How to Pray the Scriptures — Murray on Praying the Word
⏱ 16 min read
You have tried to pray. You have tried more times than you can count. The mornings begin with the intention to bring something to God, and within ninety seconds the mind has wandered to the email you forgot to send, the child’s pickup time, the small administrative weight of the day. The prayers you do manage feel borrowed — phrases lifted from someone else’s prayer life, sentences that sound like prayer without feeling like it. By the third month, you have begun to suspect that you do not actually know how to pray, and that the absence of feeling in your prayers is the problem rather than the symptom. You are wrong about which one it is. The absence of feeling is not the problem. The praying without the Word is.
This is the slow article on how to pray the scriptures, and it does not begin with a five-step method or a printable template. It begins with Andrew Murray — the South African pastor who in the 1880s wrote some of the most lived-with books on prayer the contemplative tradition produced — and the recognition that the practice you have been trying to build is older, simpler, and considerably less dependent on your own emotional production than the modern prayer manual has suggested. The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s pattern into a daily companion — a single passage of scripture, a small structure for the prayed response, a slow page that does not demand more than you can bring on a tired morning — if you would like a place to take this practice after the article. For now, read slowly.
The trouble with the modern instinct to pray is that it assumes you should have something to say. The prayer journals on the bookshop shelf are full of prompts to ask you what you are grateful for, what you are anxious about, what you are bringing to God this morning. The prompts assume the prayer originates with you. Murray would gently reverse the assumption. The prayer does not originate with you. The prayer is the small daily echoing-back of what God has already said. You are not producing the language of prayer. You are inheriting it. The scriptures are the language. Your prayer is what happens when you read the scripture slowly enough that it begins to pray itself out of your throat.
The lost shape of the practice
There is a kind of scriptural praying the modern Christian shelf has largely forgotten. It does not look like topical intercession with verses appended. It does not look like Bible reading followed, separately, by prayer.
It looks like this: a single short passage of scripture, opened in the morning, read slowly. The reading is slow enough that one or two phrases catch — they snag the attention, they will not let the eye keep moving, they begin to feel as though they are being said to you rather than read by you. You let the eye stop. You read the phrase again. Then you begin to pray the phrase back — not as a recitation, but as a response. The Psalmist says the Lord is my shepherd; you say, quietly, back to Him, Lord, be the shepherd today. The scripture has given you the words. Your prayer is the small reverent return.
That is how to pray the scriptures in the older sense. Not borrowing the Bible’s vocabulary as a quotation. Letting the Bible’s vocabulary become your prayer. Murray called this praying the Word, and the whole shape of his teaching on prayer rests on the assumption that prayer is not invented by the soul but received from the One who is already speaking. The scriptures are the speech. The prayer is the slow giving-back.
If your prayer life has felt like a performance you are not equipped to give, that is because the modern model has asked you to compose the prayer from your own interior. The slower model, the one Murray taught and the older Christians kept, asks you to listen first, and to pray what you have been given to pray. The composition is His. The receiving is yours.
(For the practical side of bringing scripture into the most frightened corners of the night, prayer for protection tonight — 10 scriptures to pray before bed walks ten passages worth keeping by the lamp. And for the prayer-of-scripture inside the most stubborn season — the year your heart will not soften — how to pray for a hardened heart — Murray’s soft answer is the sibling article that sits beside this one.)
The first passage: the soul as 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.
Notice that this is not a topic Murray is teaching you about. This is a prayer Murray is praying, on the page, in your hearing. O my God! may my heart be Thy resting-place. Read it again. The whole sentence is itself a model of how to pray the scriptures. Murray has been reading about God entering to rest and refresh and reveal Himself, and his response is not a paragraph of commentary. It is the prayed return of what he has read. May my heart be Thy resting-place. The scripture has come in. The prayer has come back.
This is the line that quiets the producing-prayer panic. You have been thinking that the prayer was supposed to be your composition. Murray is showing you a different order. The scripture is the composition. The prayer is your small reverent echo of it. The order is liturgical — He speaks; you respond — and the responding is what the soul can actually do on a tired morning. You do not have to invent the prayer. You only have to read the passage slowly, and let the prayer come back.
In the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. Notice the verbs. Rest. Believe. Thou doest all in me. The activity in the sentence belongs to God. Your activity is the resting and the believing — both of which are passive in form, both of which are receptive rather than productive. Murray is teaching you that praying the scriptures is not active labour. It is a slow opening of the soul to be entered, refreshed, and revealed.
