How to Pray for Peace — Murray on the Peace That Quiets
⏱ 13 min read
You have asked for peace. You have asked for it in the car on the way home, in the kitchen at half past nine, in the dark of the bedroom at three in the morning when the worry surfaces again with no name attached. Lord, give me peace. The asking is honest. The asking is right. And the asking has, on the long stretches of a year that has not been easy, returned no felt answer — and you have begun to wonder if you are praying for peace correctly, or if peace is the kind of thing that is supposed to be prayed for at all.
The question how to pray for peace is the question of a woman who has been doing the asking faithfully and has noticed the asking is not, by itself, quieting her. The mind is still loud. The chest is still tight. The shoulders are still up. The verse has been read. The line has been spoken. And the body has not yet caught up to the words.
This is the slow version of the answer. Andrew Murray, who spent half a century pastoring congregations in South Africa and writing on the inner life of the Christian, will be our older voice — three passages from The Spirit of Christ, Holy in Christ, and the wider Murray corpus, read at the speed he intended. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Murray’s central claim, if you take the long view of his ministry, is that the peace of God is not something the mind talks itself into. It is something the soul is quieted into — and the praying for peace is less a request than a long, daily settling, in His presence, of the parts of you that have been holding themselves up for too long. The asking is half of it. The receiving — the slow, bodily receiving — is the other half.
(If anxiety has been the long shape of the last year, prayer for anxiety and overthinking is the practical companion to this slower article. If a hardened place in the chest has been the worry — the part of you that has gone numb instead of soft — how to pray for a hardened heart walks that ground. And if the larger question of God’s direction has been part of the unrest, how to find God’s will sits beside this one.)
The thing prayer for peace is not
It is not the right words said in the right order. That is the first thing to settle.
The modern Christian woman, especially the one who has been in church culture for years, has often inherited a small unspoken theology: that if she found the right phrasing, the peace would arrive. Lord, take this anxiety. Lord, calm my heart. Lord, settle my mind. The phrasing is good. The phrasing is biblical. And the phrasing — by itself — is not what carries peace. The phrasing is the door. The walking through the door is something else.
Murray would say, gently, that prayer for peace is not the producing of the right speech. It is the slow placing of yourself in the chair, in His presence, with the body relaxing in proportion to the soul’s growing certainty that He is, in fact, in the room. The speech you make once you are there matters less than the showing-up. The peace is not in the sentences. The peace is in the sitting.
The first passage: the stillness and confidence of a restful faith
“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 the inversion Murray makes in the first line. He does not say Lord, come and give me rest. He says may my heart be Thy resting-place. The whole grammar has turned. Murray’s prayer is not asking God to rest him. Murray’s prayer is asking that his heart become quiet enough to be the place God comes to rest. The peace is not given to the heart from the outside. The peace is what arrives when the heart has settled into a hush deep enough for the presence of God to settle into it.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the part that re-frames the whole posture of prayer. You have been asking God to fix the noise inside you. Murray would tell you that what He wants, instead, is to find a quiet enough place in you to make His own dwelling. The asking shifts. Instead of Lord, calm me, the prayer becomes Lord, may I be still enough that You find a place to rest in me. The peace, when it arrives, is no longer a thing He hands you. The peace is the felt presence of Him having found a quiet room.
The stillness and confidence of a restful faith. Notice the two nouns. Stillness and confidence. Murray is not naming two separate states. He is naming the same state from two sides. The stillness is the body’s part — the unbracing, the slow exhale, the lowered shoulders. The confidence is the soul’s part — the quiet certainty that He is here, that He does what He has said He will do, that He doeth all in me. The faith is restful because it is no longer striving to hold itself up. The body and the soul, together, have set their work down.
This is what learning how to pray for peace begins to look like in Murray’s grammar. Not the right words. The slow lowering of yourself into stillness, confident that He is doing in you what you cannot do for yourself.
The somatic that goes with the asking
Pause here. Murray’s vocabulary has a body to it, and the body is where his teaching most needs translating into a Tuesday afternoon.
Sit somewhere quiet. Press both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders drop by half an inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let the jaw release. Take one slow inhale, and on the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale came in, until the lungs are empty enough that the next inhale arrives on its own. Then take one more breath the same way. Stay there for thirty seconds.
That small somatic settling is the body’s equivalent of the stillness and confidence of a restful faith. The body of the woman who has been asking for peace for years has often forgotten that it is allowed to lower itself. The asking has been honest. The body has not been let in on it. The slow exhale, repeated daily, is the body’s slow learning that the prayer is being heard. The peace arrives, when it arrives, not first in the mind but in the lowered shoulders. The mind catches up afterwards.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around this kind of small daily settling. One page each evening, a short Murray-shaped passage, room for one honest sentence about the day, no demand to perform. The journal is not the cure for the unrest — He is — but the daily small practice is the showing-up, the keeping of the body in the chair long enough for the asking and the receiving to meet.
