Andrew Murray on Praying for the Conversion of Loved Ones
⏱ 12 min read
You have prayed for a family member’s faith for years and seen no change. The husband, the brother, the grown son, the sister who used to come to church with you and stopped — the name has been on your list for so long that the prayer has worn a small groove in your chest, and the groove has started to ache. You still pray. You do not know what else to do. But the question underneath the prayer has begun to surface in the quieter moments of the week, and it is the question every long-faithful intercessor eventually meets: is anything happening, or has the prayer been falling into silence the whole time.
Andrew Murray wrote The Ministry of Intercession for the woman in exactly this place. Not the woman who has just begun praying for someone. The woman who has prayed for years and is now trying to hold the prayer up under the weight of an apparent non-answer. Chapter 10: That God May Be Glorified is the place he sits down beside her. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around the daily practice this kind of long intercession needs — a page that holds the name, evening after evening, so the carrying does not have to be reinvented each night. We will get to it. For now: the chair, the book, the slow read.
What Murray meant by “persistent intercession”
The modern Christian woman, when she searches how to pray for unsaved loved ones, is usually offered methods. The scripture to pray. The promise to claim. The number of days. The names of the angels assigned. Murray was deeply suspicious of all of it. He believed intercession was not a technique with a guarantee but a life-long carrying, and the carrying was the answer the world most needed to see — not the conversion alone, but the kind of woman the long carrying produced.
This is hard to hear when the carrying has been long and the conversion has not come. Murray would not have minimised the grief. He named it directly. But he also believed that the years of intercession were never only about the name being prayed for. They were also about the intercessor herself, being slowly conformed into a woman whose whole life had been pressed into the shape of long love — and that conformation was, in the providence of God, part of what He was doing in the very years the answer felt absent.
The question to bring to the chair is not am I praying right enough to get the answer faster. The question is am I willing to keep loving this person, slowly, in front of God, for as long as it takes. Murray’s whole counsel on praying for unsaved loved ones is built on the second question. The first one will not survive the years. The second one becomes the life.
The first passage: bowing the knees for the beloved
“Let us dwell there, where we have been placed of God. And let us bow our knees to the Father, that He would grant us to be mightily strengthened by His Spirit, that Christ as our Sanctification may dwell in our hearts, that the power of His death and His life may be revealed in us, and God’s will be done in us as it was in Him. I do bless Thee for this precious blessed word, for this precious blessed work of Thy beloved Son. In His never-ceasing intercession Thou ever hearest the wonderful prayer, ‘I sanctify myself for them, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.’ Blessed Father!”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the line at the centre of the passage. In His never-ceasing intercession Thou ever hearest the wonderful prayer, ‘I sanctify myself for them, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.’ Murray is reminding the long-faithful intercessor that her prayer is not the first one being offered for the beloved. Christ has been praying for that person — I sanctify myself for them — since His ascension. Your prayer is not a small voice trying to interest a busy God in a name. Your prayer is the joining of Christ’s never-ceasing intercession for that very person. The conversation has been happening for far longer than you have been listening. You are not starting it. You are stepping into it.
This is the first consolation for the woman who has been praying for years. The silence on the other end was never the silence of nothing happening. The silence on the other end was the silence of the most active prayer in the universe being prayed without your seeing the response yet. Christ has been interceding for that name longer than you have known the person. The Father has been hearing. The Spirit has been at work. The visible non-answer is not the same as the invisible non-action.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the line worth keeping near the page. His never-ceasing intercession. When the chair feels small and the years feel long, the prayer being prayed for your loved one is not only yours. It is His. Yours is the tributary joining the river. The river is the larger reality. The years of your prayer have been folded into the larger prayer the whole time.
(For the wider companion read on what corporate intercession looks like when many women are carrying long names in their separate chairs, see Why Andrew Murray Said the Church Is Not Praying. And for the personal posture this kind of carrying grows from, Why Andrew Murray Called Intercession a Holy Privilege walks the slow theology of the priesthood the long intercessor is quietly inhabiting.)
The second passage: the gift accepted
“You had heard of Christ as the gift of His love, you knew that He was for you too, you had felt the movings and drawings of His grace; but never till in faith in God’s word you accepted Him as God’s gift to you, did you know the peace and joy that He can give.”
— Andrew Murray, Ministry of Intercession
Read it twice. Then read it once more.
This is the passage Murray writes for the woman whose long intercession has begun to wear thin in a particular way — the way where she has started, secretly, to half-believe that her loved one’s resistance is a kind of permanent verdict. The line is the gentle correction.
Murray is reminding her how her own faith began. You had heard. You knew. You had felt the movings and drawings of His grace. The years before the woman herself fully accepted Christ were not silent years. They were drawing years. The Spirit was moving the whole time. The acceptance, when it came, came on a particular day — but the day was the visible flowering of a long invisible drawing she had not been able to see from the inside.
The loved one is in the drawing years. The acceptance has not yet visibly come. Murray is asking the intercessor to remember that her own conversion was preceded by a long stretch she could not, at the time, recognise as preparation. The Spirit was at work in her before she knew He was. He is at work in her loved one in exactly the same way. The years of apparent non-response are not non-response. They are the same kind of slow drawing she herself once was inside, before the moment of accepting arrived.