For the woman whose prayer life has been collapsing under the weight of her own effort to produce something to say, this is the older permission. You do not need to say something. You need to read slowly and let Him say something. Then your prayer is the small returning of what He said, in the simplest possible form. Lord, may my heart be Your resting-place today. The prayer is one sentence. The morning has held a real prayer. The practice has been kept.
The second passage: the still small voice
“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
Read it slowly, twice.
Notice the phrase day by day. Murray is not describing a single-event encounter. He is describing the small daily appointment — the woman setting herself at His feet, with the same passage, with the same eye fixed on Him alone, on Wednesday and on Thursday and on the Friday that follows. The praying-of-the-scriptures is built across days. You will not, on most mornings, feel the still small voice. You will sit. You will read. You will respond with a short prayed echo. And then you will get up and go to the kitchen.
Across weeks of that small daily setting-at-His-feet, the still small voice does, at some point, begin to be heard. Murray is careful about the conditions. Quiet trust. Waiting. Eye fixed on Him alone. The voice is not loud enough to compete with a hurried morning. The voice fits inside the slow morning. If you have been waiting for God to speak in the middle of a fast prayer, you have been waiting in conditions in which He has chosen not to compete. The voice is small. The conditions are quiet. The slow scriptural prayer makes the conditions.
The still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks. Notice the paradox. The smallness is not weakness. The smallness is the form God has chosen to speak in — to Elijah at Horeb, to the soul at the kitchen table, to the woman opening her Bible on a Tuesday morning. The smallness is what your nervous system can actually receive. The storm would have rendered you incapable of hearing. The small voice is what He gives because it is what you can hold.
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. This is the older theology of how prayer works. The scriptures are not just instructions; they are speech. The speech, truly heard, carries with it the capacity to receive what it announces. You do not generate the capacity. The Word generates it. Your part is the slow daily setting-of-yourself before the speech, in quiet trust, with the eye fixed on Him alone.
For the woman whose prayer has felt like talking to a ceiling, this is the diagnosis Murray would offer. The prayer felt empty because the prayer was talking without listening. The praying of the scriptures rearranges the order. Listening first. Speaking back, briefly, in response. The ceiling, when you slow down enough to listen, was never the issue. The ceiling was where the speech was coming from, the whole time.
(For the wider companion to the slow-listening dimension of prayer, war room prayers and scriptures — printable prayer cards carries seventy-five prayed-scripture cards into the rooms of an actual life — work, marriage, fear, finances — for the woman who wants the practice in printed form for the wall.)
The somatic that goes with the listening
Pause here. The slow scriptural prayer has a body to it, and the body is where Murray’s older language becomes most translatable to a modern morning.
Sit somewhere quiet, with one short passage of scripture open in front of you — a Psalm, a few verses of the Sermon on the Mount, a short paragraph of John’s Gospel. Place both feet flat on the floor. Let the shoulders lower by a small amount — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale. Notice that the slowed breath has lowered the pace of the morning by a degree.
Then, with the breath settled, read the passage once at normal speed. Then read it again, slower. Let the eye stop where it wants to stop. Read the snagged phrase a third time, almost in a whisper, almost as a prayer.
The somatic matters because Murray’s quiet trust is built in a settled body before it is built in a settled mind. The shoulders unbracing, the breath finishing its exhale, the eye slowing down on the page — these are the body’s way of becoming the soil in which the still small voice can be heard. Murray would not have used the word somatic. He knew the body and the soul were one in this regard, and the waiting on God he taught for forty years included the body’s slow learning to wait alongside the soul’s.
The Stilling Waves slow companion
The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women was built around this older listening-first shape — a single passage of scripture pre-printed at the top of each page, a small structure for the prayed response below, a slow page that does not demand more than a woman can bring on a tired morning. The journal is not the prayer; the praying is. But the passage being chosen, already, removes the small daily friction of where do I start, and lets the morning begin in the listening rather than in the searching. The friction was not your character. The friction was the absence of the small daily shape Murray would have recognised, made portable for the contemporary kitchen table.
This is what how to pray the scriptures looks like in a daily companion — not a programme, not a course, but a slow daily setting-of-yourself at His feet with a single short passage and the small reverent return.
