How to Pray for Your Husband — Murray’s Counsel for the Praying Wife
⏱ 15 min read
How to Pray for Your Husband — Murray’s Counsel for the Praying Wife
What do you do with the prayer that has been the same prayer for years now — Lord, soften him, Lord, change him, Lord, give him back the man I knew at thirty — and the years have come and the years have gone and the man you live with is, in the small daily ways that matter, the same man?
That is the question this slow read sits inside of. Not the question of whether to pray for him. The question of how to pray for him without the prayer becoming a quiet form of asking God to do your editing for you — without the praying wife becoming, by long degrees, the wife who is waiting for an outcome that the prayer was never structured to produce. Andrew Murray, who wrote With Christ in the School of Prayer near the end of a long pastoral life, has counsel for this exact woman — and it is gentler, and slower, than the counsel she is usually given. The Stilling Waves Couples Prayer Journal carries this slower kind of prayer into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly, and let the verbs change before the man does.
The instinct of most marriage-prayer literature is to teach you how to pray for your husband in the manner of a project plan — thirty days, thirty areas of his life, thirty intercessions to mark off the list. There is nothing wrong with that frame. But it is not the frame Murray works in. Murray works in the frame of the wife’s own soul. The praying wife is not the wife who has the best petition list. The praying wife is the wife whose own interior has been so deeply quieted before God that her prayers for the man beside her are no longer urgent edits but slow blessings, no longer arguments with the Lord about him but trusts opened to the Lord on his behalf. (For the petition-list version of this same practice, how to pray for your husband — 31 prayers for every area of his life walks the structured month. The younger version of this same desire — the woman praying for a husband she has not yet met — is held in how to start a prayer journal for your future husband. And if your prayer is for the children rather than for him this month, how to pray for your children — a 30-day guide sits next to this one in the same series.)
The first passage: the heart as His resting-place
Murray writes, in Holy in Christ, a sentence the praying wife should keep near her notebook for the rest of her marriage.
“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.
Notice where Murray begins. He does not begin with what God is to do — about the husband, about the marriage, about the slow grief of the middle years. He begins with what the wife’s heart is to be. A resting-place. May my heart be Thy resting-place. The first move of the praying wife is not the petition for the husband. The first move is the slow consent of her own interior to be a place the Lord can rest in.
That sounds like an evasion of the husband-question. It is not. Murray’s whole counsel is that the wife who has not yet allowed her own heart to be the Lord’s resting-place is the wife who will, by quiet necessity, try to make her husband a resting-place for her — and the husband, who is human, who is failing in his own ways, who is carrying his own unspoken weights, cannot be that. The marriage that has been asked to hold what only the Lord can hold becomes the marriage in which the wife is chronically disappointed without quite being able to say why. Murray’s first instruction reverses the order. The Lord first, in the wife’s own heart, fully. Then the marriage.
I would, in the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee. The phrase is dense. Stillness — the outer quiet. Confidence — the inner trust. Restful faith — the kind of faith that has stopped striving to produce its own outcomes. Rest in Thee — the verb that holds the whole sentence. The praying wife is not the wife who has the better strategy. She is the wife whose own resting in the Lord has become so settled that the prayer for the husband flows out of the rest, not out of the anxiety.
For the woman in a long marriage, this is the line worth keeping near the page. The first work is not the husband. The first work is the heart that prays for him.
The second passage: take heed and be quiet
Murray gathers, in Waiting on God, the scriptural witnesses of the older quiet.
“If we are to have our whole heart turned towards God, we must have it turned away from the creature, from all that occupies and interests, whether of joy or sorrow. God is a being of such infinite greatness and glory, and our nature has become so estranged from Him, that it needs our whole heart and desires set upon Him, even in some little measure to know and receive Him. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. The message is one of deep meaning: ‘Take heed and be quiet;’ ‘In quietness shall be your strength;’ ‘It is good that a man should quietly wait.'”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
This is the passage to sit with on the evenings the husband-grief is sharpest. Read it twice.
Notice the precision of the phrase everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. Murray is not telling the praying wife that the husband does not matter. He is telling her something more uncomfortable — that anything she has been waiting on, including the change she has been waiting for in him, becomes a hindrance to the waiting that her soul was actually built for. The husband is not the problem. The waiting-on-the-husband is the problem, when the waiting-on-the-husband has crowded out the waiting-on-God.