This changes what how to pray for unsaved loved ones asks of the intercessor. Not Lord, override their will. That is not what He did with you, and it is not what He does with them. The prayer is closer to Lord, do in them what You did in me. Draw them. Move them. Reveal Yourself slowly. Bring them, in Your time, to the moment of accepting that I myself only arrived at when You had been preparing me for years. The prayer is for the same Spirit’s same patient work. The patience is part of the prayer. The patience is, in fact, the long form of the love.
A somatic for the heavy chest
Pause here. The body of a woman who has been carrying a loved one in prayer for years often holds the weight in one specific place — the chest, just below the collarbone, where the small daily ache of the unanswered name has been quietly residing.
Sit somewhere quiet. Put one hand lightly over the centre of your chest. Notice the heaviness. Do not try to lift it. Just notice it. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slowly, and let the small interior phrase form: Lord, You carry her too. (Or him. Or the name itself.) Take another slow inhale. On the next exhale, let the small recognition settle that the weight you have been carrying for years has also been on His shoulders the whole time — you have not been carrying alone, and you have not been carrying the larger part.
Repeat once. Then take the hand away. The heaviness will not entirely lift. But the recognition that the carrying has been shared from the beginning changes what the body knows about the load. The intercessor who has remembered she is not the only one carrying the name can sit with the weight differently. The shoulders, slowly, can lower by a small fraction. The chest can soften by a small fraction. The prayer can continue, not as solitary heroism but as small daily joining of a larger carrying.
The Prayer Journal for Women is built around this kind of long daily carrying. One page each evening, a place for the held name, room for the honest sentence about how the carrying is going this week, no demand to perform a conversion-friendly cheerfulness. The page is the small daily reminder that you are not the only one praying for that person tonight. He is. The chair is shared.
The third passage: the whole heart
“Beloved Christian! come and give your whole heart and life to intercession, and you will know its blessedness and its power.”
— Andrew Murray, Ministry of Intercession
Read it twice. The shortness is the teaching.
Murray closes the chapter on long intercession with this line because the question of the discouraged intercessor is, by year ten, no longer how do I make God answer faster. The question by then is how do I keep going at all. And Murray’s answer is not try harder. His answer is enlarge the life intercession is held within.
Give your whole heart and life to intercession. He is not asking for more hours. He is asking for the centre to move. The woman whose interior life has reorganised itself around intercession does not carry the long unanswered name as a burden bolted onto the side of a life. She carries it as the spine of a life. The carrying becomes the work itself. The conversion, if and when it comes, is part of the carrying — but the carrying does not depend on the conversion for its meaning. The carrying is meaningful because it is the shape of love the Spirit is forming in her over the years.
This is the freedom the long intercessor is being slowly given. She does not have to keep the prayer going in order to manufacture an answer. The Father has heard. Christ is interceding. The Spirit is drawing. Her part is the small daily showing-up, the long love, the unhurried trust that what she cannot see is happening anyway, and the patience to let His timing be the timing. How to pray for unsaved loved ones, in Murray’s old answer, is the long slow walking of this freedom — until the praying is not a project with a deadline but a vocation she is glad, by year fifteen, to have spent her life inside.
(For the wider companion read on the kind of prayer that arises when the soul has stopped trying to engineer the answer, see The Holy Spirit’s Role in Prayer — Andrew Murray’s Plain Answer. And for the practical format that holds a long name across many seasons, How to Start a Prayer Journal in 10 Minutes a Day is the format that survives real life.)
What the years are actually for
Murray would have said the years of unanswered intercession are not wasted years. They are the years in which two things are happening at once. The first is the slow drawing of the loved one by the same Spirit who drew you, in His own timing, by ways you may never fully see from this side. The second is the slow conformation of the intercessor into the shape of long love — the kind of woman whose life has been, by year twenty, so deeply formed by the carrying that the carrying is her witness, whether or not the answer ever visibly comes in this life.
You may not see the conversion. You may. Either way, the years have not been silent. The Father has heard. Christ has been interceding. The Spirit has been drawing. You have been kept faithful in the chair through long stretches that would have broken a shallower love, and the love itself — formed in you by the long carrying — is part of what He is doing with the years. The intercession is the answer in part, even before the conversion arrives. The conversion, if it comes, will be the visible flowering of what has been growing invisibly under the soil for as long as you have been kneeling above it.
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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. One page each evening, a place for the held name, room for the honest sentence about how the carrying is going this week — the small daily companion for the long intercession that has not yet seen its answer. We are also slowly working toward reprinting The Ministry of Intercession itself through Everspring Press, so the book Murray wrote for the long-faithful intercessor can be back in her hands in a clean modern edition.
How to pray for unsaved loved ones, Murray would have told you, is the long slow joining of Christ’s never-ceasing prayer for that very person. You are not alone in the chair. You never were. The carrying has been shared from the beginning. Your part is the small daily showing-up. His part is the rest, and the timing, and the answer when it comes.