Prayer Postures in the Bible: What the Old Writers Said
⏱ 7 min read
Prayer postures in the Bible: reported, not commanded
What are the prayer postures in the Bible, and is any of them actually required of you? Kneeling, bowing, standing, hands lifted, faces to the ground — Scripture reports all of them and stops to command almost none. Kneeling in prayer is one of those practices the church inherited without much explanation. The old prayer books simply assume it. Lancelot Andrewes, opening the day in his Morning and Evening Prayers for All Days of the Week, reaches straight for the ninety-fifth psalm:
O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our maker.
— Lancelot Andrewes, Morning and Evening Prayers for All Days of the Week
The Scottish Book of Common Prayer carries the same psalm in its own wording:
O come, let us worship, and fall down: and kneel before the Lord our Maker.
— Episcopal Church in Scotland, The Book of Common Prayer
Notice what the verbs do. They stack. Worship, then bow, then kneel — the sentence descends as the body descends. Neither book stops to defend the practice, because the Scriptures they were reading did not defend it either. Daniel kneels in his upper room three times a day, and the narrator treats it as a habit rather than a technique. Solomon kneels at the dedication of the temple in front of the whole assembly. The posture is reported, not recommended. The argument for it only shows up later, when somebody thinks to ask why.
What is prayer posture? Bounds on what the body actually does
E.M. Bounds, writing for preachers who were mostly too busy, put the case in one flat sentence:
The body, first of all, engages in prayer, since it assumes the praying attitude in prayer.
— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer
And then, immediately, a qualification most people skip:
The body, that far, joins the soul in praying.
— E.M. Bounds, Essentials of Prayer
That far. Two words doing a great deal of work. Bounds is not claiming the knees pray. He is claiming they participate, and marking exactly where their participation ends. That is the tradition at its most careful: the body has a real part, and the part is small and early.
Why do we bow to pray? Spurgeon on the stiff knee and the stiffer neck
Spurgeon, characteristically, put it as a command rather than a doctrine.
Bend that stiff knee; yes, bend that stiffer neck, and cry out for God, for the living God.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Faith’s Checkbook
The sentence is usually quoted for its first four words. Its point is in the comparison. The knee is stiff; the neck is stiffer. One is a joint and the other is a will, and Spurgeon knows which is the harder repair. The clause he ends on is not a posture at all — it is a cry.
Does the posture come before the feeling? Murray says bow first
Andrew Murray, in book after book, gives the same first instruction, and it is always physical.
Bow before God until you get some sense of the greatness and blessedness of the work to be carried on by God in you this day.
— Andrew Murray, The Deeper Christian Life
Bow before Him, wait upon Him, until your soul realizes that you are in the hands of a divine and almighty worker.
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
The pattern runs the opposite way to how most people approach devotion now. Murray does not tell a reader to feel reverent and then kneel. He says bow, and stay bowed until — until some sense arrives, until the soul realises something. The body goes first and waits for the rest of the person to catch up. Murray’s practice is laid out whole in his complete reader’s guide.
Does kneeling in prayer prove anything? The objection from inside the tradition
It would be dishonest to present this as settled. The sharpest criticism of kneeling in this whole body of literature comes from the man who argued for it hardest. Bounds, describing the prayer meetings of his own denomination, wrote with real contempt:
So much knee-bending and talking, and the prayer is done.
— E.M. Bounds, Purpose in Prayer
That is the guardrail, and it should stay in place. The praying attitude can be assumed by a body whose owner has left the building. Alexander Maclaren made the same correction, insisting that the posture that matters is not the one the room can see:
It is primarily a spiritual posture which reveals itself in moral obedience.
— Alexander Maclaren, Things That Matter Most
Samuel Rutherford pushed it further still. Kneeling is never neutral; it always has an object, and the knee is perfectly capable of going down in front of the wrong one.
What have I to do to fall down upon my knees, and worship mankind’s great idol, the world?
— Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford
So the tradition holds two things at once, without much anxiety about the tension. The body’s posture counts. The body’s posture proves nothing.
Is there a right way to kneel? Maclaren says the manner matters
Having warned that the real posture is inward, Maclaren then wrote the most surprising line in the collection:
I believe there is a way of kneeling, a way of going on one’s knees, a way of rising from one’s knees, which will enrich the intimacy of our freedom with the Lord.
— Alexander Maclaren, Things That Matter Most
This is where the old writers are most often misrepresented. Maclaren is not describing a method, and none of these men taught anything resembling a modern breathing exercise or body-awareness technique. What they prescribed were conditions: a place, a shut door, a set hour, and a posture entered deliberately rather than collapsed into. His claim is only that the manner of going down and getting up is not nothing — that a person who kneels as if being interrupted will pray like a person being interrupted.
What to do once the knees are down: the pause before speaking
What the devotional handbooks describe at this point is not a technique but a gap: a short silence between arriving and speaking. Nothing is accomplished in it and nothing is meant to be. It is simply the pause the old writers refused to hurry through, on the grounds that a person who starts talking the instant the knees touch the floor has not really arrived yet.
Francis de Sales added a detail modern readers rarely think of, which is that kneeling was never a solitary act even when performed alone:
Remember how, at the selfsame time, many religious and other devout persons were kneeling before God, praying or praising Him.
— St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
And William Law described what all of this is finally reaching for, which is not a position but a longing that the position makes room for:
For when the heart really pants and longs after God, its prayer is a praying, as moved and animated by the Spirit of God; it is the breath or inspiration of God, stirring, moving and opening itself in the heart.
— William Law, The Spirit of Prayer
Read that alongside Bounds and the whole argument settles into place. The knee assumes the attitude; the heart does the panting; the Spirit does the praying. Three different parties, and only one of them is a joint.
Can you pray without kneeling? For readers whose knees are finished
Nothing in these writers makes kneeling a condition of being heard, and not one of the lines above sets it as a rule. The prayer postures in the Bible are plural for a reason: people stood, sat, bowed, lifted their hands and fell flat on their faces, and the record treats none of it as the required one. Age, injury, arthritis and plain exhaustion have always been in the room, and the tradition accommodated them without much comment. What it refused to do was the opposite thing: pretend the body was irrelevant, or that devotion was a transaction conducted somewhere above the neck.
The knee is one way of telling the heart that something has begun. It is not the only way, and it is not the point, but it is a way, and the writers who prayed longest kept using it.
Is it wrong to pray lying down?
No — and the question comes up often enough to deserve a plain answer. David speaks of remembering God on his bed through the night watches, men fall on their faces in Scripture more often than they kneel, and illness, exhaustion or a body that will not get down again have never been treated as obstacles to being heard. The only caution worth passing on is Maclaren’s point about manner rather than position: there is a difference between lying down in order to pray and praying because you happen already to be lying down, and most of us can tell which one we are doing.
Why a journal day starts with a pause
This is the reason a Stilling Waves day opens with one short pause before the reading rather than dropping the reader straight into the text. It is a small thing, and deliberately small: a moment taken sitting down, a door shut if there is a door. The old writers would have knelt. A journal cannot ask that, and would not presume to. It can only leave the space where the kneeling used to go, and let a reader put into it whatever their own body will still do.
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.
