How to Pray for Wisdom — Edwards on Wisdom’s Beginning
⏱ 15 min read
You have been asking for wisdom for a long time. Not the parlour-trick kind — the daily kind. Lord, what do I do about this child. Lord, what do I do about this job. Lord, what do I do about this marriage that has gone quiet, or this aging parent whose care will fall to me, or this small ongoing decision that has slowly become the question that is shaping the rest of my life. And the prayer for wisdom has, somewhere along the way, started to feel like a prayer that returns only silence — because each time you ask, the clarity does not come in the form you needed, and the decision has to be made anyway, on a kind of best-guess that does not feel like wisdom.
This is the slow version of the question. Not the cross-stitched one. Jonathan Edwards, who wrote Religious Affections in his middle forties after a lifetime of careful observation of what the human soul does when grace touches it, named the older shape of the prayer for wisdom — and named, gently, why the modern shape of the asking so often comes back empty. 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 wisdom may not be wrong; it may simply be asking for the wrong thing in the wrong order.
The modern wellness sibling of how to pray for wisdom is the decision matrix and the pros-and-cons list and the what would my best self do question on the morning walk. None of these are bad. But Edwards is praying for something different. Not the better decision. The new sight. The two are not the same kind of wisdom. The first answers the question in front of you. The second changes who you are when the question arrives, so that the question itself looks different and the answer becomes a thing you see rather than a thing you compute.
What the prayer is not asking for
Before we walk the prayer, name what it is not. The prayer for wisdom is not the prayer for better decisions. The prayer for wisdom is not the prayer for divine confirmation of the decision you have already half-made. The prayer for wisdom is not — and this is the line that breaks the modern Christian framing — the prayer for God to tell you what to do.
Edwards would say all three of these are misreadings of an older asking. The proverb is old: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Not the planning of the day. Not the consulting of the data. Not the asking of God-as-advisor. The fear of the Lord — the reverent settledness of the soul into the size of the One it is asking — is wisdom’s beginning. The decision in front of you is not the beginning; it is somewhere in the middle, and the middle cannot be reached without the beginning.
The shift is small in language. It is enormous in posture. The woman praying for wisdom is not asking for a better answer to her question. She is asking to be re-positioned in front of God, so that the question she is asking starts to be asked by a different woman.
The first passage: the more you have of a rational knowledge
“The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be, when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice what Edwards is doing. He is not saying rational knowledge is wisdom. He is saying rational knowledge is the opportunity — the prepared ground in which the Spirit-given sight can land when the Spirit gives it. The wisdom itself is not the knowledge; it is the seeing of the excellency that happens when the Spirit breathes on a soul already familiar with the truths. The seeing is the wisdom. The knowing is the ground the seeing happens inside of.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the line that re-orders the prayer for wisdom. The prayer is not Lord, give me information I do not have. The prayer is Lord, let me see, in Your light, what You have already laid out plainly. Let the truths I already know change from facts I have read into things I can taste. Let the rational become the experiential. Let the knowing become the seeing.
This is also why the prayer for wisdom, in its modern shape, so often comes back empty. The modern shape asks for information. Edwards is praying for sight. The two are not the same answer. The information request gets answered by Google. The sight request gets answered by the slow daily prayer that positions the soul to receive what only the Spirit can give.
To see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them. The verbs are sensory. Edwards is not describing a mental operation; he is describing a deeper kind of perception, the kind in which the soul tastes the rightness of something rather than reasoning its way to it. This is wisdom in its older shape — the discernment that operates below the layer of analysis, by a kind of spiritual taste-sense that has been trained, slowly, by the daily contact with the truths until they have become familiar enough to taste rather than merely calculate.
If the prayer for wisdom has felt like a closed door, this passage names why. The asking has been the asking of the analyst. The older asking is the asking of the woman who is sitting with the One in whose light all questions look different.
(If the long arc of the discouragement has been the part keeping you back from rest, why doesn’t God answer some prayers? — Edwards on the affections walks the deeper question Edwards’s vocabulary surfaces. For the related ask — what the subtler form of pride does to wisdom — what is spiritual pride? — Edwards on the subtlest sin walks the line of the same author’s diagnosis, and what is true repentance? — Edwards on godly sorrow walks the small turn that wisdom often hinges on.)