The third passage: the silence that holds
“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 that names the cost of the practice. Read it slowly, twice.
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. Notice that Murray is not separating good from bad. He includes the things that make us glad alongside the things that excite our fears. The praying of the scriptures requires the temporary setting-aside of everything else — the inbox, the worry, the joy, the planning, the small bright distractions as much as the dark ones. The setting-aside is short. Five minutes. Ten on a slower morning. But the small daily setting-aside is what the practice rests on.
For the woman whose mornings have been collapsing because she cannot keep the inbox from invading the prayer, this is the older counsel. The invasion is not an indictment of your character. The invasion is what happens when the small daily setting-aside is skipped. Murray would tell you to keep the phone in a different room. To open the scripture before the email. To take the slow breath before the first checking-of-anything. The five minutes are built by guarding the conditions, not by trying to focus more effectively inside fractured conditions.
Take heed and be quiet. In quietness shall be your strength. It is good that a man should quietly wait. Murray is stacking three scriptures here, and the stacking itself models the practice. He is praying the Word by quoting the Word, three times, until the word quiet has settled into the paragraph the way it is meant to settle into a morning. The praying of the scriptures, taught by example, is what the paragraph is doing.
For the woman who has been waiting for prayer to feel like something, Murray gently re-orders the feeling. The strength is in the quietness. The quietness is the practice. The feeling, when it comes, comes inside the kept quiet, not before it.
How to actually begin tomorrow morning
Here is what Murray’s pattern looks like, translated to the morning you have ahead of you.
Pick one short passage tonight, for tomorrow morning. Not a whole chapter. Not a reading plan. One short passage — five to ten verses. A Psalm. A paragraph of the Sermon on the Mount. A few verses of John 15. Write the reference on a slip of paper. Place the slip on top of your closed Bible by your morning chair.
In the morning, before anything else, sit down in the chair and open the Bible to the passage. Not after the phone. Not after the email. Before any of it. The order matters. The first speech of your day should be God’s.
Read the passage at normal speed. Then read it again, slowly. Let the eye stop where it wants to stop. The snagged phrase is the place the praying will begin. You did not choose the phrase. He chose it for you, by drawing your eye there.
Pray the phrase back, in one short sentence. If the phrase is the Lord is my shepherd, you might pray Lord, be the shepherd of this Tuesday. If the phrase is abide in me, you might pray Lord, let me abide in You through the morning’s first difficult conversation. The prayer is short. The prayer is in your own words. The prayer is the scripture coming back through your mouth, addressed to the One who sent it.
Sit for one more minute in silence after the prayer. The minute is the listening. You are not waiting for a voice. You are waiting because the older Christians knew the prayer is not finished until the silence has held it for a beat. Then close the Bible, and go into the day.
That is how to pray the scriptures in the older sense. Not a sermon. Not a method. The small daily setting-of-yourself at His feet with one short passage, the slow reading, the snagged phrase, the prayed return, and the minute of silence that lets the prayer settle into the day before the day takes you away from it.
(The sibling articles on the same contemplative ground sit at how to memorize scripture — Owen’s slow method and how to read the Bible daily — Spurgeon’s practical counsel.)
What a year of praying the scriptures actually looks like
A year of Murray’s pattern does not look like a transformation arc. It looks like a woman who, in February, was opening her Bible at six in the morning to a short passage and reading slowly, and in November of the same year is doing the same thing. The mornings have not changed in any way an outside observer would notice. The woman inside the morning has slowly become someone whose first thought on a hard Tuesday is a phrase from a Psalm she read in March, whose worry on a difficult Thursday has a piece of John 14 sitting underneath it, whose marriage has begun to be quietly held by sentences from Ephesians she has prayed back to God for nine months without noticing the praying.
That is how to pray the scriptures in the older sense. Not a topical-intercession technique. Not a verses-with-prayers-appended manual. The slow daily inhabiting of the speech of God until the speech becomes the prayer, and the prayer becomes the small steady ground on which the year is walked.
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 morning, a short passage and room for the prayed response — the small daily anchor that holds the listening together until the listening becomes a way of life.
The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s older vocabulary — the still small voice, the quiet trust, the heart as resting-place — into a daily companion built for the woman whose prayers have felt borrowed, and who is ready, slowly, to let the scriptures become the prayer.
