How to Pray for a Hardened Heart — Murray’s Soft Answer
⏱ 12 min read
You have been praying for this person for years. The husband. The grown son. The sister. The father. The friend who used to walk with God and stopped. The heart you are praying for has, in the years of your praying, gone harder rather than softer — and somewhere in the last quiet stretch you began to suspect that your praying was, if not pointless, at least not the kind of praying that softens stone. You have asked for the breakthrough. You have prayed warfare. You have fasted. You have sent the sermons. The heart is harder now than it was when you started. You are tired, and you have begun to wonder whether you have been praying the wrong way for the wrong thing.
This is a slow walk through Andrew Murray’s soft answer to that question. Murray — a Dutch Reformed minister in South Africa, who spent the latter half of his life writing thin little books about prayer and abiding — left behind a counsel that the modern intercessor often skips. He did not promise the breakthrough by Friday. He described a different prayer, with a different posture, that does something the warfare prayer cannot. If a journal feels like a steadier home for the long years of praying for someone, the Prayer Journal for Women was designed as a quiet field for exactly this kind of asking — the long, repeated, faithful kind.
What hardness actually is
The phrase hardened heart is biblical, and the modern church often softens it into something it is not. The modern reading tends to picture a hardness that is willful and recent — the person has made a choice; the prayer is to reverse the choice; the breakthrough is when the choice reverses. This is a small part of what scripture means by hardness, and not the largest part.
Scripture’s longer use of hardness is geological. The heart has hardened the way a riverbed hardens — slowly, by years of small accumulations, by the laying-down of layer over layer until the surface that was once living is now stone. Pharaoh’s heart hardens. Israel’s heart hardens. The disciples’ hearts harden, even after they have walked with Christ for years. The hardness is not always a willful act. It is often the cumulative settling of many small refusals, many small unbeliefs, many small disappointments, many small protective shells laid down by a soul that, somewhere along the way, was hurt and decided that softness was no longer safe.
You cannot, by warfare prayer, reverse a riverbed. The water that wears stone back to softness does not arrive in a single flood. It arrives in the long patient pressure of water that keeps coming, and coming, and coming. Murray’s whole counsel for praying for a hardened heart is about being that kind of water rather than that kind of flood. (If the praying has begun to feel like it is failing because it is not loud enough, 75 war room prayers and printable prayer cards is the wider-shaped companion — but the practice in this article is the quieter one underneath all of them.)
Murray’s first instruction — the prayer that becomes still
The first passage is the one most readers want to skip. It is not about the hardened person at all. It is about the praying person. Murray, in Waiting on God, writes this:
“If we are to have our whole heart turned towards God, we must have it turned away from the creature, from all that occupies and interests, whether of joy or sorrow. … 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.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it slowly. He is not telling you to pray harder. He is telling you to become quieter.
The instinct of the woman praying for a hardened heart is to do more. More verses. More fasting. More intercession nights. More tears. More words. The doing-more is the natural response of a heart that loves someone and is afraid they will be lost — and Murray, who knew this instinct intimately, gently turns it around. The praying that softens what stubbornness has locked is not the praying that adds more. It is the praying that subtracts the noise from the praying person.
Take heed and be quiet. In quietness shall be your strength. It is good that a man should quietly wait. These are the three lines Murray gathers from the Old Testament, and they are not addressed to the hardened person. They are addressed to you, the one praying for the hardened person. Your strength, in this long intercession, is not in the volume of the praying. It is in the quietness of the praying. The quietness is the strength.
The reason this is the first instruction, and not the last, is that the hardened heart you are praying for cannot hear a noisy prayer. The noisy prayer presses, and pressing makes hardness press back. The quiet prayer does not press. The quiet prayer waits. And the waiting prayer, over time, becomes a kind of presence that the hardened heart can feel through the wall it has built — because the prayer is no longer arriving as pressure but as patient nearness.
This is the first half of Murray’s soft answer. Become quiet. The prayer for a hardened heart begins inside the praying person, not inside the prayed-for one.
Murray’s second instruction — the abiding that does the work
The second passage gives the prayer its shape. Murray, in Abide in Christ, describes the kind of abiding that the long intercessor needs, and the description is the one to keep near the page:
“At Thy bidding I take Thy yoke; I undertake the duty without delay; I abide in Thee. Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command, and teach us to listen more earnestly than ever till the Spirit again give us to hear the voice of Jesus saying, with a love and authority that inspire both hope and obedience, ‘Child, abide in me.’ That word, listened to as coming from Himself, will be an end of all doubting — a divine promise of what shall surely be granted. And with ever-increasing simplicity its meaning will be interpreted. Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led. Look at what the abiding actually is. It is not the praying harder. It is the giving up of the running of the prayer to Christ — letting the prayer be His prayer, on His timetable, in His shape, for His ends.
This is the unbinding the long intercessor has been needing. The prayer for a hardened heart is not yours to engineer. The breakthrough is not yours to time. The shape the softening will take is not yours to imagine in advance. The abiding is the giving-up of all three — the engineering, the timing, the shape — into the hands of Christ, who is the one who actually does the softening, and who has been at work on the hardened heart you love for longer than you have been praying for it.
