How to Pray for Guidance — Murray’s Three Steps
⏱ 16 min read
You are standing in front of a decision and both paths look reasonable. The job that pays better, or the one that fits your life. The house that is cheaper, or the one that is closer to the people you love. The conversation to have, or the one to let go of. The boundary to draw, or the one to extend a little longer. And the prayer for guidance — Lord, show me which way — has, somewhere in the last few weeks, started to feel like a prayer that has not come back with an answer, because both paths still look reasonable, and the deadline for the decision is getting closer, and the more you ask the more silent the asking seems to be.
This is the slow version of the question. Not the cross-stitched one. Andrew Murray, who wrote Absolute Surrender in the last years of a long life of pastoral leadership in the Karoo and the cities, knew the shape of the prayer for guidance — and knew, gently, why the modern shape of the asking so often comes back inconclusive. The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow asking into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly. The way you have been praying for guidance may not be wrong; it may simply be skipping the first two of three steps.
The modern wellness sibling of how to pray for guidance is the pros-and-cons list and the gut-check and the what would the wisest version of you do question on the morning walk. None of these are bad. Murray would say they belong to step three, and that step three never works without step one and step two. The two steps before the question are the steps the modern prayer for guidance most often skips, and the skipping is why the asking feels like it has been ignored.
What the prayer is not asking for
Before we walk the prayer, name what it is not. The prayer for guidance is not the prayer for a sign. The prayer for guidance is not the prayer to have the future shown to you. The prayer for guidance is not — and this is the harder line — the prayer for God to tell you the right path so that you can avoid the consequences of the wrong one.
Murray would say all three of these are misreadings of an older asking. The older asking is the asking of a child whose father is in the room, who has agreed to be led, and who is asking only for the next step rather than the whole map. The prayer for guidance, in its older shape, does not demand the destination be revealed. It asks for the small next thing to be made plain — and trusts that the small next thing, walked, will produce the visibility of the second thing, and that the second thing will produce the visibility of the third. The map is given a step at a time. The whole map is rarely given at all.
The shift is small in language. It is enormous in posture. The woman praying for guidance is not asking for a download of the future. She is asking to be led — slowly, daily, by the One who has the map and is not in a hurry to hand it to her in full.
Step one — make my heart Thy resting-place
“It is where Thou enterest to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself, that Thou makest holy. O my God! may my heart be Thy resting-place. I would, in the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. Let such fellowship with Thee, and Thy love, and Thy will be to me the secret of a life of holiness.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is the first of the three steps. Before the asking about the decision, the establishing of the room in which the asking will happen. May my heart be Thy resting-place. The prayer for guidance, in Murray’s older form, does not begin with the question. It begins with the settling — the slow positioning of the heart as the place where the One you are asking is at rest.
Notice the inversion. The modern prayer for guidance is the prayer of the anxious heart, asking a God who is somewhere else to give an answer. Murray is praying the opposite. The heart is being prepared as the room in which God is resting. The guidance, when it comes, will come from inside that resting. The asking from outside the resting is the asking that returns silence; the asking from inside is the asking that the resting itself is already answering, in slow ways the anxious form cannot perceive.
In the stillness and confidence of a restful faith. The phrase is exact. The first step is not the asking. The first step is the stilling. The body lowers. The breath slows. The agitation around the decision is set down at the edge of the chair. The mind ceases its restless cycling between the two paths. The heart becomes the place He is invited to rest in — not as a passive emptiness, but as a deliberate, made-quiet room. Then, and only then, does the asking begin to make sense.
The reason this step is so often skipped is that it does not feel like progress. The woman with a decision to make does not feel that making her heart a resting-place is the work. She feels that the work is the analysis, the consultation, the prayer-for-an-answer. Murray would say the analysis can happen later. The first step of the prayer for guidance is the stilling. Without it, the asking sits inside the agitation, and the agitation distorts whatever guidance comes.
(If the long arc of decision-fatigue has been the part keeping you back from rest, how to know God’s will for your life — Murray’s three tests walks the wider question this prayer sits inside. For the related ask — how to pray when the heart of someone you love has gone stone — how to pray for a hardened heart — Murray’s soft answer walks the same author’s softer grammar, and what true humility looks like — Andrew Murray’s 12 marks walks the posture without which guidance cannot land.)
Step two — to be ruled and taught and led
“Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Blessed rest! the fruit and the foretaste and the fellowship of God’s own rest! found of them who thus come to Jesus to abide in Him. It is the peace of God, the great calm of the eternal world, that passeth all understanding, and that keeps the heart and mind.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly.