This is a difficult sentence to receive in the middle years of a marriage that has not gone the way you hoped. The instinct is to fight it. Of course I am waiting on him — I have been waiting on him for eighteen years. Murray is not asking you to stop praying for him. He is asking whether the praying has, somewhere along the line, become a way of leaning on the marriage rather than on the Lord. The praying wife who is leaning on the marriage cannot pray well for the husband, because her prayer is bent by her own ache. The praying wife who has slowly transferred the weight of her waiting back onto the Lord can pray for the husband without the prayer being warped by need.
Take heed and be quiet. In quietness shall be your strength. It is good that a man should quietly wait. Murray repeats the three older scriptural lines because he wants the praying wife to feel the cumulative authority of them. The whole of the Old Testament wisdom on the long wait is a wisdom of quietness. Not the absence of words. The absence of striving. The wife in the long marriage is being asked, by the slow voice of the Lord through Murray through Habakkuk through Isaiah through Lamentations, to quietly wait.
For the praying wife, this is the practice of releasing the urgency without releasing the love. You still love him. You still pray for him. You simply stop bracing the prayer with the need for him to change by Christmas. The prayer becomes quieter. The marriage becomes — slowly — a place the prayer can live without the prayer having to fix what it is praying about.
The somatic the praying wife’s body has been carrying
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and most praying wives have been carrying the husband-prayer in their shoulders for years without realising they have been.
Sit somewhere quiet. Set the book down. Notice, first, the shoulders. The praying wife’s shoulders are usually slightly raised — the small ongoing brace of the woman who has been holding a hope and a fear in the same body for a long time. Do not try to relax them yet. Just notice that they are up.
Now move the attention to the jaw. Most praying wives have a low-grade clench in the jaw, the way you clench it when you are determined to say nothing further about a subject you have already said enough about. Notice the clench.
Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the shoulders lower by an inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let the jaw open a quarter-inch. Let the next exhale be slightly longer than the one before. Stay there for one minute, by a clock if you need to.
That small un-bracing is the body’s version of take heed and be quiet. The prayer for the husband cannot live well in a body that is permanently braced against him. The body learning to lower itself is part of the prayer learning to soften. You are not being asked to lower the prayer. You are being asked to let the prayer be held in a body that has stopped bracing for the disappointment of him.
Then go on with the reading.
A note on what this prayer is not promising
This is the place to say plainly what Murray is not saying — because the marriage-prayer industry has, over the last forty years, made implicit promises that Murray would have refused.
Murray is not promising that if you pray rightly for your husband, he will soften. He is not promising that the prayer will produce the marriage you wanted. He is not promising that the right intercession, on the right day, in the right tone, will reach into the man’s interior and re-arrange him. The prayer is not a remote control. The husband is a soul before God, and his interior is between him and the Lord, not between him and your prayer journal.
What Murray is saying — what the praying wife who has read him for thirty years has slowly learned — is that the prayer changes the wife who is praying it. The prayer that began as a project to fix the husband becomes, over years, the prayer that quiets the wife. The wife becomes a softer presence in the marriage. The marriage often, but not always, softens in response. Sometimes the husband does shift. Sometimes he does not, in the years you would have liked him to. Murray does not promise the outcome. He promises only the slow inward work the prayer does in the woman who keeps praying it.
This is the prayer for the praying wife, not for the controllable husband. The Stilling Waves Couples Prayer Journal is built around exactly this Murray-shaped frame — daily pages that do not ask the wife to script the husband’s transformation, only to bring the marriage, in its actual present shape, before the Lord. One short passage. Room for one honest sentence. No demand that the page produce a softer man by Friday. The page produces a slightly quieter wife, evening by evening, and the marriage finds what it finds inside that quieter ground.
The third passage: abide in His love
Murray’s most pastoral counsel for the long marriage is in Abide in Christ.
“In the light of His life in the Father, let it henceforth be to you a blessed rest in the union with Him, an overflowing fountain of joy and strength. To abide in His love, His mighty, saving, keeping, satisfying love, even as He abode in the Father’s love — surely the very greatness of our calling teaches us that it never can be a work we have to perform; it must be with us as with Him, the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above. What we only need is this: to take time and study the divine image of this life of love set before us in Christ. We need to have our souls still unto God, gazing upon that life of Christ in the Father until the light from heaven falls on it, and we hear the living voice of our Beloved whispering gently to us personally the teaching He gave to the disciples.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it once at speed. Then read it slowly.