The relief in this is the size of the room. The woman who has been carrying the hardened heart of someone she loves for ten years has been carrying it as if the outcome rested on her praying. Murray’s counsel — and the counsel of the New Testament that Murray is quietly handing back — is that the outcome rests on Christ. Your praying is the abiding. Christ does the rest.
This is not the same as not praying. The abiding is itself a kind of praying — the deepest kind, the most patient kind, the kind that holds the hardened heart in the presence of Christ year over year without requiring the year to deliver the outcome. It is the kind of praying that can be sustained for decades, because it is not the kind of praying that exhausts the praying person. (The version of this on the page — the small evening practice of bringing the long-prayed-for person into Christ’s company without manufacturing the breakthrough — is what the Prayer Journal for Women was designed to hold: a structure that lets you bring the same person, faithfully, across months and years, without the pressure of the daily breakthrough log.)
Pause in the body for a moment
The shoulders that were braced when you began reading this — braced under the long weight of the praying — let them lower by an inch. Let the chest, which has been tight for years around this person, soften by half a breath. Let the jaw release. The body has been carrying the hardened heart of someone else, and the carrying has settled into your own physical posture. The hardness you have been praying for has been pulling your body into a small mirror of itself.
Let the body, for one slow breath, un-mirror. The abiding Murray is describing happens more easily in an un-braced body than in a braced one. The prayer that softens what stubbornness has locked is prayed first from a body that has stopped trying to soften it by force.
Murray’s third instruction — the resting that is the work
The third passage is the one Murray uses to seal the practice. It is short, and it is the line worth keeping near the page:
“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
Believing that Thou doest all in me. That is the sentence. The whole of Murray’s prayer for a hardened heart resolves into that one trust — that God is already at work in the long intercession, doing what you cannot do, in ways you will not see for years, on a timetable that is not yours to set.
The prayer for the hardened heart, walked Murray’s way, is small and slow. You sit down. You name the person. You offer them, again, into Christ’s hands. You ask, gently, for the softening — without telling Him how. You abide for a few minutes in His presence, with the hardened heart held there alongside you. You get up. You go on with the day.
You do this tomorrow. And the day after. And next week, and next month, and into the year after this one. The praying does not feel dramatic. The praying often does not feel like anything at all. But over time — Murray’s some years, the way Brother Lawrence used the same phrase — the praying that is abiding rather than pressing becomes the slow patient water that begins, in ways you may not be the one to witness, to wear the stone.
The hardness of the prayed-for heart may yield in this life. It may not. Some of the prayed-for never soften in time for the praying person to see it. This is the hardest truth of the long intercession, and Murray does not pretend it away. What he does say — and what the abiding prayer rests on — is that the praying is not wasted. The praying that abides in Christ is held in Christ, and what Christ holds, He keeps, and what He keeps, He works on, in His own time, by means none of us are required to engineer.
The relief is large. The work is His. Your part is the abiding. (If the night-time wondering about why God seems to be ignoring the long prayer is the part most loud, Edwards on the affections is the slow companion piece, and for the nights you cannot find the words at all, Spurgeon’s counsel on what to pray when you don’t know what to pray is the sibling worth keeping near the page.)
What changes, slowly
When the prayer for the hardened heart shifts from pressing to abiding, three things tend to happen in the praying person before they happen in the prayed-for one.
The first is that your own peace returns. The long intercession had been carrying a low fear underneath every prayer — the fear that if you stopped praying, or prayed wrong, the person would be lost. The abiding prayer dissolves the fear, slowly, by handing the outcome back to Christ. You can stop carrying what was never yours to carry.
The second is that the relationship with the prayed-for person becomes lighter. The woman whose prayer has shifted from pressing to abiding stops pressing in person, too. The visits become softer. The conversations become quieter. The relationship that had been bent toward the breakthrough-by-Friday begins to relax into the long companionship that the abiding prayer was already practicing in the chair. The hardened person, often, feels the change before they can name it.
The third — and this is the slowest, and not always granted in the time the woman is praying — is that the hardened heart begins to soften. The water that has been arriving as patient nearness, year over year, begins to wear the stone. The softening, when it comes, is usually not the dramatic conversion the warfare prayer was asking for. It is small. A phone call out of the blue. A question asked over coffee that has not been asked in a decade. A door, opened slightly, that the praying woman recognises as the hand of the One she had been quietly handing her praying to. (For the slow daily structure that holds the long intercession across years, how to set up a prayer journal is the six-section system that has a place built for this kind of asking, and verse mapping examples is the slow scripture practice for the verses you are praying over the hardened heart.)
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The soft answer, kept near the page
How to pray for a hardened heart. Murray’s answer is small. Become quiet. Abide in Christ. Trust that He is at work. Do this for years, without requiring the year to deliver the outcome. The praying that abides does not need to break the stone. The Spirit does that, in His time, by the patient water of the abiding praying you have been quietly offering all along.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women.
