What to Pray When You Don’t Know What to Pray — Spurgeon’s Counsel
⏱ 10 min read
You opened the search bar because the words would not come. The morning was getting on. The hands were folded. The intention to pray was there. And the sentence that was supposed to follow Lord — the one the books say should come fluently to the faithful heart — was simply not arriving. So you typed the honest phrase. What to pray when you don’t know what to pray. And here you are.
This is not the page that will hand you a script. The scripts are everywhere — the five-pillar prayer, the ACTS structure, the Lord’s Prayer line by line, the Hannah-prayer for the desperate mother, the Jabez-prayer for the season of increase. The scripts are good in their place. But you did not come here for a script. You came here because the place underneath the script — the place the script is supposed to come out of — has gone quiet, and what you need is not a different script but a slower theology of what the wordless prayer actually is. There is a small, faithful companion to this kind of asking in the Prayer Journal for Women, which is where the practice this essay describes has its 140-day form; but the essay itself will simply walk three of Charles Spurgeon’s passages, slowly, and let the old pastor of London say what the modern devotionals will not.
If you have searched for what to write in a Christian journal when you feel blank because the page has been refusing you the same way the prayer has — you are in adjacent terrain. The blankness of the page and the blankness of the prayer are usually the same blankness, and the slow undoing of one tends to help the other.
The first thing Spurgeon will tell you — the prayer of one syllable
Spurgeon, in Morning and Evening and the lectures that followed it, returned again and again to a pastoral idea most modern devotionals have lost — that the prayer the Father hears most clearly is not the most elaborate one. He was preaching to a London full of women who had been catechised into believing that prayer required a certain register, a certain vocabulary, a certain emotional pitch. And he kept gently disassembling that assumption.
Listen to him in one of his quieter passages from Morning and Evening:
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth! O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. Notice what is not in it. There is no list of requests. There is no eloquent intercession. There is no apology for past failures. The whole prayer is the simple turning of the face toward God and the saying — speak; I am here; I am listening; what You give me, I am ready to receive.
Spurgeon’s point, when he prayed this kind of prayer in print, was that this is the prayer most modern Christians have forgotten exists. The prayer that is not asking in the transactional sense. The prayer that is the simple opening of the inward door — speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth — and the slow waiting in the room with that door open. He is saying, to the woman who does not know what to pray, that this is the prayer. The one syllable. The one direction-of-the-face. The simple I am here, Lord, and the rest of the words I cannot find right now, but the heart is turned.
The Father, Spurgeon insisted, does not need the rest of the words. The turning is the prayer. The blankness behind the turning is not the failure of prayer; it is, sometimes, the form of prayer the next stretch of your life is meant to be praying.
A small thing for the body before the next passage
Notice the chest. The not-knowing-what-to-pray sits in the chest more than anywhere else in the body — a tight band across the upper ribs, the sense of being slightly held shut, the breath shorter than it would naturally be. The wordlessness has been there for longer than the morning. It has been there for weeks.
Let the chest open by a small amount. Not by a dramatic breath. Just by stopping the small ongoing brace. One slow inhale into the lower ribs. One slow exhale. Let the hands, if they were clenched, soften. The next passage is here when you are ready.
The second thing Spurgeon names — the prayer the Spirit prays through you
The woman who does not know what to pray is often working from a theology she has never explicitly examined — the theology that says the prayer is mine to construct and God’s to answer. The prayer is the woman’s verb. God is the listener. The woman who runs out of words has, in this theology, failed at her side of the transaction.
Spurgeon will not let this theology stand. He returns, in passage after passage, to a Trinitarian view of prayer that the modern devotional shelf has largely set down. Here is one of the more developed versions, from his sermon collection:
“Thou, O Father, art the source of all grace, all love and mercy towards us. Thou, O Son, art the channel of Thy Father’s mercy, and without Thee Thy Father’s love could never flow to us. And Thou, O Spirit, art He who enables us to receive that divine virtue which flows from the fountain-head, the Father, through Christ the channel, and which, by Thy means, enters into our heart, and there abides, and brings forth its glorious fruit.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Gleanings among the Sheaves
This is doing more than it looks like it is doing. Sit with the three verbs. The Father is the source. The Son is the channel. The Spirit enables us to receive. Notice where the woman is in this picture. She is not the source. She is not the channel. She is the receiver, and even her receiving is something the Spirit does in her.