Notice the verb at the heart of the passage. Abide. Not strive. Not intercede harder. Not pray longer lists. Abide. The praying wife in the long marriage is being given an older verb than the one her usual literature gives her. She is being asked to abide in His love — and to let the abiding, not the petition list, be the foundation of how she prays for the man beside her.
It never can be a work we have to perform. This is the line that releases the praying wife from a kind of secret performance she has been doing for years. She has been working the prayer — adjusting the words, picking the verses, varying the tone, watching for whether God seems to be moving. Murray gently dismantles the performance. The abiding is not a work. It is the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within. The praying wife is not asked to manufacture the prayer for the husband. She is asked to abide in the Lord’s love, and to let the prayer arise from inside that abiding the way fruit arises from a tree that is not straining to fruit.
We need to have our souls still unto God. The phrase is the whole counsel in one line. Still, not active. Unto God, not unto the marriage. Souls, not strategies. The praying wife who has learned to keep her soul still unto God will, by long quiet practice, pray for her husband out of a different ground than the one she started in. The prayers will be shorter. The prayers will be slower. The prayers will carry less anxiety. The husband will receive — whether he knows it or not — the prayer of a wife who is no longer trying to use him as her own resting-place, because she has found a deeper one.
The living voice of our Beloved whispering gently to us personally. This is the line that holds the long marriage. The Lord still whispers — gently, personally, in the specific quiet of the praying wife’s chair — the teaching she needs for the next stretch of the marriage. The whisper is small. It is easy to miss. It comes when the soul is still. The praying wife who has stopped striving and started abiding will, in the still evenings, hear it. The prayer for the husband begins to be shaped by the whispers she is hearing, rather than by the fears she is carrying.
How to pray for your husband, in Murray’s frame, this week
Not a thirty-day plan. A different posture, walked slowly.
The first evening, sit in the chair without a list. Let your shoulders lower. Let the jaw release. Say, simply, Lord, may my heart be Thy resting-place. Do not move to the husband yet. Stay there.
The second evening, name the husband by his given name. Once. Then say, Lord, I bring him to You. I am not asking You to fix him by Friday. I am asking only that the abiding I am learning be the ground I pray for him from. Stay there.
The third evening, choose one specific thing about him that is currently sharp for you — not to fix, but to bring. Name it, briefly. Then return to the abiding. The prayer is mostly the abiding. The specific is a small placing of the husband within the abiding, not the centre of the practice.
By the end of the week, you will have prayed for him in a manner that does not look much like the prayer you started with. The change is not in the husband yet. The change is in the wife, who is learning to know how to pray for your husband from inside Murray’s older, quieter frame. The marriage receives, slowly, the benefit of a wife who is praying from a different ground.
(The sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series sit at how to develop a quiet time with God — Brother Lawrence’s hidden method and how to pray morning and evening — Habermann’s daily prayers.)
What the long arc looks like
The praying wife who walks Murray’s counsel for ten years is not the wife who arrives at a fixed husband. She is the wife who arrives, slowly, at a quieter interior — and whose marriage, whatever shape it has settled into, is held in a different ground than the one she was holding it in at the start.
Some marriages do soften, over those years. Some do not, in the ways the wife had hoped. The Lord does not promise the outcome through Murray. He promises only the abiding, and the inward work the abiding does in the woman who keeps showing up for it. The praying wife is the wife who has stopped requiring the marriage to be the answer to her own ache, and has let the Lord be it. The marriage becomes — slowly — a place the wife can love the man inside of, instead of a place she is using to negotiate with God about him.
That is the slow shape of how to pray for your husband, in the older Murray frame. Not the project plan. The interior re-grounding. Not the controlled husband. The quieter wife.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Couples Prayer Journal. Each evening, a short passage, room for the honest sentence, and the slow place to bring the marriage you actually have — not the one you keep editing in your head — before the Lord who is quietly at work in both of you.
The Stilling Waves Couples Prayer Journal carries Murray’s older vocabulary — abide, be still, the heart as His resting-place — into a daily companion built for the praying wife whose love for her husband is ready to be held in a quieter ground than the one it started in.
