Why Do I Cry When I Pray? Tears, Sighs and Groans as Prayer
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You are praying, and the tears arrive before the words do. Why do I cry when I pray — and has something gone wrong? It is a question most people ask quietly, if at all, because nobody teaches you what to do with it.
There is a stage in most praying lives where the sentences stop arriving. Not doubt, exactly, and not rebellion. Just a person sitting with something too heavy to be phrased.
Why do tears come when I pray?
The devotional tradition has a name for what happens next, and it is not “distraction.” It is tears, sighs and groans. The old writers treated these as prayer proper, not as the wreckage left behind when prayer failed. Charles Spurgeon put it about as plainly as it can be put:
He may only look up with misty eye; but “prayer is the falling of a tear.” Tears are the diamonds of heaven; sighs are a part of the music of Jehovah’s court, and are numbered with “the sublimest strains that reach the majesty on high.” Think not that your prayer, however weak or trembling, will be unregarded.
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Note what is being claimed. Not that tears are a lesser prayer God tolerates. That they are a form of prayer with standing. Spurgeon returns to the point in a couplet elsewhere in the same book: “God is God; he sees and hears All our troubles, all our tears.” The eye that is only misty is still an eye lifted.
Alexander Maclaren pushed it further, past weeping and into the involuntary. In his Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms he writes, “If a man’s heart is set upon God, his very life-breath will be a cry to His Father.” That is a large claim about a small thing. Breathing is not a devotional act. But a man whose whole disposition leans one direction is, in Maclaren’s reading, already asking, without composing a single sentence of it.
Is it OK to pray while crying?
The tradition’s answer is yes, and it is not a grudging yes. The awkward fact, for anyone who wants prayer to be a purely interior transaction, is that the tradition keeps refusing to leave the body out.
P.T. Forsyth, writing in the middle of the First World War, would not allow the praying person to be divided into a spiritual half and a physical one. Echoing the Psalmist, he describes the whole creature at once in The Soul of Prayer: “For heart and flesh cry out for the living God.” Heart and flesh. There is no spiritual part that prays while a physical part waits in the corridor.
Forsyth was also unwilling to let Gethsemane be decorative. He sets down the gospel’s own phrase for it and draws the obvious conclusion:
He prayed in an agony.” We must pray even to tears if need be.
— P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer
The wording is deliberately unheroic. If need be — he is not recommending that anyone work themselves up. He is saying that if the thing being prayed about is genuinely that heavy, the tears are not a failure of composure. They are the honest register.
Johann Arndt, three centuries earlier, had made the same move by way of the same evidence:
God keeps an exact account of all our sighs and tears (Ps. 56:8), for the sake of those tears which Christ our blessed Saviour shed, who, in the days of his flesh, offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears.
— Johann Arndt, True Christianity
That is the load-bearing argument of the tradition on this point, and it is worth saying slowly. Bodily prayer is not defended on the grounds that it feels authentic, or that God is impressed by intensity. It is defended christologically. The Son prayed with strong crying and tears in the days of his flesh. Whatever else prayer is, it is therefore not a thing the body sits out.
Andrew Murray described the same escalation in his own vocabulary in To Be Near Unto God: “And this true impulse of prayer expresses itself in this, that prayer can sometimes become a calling, a crying, a roaring, as the Psalmist says; and only when we observe that God inclines his ear to us, and regards us, and hearkens to our prayer, does the praying soul find rest.” Calling, crying, roaring. None of those are things a mind does on its own.
What is groaning in prayer?
Groaning, in these writers, is not a technique and not a noise to be produced on purpose. It is what praying sounds like when the matter is heavier than the words available to carry it — closer to labour than to speech. Arndt was blunt about who this argument was aimed at, and it was not the visibly distressed:
This surely is not to be effected, as the delicate Christians of this age imagine, by any careless and slight application of mind, but by an inward and profound sorrow, contrition, and brokenness of heart, together with groans and tears that cannot be uttered.
— Johann Arndt, True Christianity
“Delicate Christians of this age” has aged into an insult that lands in any century. The target is the assumption that prayer is a light mental operation, easily performed while doing something else, and that anything more strenuous is unseemly.
Murray made the same complaint diagnostically in Love to the Uttermost, describing a man in whom nothing has moved: “No trace of tears in his voice, no shame on his face, no response to God’s love in his heart.” He is listing symptoms, and the first two are physical. He is reading the body for evidence of what the heart is doing, on the assumption that the two are connected.
Do tears prove your prayer is real?
This is the point at which an honest piece has to stop nodding along.
Because the same Murray who reads tearlessness as a symptom writes this elsewhere:
The cry, ‘Repent of the sin of prayerlessness’, will not be responded to by a sigh of helplessness, or by the unwillingness of the flesh.
— Andrew Murray, The Prayer Life
A sigh, in that sentence, is not prayer. It is the noise a person makes instead of changing anything. The same bodily act — an audible exhalation over one’s own spiritual state — counts as prayer on one page and as evasion on another, and Murray offers no test for telling them apart.
Nor did the tradition ever settle whether visible weeping proves anything. John Wesley recorded scenes of it without much editorial comment:
The next evening, during the public service, the whole congregation, young and old, were dissolved in tears: after service, several of the parishioners, and all his family, particularly the little children, returned home crying along the street, and some could not help praying aloud.
— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions
That is a report, not a prescription. Wesley’s century argued fiercely over whether such scenes were the Spirit’s work or crowd behaviour, and the argument was never won. To take tears as a reliable instrument reading is to go well past what any of these writers claimed. Tears come from grief, exhaustion, relief and self-pity too, and the writers who were paying attention knew it.
What survives the argument is narrower and steadier: tears are permitted as prayer. They are not required, and they do not certify.
Why the crying usually starts with sorrow, not method
Ask why we cry when we pray and the plainest answer in the tradition is not about technique at all. Charles Kingsley was candid, in his Westminster Sermons, about how most people arrive here at all: “It is sorrow, my friends, sorrow and failure, which forces men to believe that there is One who heareth prayer, forces them to lift up their eyes to One from whom cometh their help.” Not curiosity. Not an improved devotional method. Failure.
And when E.M. Bounds describes a man of that kind praying, in Prayer and Praying Men, he cannot do it without describing the body: “He prays unto God, deeply burdened, prostrate on the ground and weeping, while the whole city unites with him in prayer.” Face down. That is the whole posture, and it is not a technique.
Which is the accurate boundary to draw. These writers did not teach breathing exercises or bodily method, and it would be a small dishonesty to dress them up as though they did. What they prescribed were conditions: a place, a shut door, a posture, an unhurried stretch of time. They assumed a person who has sat down and stopped moving, and they never assumed the body was irrelevant to what happened next.
Why do I cry when I pray for others?
Notice where the weeping keeps turning up in these accounts. Not in private self-examination, mostly, but in prayer offered for somebody else — a man face down over a city, a whole congregation crying in the street. Intercession sets you in front of a weight you cannot lift and are not willing to put down, and the body registers that before the mind has found a sentence for it. If the tears come hardest when you pray for your children, or for a friend whose situation will not move, you are in the ordinary place, not an alarming one.
A quiet note on the practice
This is why a Stilling Waves journal day opens with a short pause before the reading rather than with the reading itself. Not as a method, and not because a pause improves anything. Only because a body that has just come in from the day needs a moment to arrive, and because most of the writers quoted here would have thought it strange to begin any other way. Readers who want the fuller argument in Murray’s own hand will find it in the complete reader’s guide to Andrew Murray.
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.