This is the second of the three steps. Before the asking about the decision, the agreeing to be led. Notice the verbs: ruled, taught, led. Murray is not asking for guidance from outside a relationship of obedience. He is asking from inside one. The prayer for guidance is the prayer of the soul that has already agreed to do what God shows it, before the showing has happened.
This is the step that the modern prayer for guidance most often skips, because the modern prayer wants to keep the right of veto. Lord, show me Your will — and I will then consider whether to do it. Murray would say that prayer is not the prayer for guidance; it is the prayer of the consultant asking for the boss’s preference so the consultant can decide whether to take the advice. The older prayer for guidance does not work that way. It is the prayer of the child who has agreed, in advance, to do what the father says — and is now asking what the father says, knowing that the asking and the doing are part of the same motion.
Giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led. The phrase is direct. The asking for guidance is not a transaction; it is a posture. The posture comes before the asking. If the posture is not there, the guidance, when given, cannot be received — because the soul has reserved the right to decline, and the One who guides has agreed not to flood unsubmitted soil with light it has not asked to be flooded with.
Resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. This is the second image. The asking does not happen at a distance. It happens from within a relationship that is already an embrace. The guidance is given to the woman who is resting against the chest of the One she is asking. The information that comes from that closeness is different from the information that comes from a distance. It is more like sensing than like hearing. The direction is felt before it is articulated. The path that was reasonable but wrong starts to feel slightly off, in a way that does not announce itself in words; the path that was reasonable and right starts to feel slightly settled, in a way that also does not announce itself in words. The articulation comes later, after the slow inner ear has done its work.
For the woman whose decision has been keeping her up at three in the morning, this is the line that quietly relocates the asking. The asking has been the asking of the consultant from across the desk. The older asking is the asking of the child against the chest of the One she has already agreed to follow. The two ask the same words. The two receive different answers.
The somatic that goes with the prayer
Pause here. Murray’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to a modern week through the body.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let the hands, which have been gripping the question for weeks, open. Turn the palms upward in the lap. Notice the small involuntary clench that the hands have been carrying. Let it release — not by trying to relax it, but by letting the fingers go a small distance soft. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the chest, which has been held high with the urgency of the deciding, lower an inch. Take a second slow inhale, with the same lowering. The body that has been gripping cannot receive guidance; it is too busy producing the cheaper substitute, which is decision-by-anxiety. The body that has opened its palms and lowered its chest for thirty seconds becomes a body the older guidance can find.
That somatic minute is what ruled and taught and led feels like in the body. The opened palms are the body’s small version of giving up of oneself. The lowered chest is the body’s small version of resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Murray would not have described it this way. He knew the body and the soul were one in this regard, and the opened palms before the prayer are the entry point the modern prayer for guidance most often skips.
Do this once a day, for a week, before the prayer. The body is not separate from the asking. The body is the room the asking happens inside of.
The mid-article callout
It is worth pausing for one breath. The prayer for guidance you have been walking — Lord, show me which way; help me choose; make the path clear — is not wrong. It is simply the surface form of an older asking. The older asking is Lord, make my heart Your resting-place; I give myself up to be ruled and taught and led; show me only the next step, and I will walk it; the whole map is Yours, the next step is enough for me. The 140-day version of that slower asking lives inside the Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women — a daily page that holds the slow form when the day’s urgency would otherwise push you back into the surface one.
Step three — the still small voice mightier than the storm
“Come, my brethren, and let us day by day set ourselves at His feet, and meditate on this word of His, with an eye fixed on Him alone. Let us set ourselves in quiet trust before Him, waiting to hear His holy voice — the still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks — breathing its quickening spirit within us, as He speaks: ‘Abide in me.’ The soul that truly hears Jesus Himself speak the word, receives with the word the power to accept and to hold the blessing He offers.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
This is the third of the three steps. Read it twice.
After the heart has been made a resting-place, and after the soul has agreed to be ruled and led, the third step is the listening. Not the asking again. The listening. Setting ourselves in quiet trust before Him, waiting to hear His holy voice.
Notice the metaphor. The still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks. Murray is borrowing Elijah’s image from 1 Kings 19. The wind that broke the mountains was not the voice. The earthquake was not the voice. The fire was not the voice. The voice came in the small still whisper after the noise had stopped. Elijah heard it only because he had wrapped his face in his cloak and stepped to the mouth of the cave to listen.