The second passage: take heed and be quiet
“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.’ How the very thought of God in His majesty and holiness should silence us, Scripture abundantly testifies. ‘The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him’ (Hab. 2: 20). ‘Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord God.’ (Zeph. 1:7). ‘Be silent, O all flesh, before the Lord; for He is raised up out of His holy habitation’ (Zech. 2:13).”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
This is the passage that turns the asking inside out. Read it twice.
Murray is stacking five scripture lines on top of each other, and the stack is doing one piece of work: it is teaching that quiet is not the absence of activity in the soul. Quiet is a posture — the posture a creature takes in the presence of its Maker. Take heed and be quiet. In quietness shall be your strength. Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord God. The five lines, read in a single breath, are the older Christian doctrine of how to be present to God. You do not bring Him your noise. You bring Him your silence.
For the modern Christian woman who has been praying for peace by talking through the worries one after another, this passage opens a different door. The peace Murray is naming is not the result of having worked through the list. The peace is the result of having set the list down — not because the list does not matter, but because the One you are sitting in front of is too holy, too present, too quietly real for the list to remain the centre of the room. Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord God. The mouth quiets because the awareness of who is in the chair across from you has grown.
This is the part of praying for peace that most Christian women have not been taught. The asking begins as words. The asking matures, over years, into silence — not the silence of distance, but the silence of nearness so close that words have become less necessary than presence. The peace, when it comes, comes inside that silence. Not before it.
In quietness shall be your strength. Notice the verb. Shall be. The strength is not produced by effort. The strength is the slow gift of the quietness itself. The woman who has been white-knuckling the day, asking God to give her strength to keep going, has been working at the wrong end of the equation. The strength is in the quietness. The quietness is the practice. The praying for peace is, in its mature form, the long daily learning of how to be quiet in His presence — and the strength is the thing that arrives, undeserved, on the other side of the quietness.
The third passage: the still small voice that is mightier than the storm
“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
This is the most pastoral of the three passages. Read it slowly.
Murray is doing something quiet and remarkable here. He is naming what the praying for peace, over years, finally becomes. Quiet trust before Him, waiting to hear His holy voice. The praying is not speech any more. The praying is the listening. And the listening is for the still small voice — the inheritance Murray takes from the prophet Elijah on the mountain — that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks.
That is the line worth keeping near the page. The still small voice that is mightier than the storm. The storm in your own week — the worry, the loud mind, the unsettled chest — is not the loudest sound in the room when you sit down with Him. His quietness is louder than your storm. His silence is more present than your noise. The praying for peace, over time, becomes the slow daily training of the ear to hear what is, in fact, louder than the things that have been roaring.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the consolation that quiets the chronic worry that peace has eluded her because she has not prayed correctly. Peace has not eluded you. The still small voice has been there the whole time. Your asking has been heard the whole time. What the praying for peace is teaching you, over a year of daily showing-up, is how to receive the voice that has been speaking under the storm all along. The voice is not new. The hearing is new.
Abide in me. That is the word Murray says the soul hears, in the quiet. Two syllables, in the older grammar. Stay where you are. Stay close. Stay in me. The praying for peace, fully matured, is the daily abiding — the small, repeated returning to the place where He is, where He has always been, where the peace lives because He lives there.
What praying for peace will actually feel like over a year
The asking will not stop. You will keep saying Lord, give me peace. The asking is honest, and the asking is right. What will change, slowly, is what happens after the asking.
In the first month, the asking will feel like words said into a room. By the third month, the asking will start to be followed by a small softening in the body — a half-inch of shoulder drop, a longer exhale, the first signs that the body is responding to the soul’s invitation. By the sixth month, the asking will be shorter, and the silence after the asking will be longer, and the silence will begin to feel like a place rather than an absence. By the end of the year, the praying for peace will have become — quietly, without your noticing the day it shifted — the daily sitting in His presence, with or without words, with the still small voice doing the work the speech used to do.
The peace will arrive on its own schedule. Some days it will be there before the asking is finished. Some days it will arrive at four in the afternoon, on no prompting, with no proportion to the worry of the morning. Some days it will not arrive as a feeling at all, and you will only notice afterwards that you slept through the night without the three a.m. surfacing. Peace will become less of a felt experience and more of the slow underlying weather of a life that has, by daily showing-up, settled itself into His presence.
That is what Murray’s slow grammar promises. Not the absence of the storm. The slow learning that the still small voice is mightier than the storm — and that the voice is, in fact, the One you have been asking for the whole time.
(For the wider context this sits inside, how to develop a quiet time with God walks the foundational daily practice in Brother Lawrence’s gentler grammar. And how to pray morning and evening carries the two-bookends-of-the-day shape into a practical pair of rhythms.)
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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 asking and the listening in the same chair, until the still small voice becomes louder than the storm.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, the still small voice mightier than the storm — into a daily companion built for the woman whose praying for peace is, at last, ready to mature into the long quiet listening.