The somatic that goes with the prayer
Pause here. Edwards’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to a modern week through the body.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let your head, which has been busy reasoning the day, lower by a small amount. Not a full bow — just the inch of release that lets the back of the neck stop holding the head up. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, notice the place behind the eyes where the analyser sits. It has been running all day. Let it slow, the way you would let a fan slow on a low setting — not stop, just slow. Take a second slow inhale, with the same easing on the exhale. The body that is busy reasoning cannot taste; it is too busy calculating. The body that has slowed for thirty seconds becomes a body the older wisdom can find.
That somatic minute is what to taste the sweetness of them feels like in the body. The reasoning self cannot receive the kind of sight Edwards is praying for. The reasoning self has its place — Edwards spent a lifetime defending it — but it is not the layer at which wisdom is given. Wisdom is given in the slightly slower, slightly lower posture, by a Spirit who breathes on a soul that has positioned itself to be breathed on.
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 second passage: placing not your happiness in God
“This your practice shows, that you place not your happiness in God, in nearness to him, and communion with him.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly.
This is the harder passage. Edwards is naming the diagnostic edge of the wisdom prayer — that the daily practice of a soul reveals where its happiness is actually being placed. The wisdom you receive is shaped by where your happiness is located. If your happiness is located in the outcome of the decision in front of you, you will pray for wisdom about the decision and you will receive — at best — a partial answer to a partial question. If your happiness is located in nearness to Him, you will pray for wisdom and you will receive a re-positioning that often re-frames the decision itself.
This your practice shows. The phrase is exact. Edwards is not asking what you believe; he is observing what you do. The practice of the soul is the more reliable witness to where the happiness sits. The woman whose daily practice is the consultation of the news, the budget, the calendar, and the catastrophising — and only at the edges of the day a small prayer for wisdom — has located her happiness in the outcomes those daily practices are tracking. The woman whose daily practice has, by small daily showing-up, become the morning quiet with the Lord — even when nothing seems to happen in it — has located her happiness somewhere different, and her prayer for wisdom is asked in a posture that can actually receive an answer.
The fear of the Lord, in Edwards’s vocabulary, is not the white-knuckle fear of punishment. It is the reverent recognition that He is large and you are small, that His ways are not your ways, that the happiness you have been chasing in the outcomes of your decisions is a smaller happiness than the happiness available in nearness to Him. The fear of the Lord is wisdom’s beginning because it locates the soul in the right relationship to size — small, before a large God, asking from inside the smallness rather than from inside the illusion that you are equal to the question.
For the woman whose prayer for wisdom has felt unanswered, this is the line that quietly relocates the asking. The wisdom is given to the woman who has placed her happiness in Him. The wisdom is not denied to the woman who has not. It simply finds a different soil when it arrives, and the soil determines what grows from it.
The mid-article callout
It is worth pausing for one breath. The prayer for wisdom you have been walking — Lord, tell me what to do, help me decide, show me which way — is not wrong. It is simply the surface form of an older asking. The older asking is Lord, let me fear You rightly; let my happiness rest in nearness to You; let the truths I already know change, by the Spirit’s breath, from facts I have read into things I can see and taste; let the decision become a thing You and I look at together, with my eyes adjusted to Your light. 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.
The third passage: the word is nigh thee
“‘The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith which we preach.’ There is no need of doing any great work to come at this rest; the way is plain to it; it is but going to it, it is but sitting down under Christ’s shadow.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
This is the gentlest of the three passages. Read it twice.
Edwards is borrowing Paul’s line from Romans 10 — the word is nigh thee — to name the un-distance of the wisdom you have been praying for. The wisdom is not far. It is but going to it, it is but sitting down under Christ’s shadow. The asking does not require travel. It does not require a great work. It requires the small daily act of sitting down inside the nearness that is already there.
This is the line that gently lifts the burden off the modern prayer for wisdom. The modern prayer assumes wisdom is far — that you have to travel for it, search for it, earn it, deserve it. Edwards assumes wisdom is near — that the Word is in your mouth and in your heart, that Christ’s shadow is already over the chair you are sitting in, that the work of receiving wisdom is the work of sitting down rather than the work of striving.
