped: a set time. Note what Murray concedes mid-sentence:
Enter your closet at the appointed time, however dull you feel, and place yourself before your Lord.
— Andrew Murray, The Ministry of Intercession
The appointed time is the instruction. However dull you feel is the honest part. Murray expects dullness, does not treat it as a sign that something has gone wrong, and does not offer to fix it before the door shuts.
Wesley supplies a frequency:
We have need daily to retire from the world, at least morning and evening, to converse with God, to commune more freely with our Father which is in secret.
— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions
And Murray, elsewhere, writes about the reader who has already tried this and lost:
He has often tried to retire half an hour for prayer and sacred meditation, but life is too busy, it rushes on relentlessly, and even in moments of seclusion thoughts wander too far afield for serious concentration on holy things.
— Andrew Murray, To Be Near Unto God
That was written for a generation without telephones. The failure it describes is old, which is no solution, but it disposes of the idea that the problem belongs only to this century.
The most extreme version, and a small piece of book history
William Law, who was never moderate, proposed the maximal form of the same principle:
It is this: retire from the world, and all conversations, only for one month; neither write, nor read, nor debate anything in private with yourself; stop all the former workings of your heart and mind; and, with all the strength of your heart, stand all this month as continually as you can, in this following form of prayer to God.
— William Law, The Spirit of Prayer
Readers of Murray will find that passage oddly familiar, because Murray reproduced it, almost word for word, in Like Christ:
It is this: retire from the world and all conversation, only for one month; neither write, nor read, nor debate anything with yourself; stop all the former workings of your heart and mind: and, with all the strength of your heart, stand all this month, as continually as you can, in the following form of prayer to God.
— Andrew Murray, Like Christ
Nineteenth-century devotional writers quoted their predecessors at length and loosely; Murray was passing Law on rather than passing him off. The counsel travelled intact for a century and a half, physical conditions and all.
Law also supplies the guardrail, and it is a firm one:
When, for the sake of this inward prayer, you retire at any time of the day, never begin till you know and feel, why and wherefore you are going to pray; and let this why and wherefore, form and direct everything that comes from you, whether it be in thought or in word.
— William Law, The Spirit of Prayer
The room does not do the praying. Law’s instruction to wait at the threshold until the reason is known is a plain admission that a person can complete every physical condition and still have done nothing.
Does a prayer closet have to be a physical room?
It would be tidy to stop there. The tradition does not.
Anselm, centuries earlier, had already moved the room inward and made it a figure of speech:
Enter into the closet of thy heart; shut out all except God, and what may help thee in thy quest of Him, and with closed door seek Him.
— Anselm of Canterbury, St. Anselm’s Book of Meditations and Prayers
That is a real disagreement, not a nuance. For Anselm the chamber is the attention, and the door is an act of the will. Whether a physical door helps is left open.
Madame Guyon presses harder, and her warning is the one most worth hearing:
It will be a small matter to pray, and to retire within ourselves for half an hour or an hour, if we do not retain the unction and the spirit of prayer during the day.
— Madame Guyon, A Short Method of Prayer
The hour, in other words, can become a sealed compartment. A person can keep the appointment scrupulously and let it change nothing on the other side of the door.
P.T. Forsyth adds a further complication, denying that the shut door makes the prayer private in any meaningful sense:
Even private prayer is common prayer–the more so, possibly, as it retires from being public prayer.
— P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer
What these writers never promised a prayer closet would do
They prescribed conditions. A place, a door, a set hour, unhurried time. They never treated the body as an irrelevance to be got past. That is the honest claim, and it is enough.
They did not teach breathing technique or bodily method, or anything a modern wellness vocabulary would recognise, and it does them no favours to dress them in it. What they offered was cruder and more durable: arrange the circumstances, then wait, and expect the waiting to be unrewarding for long stretches. Jean-Pierre de Caussade named what happens when the conditions are met and nothing arrives:
Instead of the prayer of quiet you then make a prayer of patience, of suffering and of resignation.
— Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence
That is not a technique failing. On this reading it is the practice working as designed, in a season that happens to be dry.
Why a Stilling Waves day begins with a pause
This is the unglamorous reason a Stilling Waves day opens with one short pause before the reading rather than dropping the reader straight into the text: a moment to close the door, however dull the reader feels, before anything is asked. Murray’s own instructions are gathered in the complete reader’s guide to Andrew Murray, and the place where he wrote most of them in the note on the Andrew Murray Centre in Wellington.
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.