The prayer for guidance, in step three, is the equivalent of that wrapping. The mind that has been generating storms of analysis about the two paths has to first let the storms pass. The wind passes. The earthquake passes. The fire passes. And then, in the small still quiet that follows, the voice — if it speaks — is audible. The voice rarely speaks while the storms are still running. The voice does not compete with the noise the asking soul has been generating. It waits for the noise to die down, and then it speaks in the form the listening soul can receive.
Day by day set ourselves at His feet. The repetition matters. The third step is not a one-off act of listening; it is a daily small showing-up. The voice comes when it comes. Your part is the daily setting-down at His feet, in quiet trust, without urgency. Some days the voice will not speak. Some days it will speak about something other than the decision you were asking about. Some days, after weeks of daily showing-up, the path forward on the original question will have clarified itself without any single dramatic moment of guidance — because the slow cumulative effect of the daily setting-down has been quietly re-shaping how the question looks.
For the woman whose decision is closing in on its deadline, this is the step that gives the asking back its proper time-frame. The path may not be clear on Friday. It may be clear on Tuesday. It may be clear on the following Tuesday. The daily setting-down does not promise a schedule. It promises that the path, when it is given, will be given to the soul that has been quietly listening for it — in the still small voice that does not compete with the storms of decision-by-anxiety.
How to pray for guidance — the slow form
Bring the three steps together. The slow form of the prayer for guidance is not three sentences. It is three movements, walked in order, daily.
The first movement is the resting-place. Before any words about the decision, the small stilling. The hands open. The chest lowered. The body un-braced from the agitation of the question. The heart deliberately made a room the Lord is invited to rest in. May my heart be Thy resting-place. This is not a phrase to be recited. It is a posture to be taken — small, slow, real — before the asking begins.
The second movement is the agreement to be led. Lord, before I ask You what to do, I give up the right of veto. I am here to be ruled and taught and led, not to consult. The asking I am about to make is the asking of a child against Your chest, not the asking of a consultant across a desk. Whatever You show, I will walk. This second movement is rarely spoken aloud. It is a settled disposition that exists, by daily practice, underneath the asking.
The third movement is the listening. Lord, I set myself at Your feet. I am not asking again. I am listening. The still small voice — when and how You speak it — I am here to hear. I will sit, for five minutes, in the quiet, without urgency, and what You give I will receive. The third movement is the longest in time and the shortest in words. Most days it produces no audible answer. Some days it produces a small inner settledness that is itself the answer. Some days, after weeks of practice, it produces a clarity that arrives outside the chair — at a red light, in the queue at the supermarket, in the lift between floors — because the slow listening has, by then, become a posture the soul carries into the day.
The prayer for guidance, walked this way, does not produce a thunderclap. It produces the slow re-aligning of a soul to the still small voice that has been speaking the whole time, in the soft register that the storms of modern decision-making had been drowning out. The decision will be made. The path will be walked. But the path will be walked by a woman who has been led to it — slowly, daily, by the One whose voice she has finally given the quiet room to hear.
(For the slow companions in the contemplative-fathers series, how to develop a quiet time with God — Brother Lawrence’s hidden method walks the wider quietness this prayer sits inside, and how to pray morning and evening — Habermann’s daily prayers holds the daily rhythm into which Murray’s three steps are most often given.)
What being led will actually feel like over a year
The slow form of the prayer for guidance does not produce a dramatic shift on Monday. Murray took decades to settle into the rest he wrote about. What happens over a year is quieter.
The decision-anxiety softens. The two paths, which had felt equally weighted, begin to weight themselves differently — not because new information has arrived, but because the woman looking at them has been quietly re-shaped by months of daily setting-down. The hands that had been gripping the question are more often open. The chest is more often lowered. The still small voice is heard more often, and more often it speaks about the next step rather than the whole road. The deciding becomes less of a single agonised event and more of a slow daily walking — with the next step visible, the second step coming into view as the first is taken, and the whole map remaining, as it usually does, the property of the Father rather than the child.
This is what Murray means by being led. Not the sudden vision of the future. The slow daily walking, by the woman who has agreed to be led, with the next step made plain when she is positioned to receive it. The decisions that follow are downstream. The making-of-the-heart-a-resting-place is upstream. The prayer for guidance is the slow walk between the two, by the woman who has, at last, learned to wait at His feet.
That is what how to pray for guidance actually answers. Not the decision-matrix version. The older one. The one Elijah heard in the cave, after the wind and the earthquake and the fire had passed.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds Murray’s three steps in proximity to the One whose still small voice has been speaking the whole time.
The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — heart as Thy resting-place, ruled and taught and led, the still small voice mightier than the storm — into a daily companion built for the woman whose decision has been keeping her up and whose asking is, at last, ready to slow into the older shape.