Sitting down under Christ’s shadow. The image is small and exact. Not striding through His light. Not climbing toward His throne. Sitting. Under His shadow. In the cool, slow, slightly hidden place where the heat of the day’s urgency cannot reach. The wisdom that is given in that shaded chair is not the wisdom that announces itself in a thunderclap. It is the wisdom that arrives as a slow, settled knowing — the kind that does not need to be argued for, because it has come from a place deeper than argument can reach.
For the woman whose decisions have been weighing on her for months, this passage is the small lifting of the weight. The wisdom does not require the great work. It requires the sitting down. The shadow is already over the chair. The Word is already in the mouth and in the heart. The asking is the small daily act of going to it — five minutes in the morning, in the shaded chair, with no urgency to extract the answer, sitting under the nearness that has been waiting for you.
The decision will be made. The wisdom will be given. But the order matters. The fear first. The nearness second. The decision third — and the third, when it comes, will come on a layer of soul that has been quietly sitting under His shadow for long enough that the choice will look different than it did when you started.
How to pray for wisdom — the slow form
Bring the three passages together. The slow form of the prayer has three movements, not three sentences.
The first movement is the fear of the Lord. Before any words, the small adjustment of size. He is large. I am small. The question I am asking is real, but it is smaller than I have been making it; the One I am asking is larger than I have been remembering. The lowering of the head an inch. The slowing of the breath. The body un-bracing into the posture of the smaller, more reverent self. This is not self-erasure. It is the right positioning of scale.
The second movement is the locating of the happiness. Lord, my practice today has been the practice of a woman trying to extract wisdom from outcomes I cannot control; let me return my happiness to nearness to You; let my asking come from inside the nearness rather than from the chase for the answer. The relocation is the second movement. The asking, after the relocation, asks from a different layer.
The third movement is the sitting under the shadow. The Word is nigh me. The shadow is over the chair. I do not have to travel for wisdom; I have to sit down in what is already near. Let me sit for five minutes, without urgency, and let the Spirit breathe on the truths I already know until they become sight rather than information.
The prayer for wisdom, walked this way, does not produce a sudden answer to the decision in front of you. It produces a slow re-positioning of the woman who has to make the decision. The decision will be made — by you, in time, with whatever clarity has been given — but the woman making it will be a different one. The eyes will have been adjusted to a different light. The taste will have learned to perceive sweetness she did not have a category for yesterday. The fear of the Lord, which is wisdom’s beginning, will have settled into the bottom layer of the soul, and the choice — whatever it is — will be made from that bottom layer rather than from the surface noise.
(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 Edwards’s slow wisdom is most often given.)
What wisdom’s beginning will actually feel like over a year
The slow form of the prayer for wisdom does not produce a dramatic shift on Monday. Edwards’s own writing was the work of decades of careful watching. What happens over a year is quieter.
The reasoning self, which has been running the analysis from waking to sleeping, slows a small amount. The fear of the Lord — the settled reverence — moves from being a phrase you have read into being a posture the body knows how to take. The decision in front of you is still the decision in front of you, but the urgency around it softens, because you are no longer relying on the decision to deliver the happiness you have located elsewhere. The small daily sitting under His shadow becomes the bottom layer of the day. The wisdom that is given does not announce itself. It accumulates — like the slow filling of a well by small streams — until one morning you realise the question you were asking has clarified itself without an answer arriving in the form you expected.
This is what Edwards means by wisdom’s beginning. Not the smart decision. The right-sized soul, sat under the right shadow, in the right reverence, receiving the kind of sight only the Spirit can give. The decisions that follow are downstream. The fear of the Lord is upstream. The prayer is the slow walk to the source.
That is what how to pray for wisdom actually answers. Not the decision-matrix version. The older one. The one the Proverbs were pointing to all along.
Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
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 the slow asking for wisdom in proximity to the One whose shadow is already over the chair you are sitting in.
The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women carries Edwards’s slow vocabulary — the fear of the Lord, the seeing of excellency, sitting down under Christ’s shadow — into a daily companion built for the woman whose decisions have been weighing on her and whose asking is, at last, ready to slow into the older shape.