This is Spurgeon’s quiet rebuke to the woman who feels she has failed because she could not produce a prayer this morning. The prayer was never hers to produce in the first place. The prayer is something the Spirit, given to her by the Father through the Son, prays through her when she gives Him the space to. The blank page is not the absence of prayer. The blank page is the space the Spirit is being given. The woman who sits with the blank page in the open posture is, in Spurgeon’s theology, already praying — because the Spirit, when given a quiet receiver, prays.
This means the practice for the wordless morning is not to scramble for words. The practice is to sit, and let the Spirit have the room. The words, if words come, will be the Spirit’s words. And if no words come, the silence is also His. Either way the prayer is happening. The woman is not failing. She is being received, instead of producing.
This is the deepest reframe Spurgeon offers on this question. The prayer was never the woman’s work to manufacture. It was always the Spirit’s work to pray in her. Her job is the open posture. Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. That is the whole offering. The rest is His.
A practical home for this kind of praying
The Prayer Journal for Women is built specifically for the receiver-posture Spurgeon is describing. Not a journal that demands a paragraph of original eloquence each morning. A page that gives you scripture pre-printed, a small structure for the speak, Lord posture, and space for whatever the Spirit prays through you on the day He prays it — which on some days will be three pages of asking, on other days will be one honest sentence, and on other days will be the date and the line I sat here with You today. That last entry is, in Spurgeon’s frame, the most faithful entry of the three.
(If the daily morning page has felt too elaborate for the season you are in, the slower entry-point is a prayer journal and devotion — 30 prompts that earn their place — short prompts for the days the page itself is too big. And if the yearly arc of practice is what you are setting up for, a women’s prayer journal for the year ahead — pray like you mean it is the twelve-month version of what this essay walks in one morning.)
The third passage — the prayer of perfect peace
There is one more passage of Spurgeon’s worth walking slowly with, because it answers the why bother underneath the wordless prayer. Why pray at all, if the words will not come, and the feeling will not come, and the answer may not come either? Spurgeon’s answer is in a small note he tucked into Till He Come:
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
This is the most pastoral sentence on this question that Spurgeon ever wrote, and it is the easiest one to underread. I was sitting. Not striving. Not scrambling. Not producing. Meditating on God’s mercy and love. Not a list of requests. Not an intercession. Not an apology. The simple turning of the inward face toward two attributes of God — His mercy and His love — and the slow sitting with them. When suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.
Spurgeon is naming the small surprise the wordless-prayer woman is sometimes met with — that the peace, when it comes, comes unbidden, in the middle of a prayer that did not look like a prayer. The woman did not pray for the peace. She sat with His mercy and love. The peace arrived as a guest. This is the answer to why bother — because the sitting is what the peace comes into. The wordless prayer is the open door the peace, when it visits, walks through.
You will not produce this peace by trying harder. You will not produce it by finding the right script. You will produce it, in Spurgeon’s reading, by being the woman who is willing to sit — to meditate slowly on what God is like, to let the inward face be turned toward Him, and to wait, with no insistence on a timetable, for the peace to be the surprise it always was.
(If the question of what to pray is bleeding into the broader question of whether God is answering at all, the sibling read is why doesn’t God answer some prayers? — Edwards on the affections, and if the prayer has gone wordless because God Himself has gone quiet on you, how to pray when God feels far — Augustine’s Confessions pattern is the companion. The three essays sit together — Spurgeon, Edwards, Augustine — and walk three faces of the same long question. If you are setting up the year-ahead practice for this kind of asking, a new-year prayer journal for women without the pretty-page pressure is built for women who want the practice without the polished aesthetic.)
The small practice for tomorrow morning
If you take one practice from Spurgeon into this week, take this one. Tomorrow morning, when the prayer will not come — sit. Five minutes. Hands open. The single inward sentence — Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth. That is the whole prayer. You are not asked to add anything. If words come, write them. If no words come, the sitting is the prayer. Spurgeon is the witness that this is enough.
Do it for seven days. Not for thirty. Seven. The seven days will teach you what Spurgeon spent a lifetime teaching London — that the prayer the Father hears most clearly is the one-syllable turning of the face, and that the woman who sits in the open posture is praying more truly than the woman scrambling for words she cannot find.
The sentence to keep near the page
Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth. Write it on the small piece of paper by the kettle. Carry it through the week. Let it be the morning prayer when no morning prayer will come. Spurgeon prayed this prayer on the mornings he could not find words either — and the woman who borrows his line from him is in good and faithful company.
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A companion for the wordless morning
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. A page each day, with scripture pre-printed and space for the speak, Lord posture Spurgeon describes, built for the woman whose words have gone quiet and who is ready to let the Spirit do the praying in her while she sits in the open posture and waits.
