How to Pray for Faith — Spurgeon’s Counsel for Weak Believers
⏱ 13 min read
The honest version of the question has a sting in it. You are praying for faith, and the praying itself is the thing that feels uncertain. Lord, give me more faith. And then, at the back of the asking, a small voice — do I even have enough faith for that asking to count? The trying to believe and the not-quite-believing have been running together in your chest for months, and somewhere along the way the line between them got blurry, and now you do not know which one you are bringing to the prayer.
The question how to pray for faith is the question of a Christian woman who has been showing up to her faith for years and is in a stretch where the showing-up has not felt like belief. The verses still mean what they mean. The doctrine is still true. The body that is sitting in the pew is still the same body. And the inner felt-sense of I am held, I am loved, He is here — the felt part — has thinned. You have not lost the faith. You have lost the felt warmth of it. And the asking give me more faith is the right asking, but it has not yet been taught the slow grammar of how to actually receive what it is asking for.
This is the slow version of the answer. Charles Spurgeon, the nineteenth-century London preacher who wrote All of Grace for exactly this woman — the seeker, the weak believer, the one whose faith was the size of a mustard seed and who knew it — will be our older voice. Three passages, slowly read. 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.
Spurgeon’s pastoral genius, across forty years of preaching to the London poor, was the refusal to shame the weak believer for being weak. He took the mustard-seed faith of his congregation and treated it as enough — not because mustard-seed faith was strong, but because the One the faith was placed in was strong, and the strength of the One being trusted was what made the size of the faith almost beside the point. The praying for faith, in Spurgeon’s grammar, is less about generating more belief and more about leaning the small belief you have on the One who is, in fact, holding you whether you feel it on a given Tuesday or not.
(If the longer shape of this question has been how do I strengthen the faith itself, how to strengthen your faith when it’s weak is the practical sister article. If the silence has been the harder part — the praying when you cannot find the words — what to pray when you don’t know what to pray walks that ground. And if the page itself has been the obstacle — the journal that has gone blank for months — how to start a faith journal is the gentle re-entry.)
The thing prayer for faith is not
It is not the manufacture of a feeling. That is the first thing to settle.
The modern Christian woman, especially the one who came up through the warm-hearted streams of the church, has often inherited a quiet expectation: that real faith feels like something. The chest goes warm. The eyes well up. The sense of presence settles in. And on the long stretches when the felt warmth has gone — the long Tuesday-afternoon dryness, the months after the loss, the year that has been heavier than usual — the woman starts to read the absence of feeling as the absence of faith.
Spurgeon would, gently, set that down. The feeling is one of God’s gifts. The faith is something else. The faith is the placing of the soul’s weight on Christ — not the felt warmth of having done so. The praying for faith is the daily small leaning, with or without the feeling. The feeling, when it returns, is His to give. The leaning is yours to keep doing. The leaning, by itself, in the absence of any felt warmth, is already the faith Spurgeon spent his life pointing his congregation toward.
The first passage: the perfect peace in the meditating heart
“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
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice what Spurgeon is not saying. He is not saying I prayed harder and the feeling came. He is not saying I worked up belief and the warmth followed. He is saying something quieter, and for the weak believer, much more freeing: I was sitting. I was meditating. The sense came. The structure of the sentence is important. The sitting came first. The meditating on God’s mercy and love came second. The sense of perfect peace came third — suddenly — and from outside Spurgeon’s effort. It came to him, not from him.
For the modern Christian woman whose faith feels thin, this small sentence carries a whole pastoral theology. The sense of God’s nearness is not something you produce by trying harder. It is something He gives, on His timing, to the soul that has been quietly meditating on what He has already said and done. The praying for faith, in Spurgeon’s grammar, is not the asking for a feeling. It is the showing-up to sit and meditate on God’s mercy and love until, suddenly — at His timing, not yours — the felt sense of His peace surfaces in your chest of its own accord.
This is the part that re-frames how to pray for faith for the woman who has been trying to make herself believe more. The making is the wrong verb. The sitting is the right one. I was sitting. The praying for faith begins with sitting — in a chair, in His presence, with the Bible or the older book open — and letting the slow meditating on what He has done do its quiet work until the sense, His to give, arrives. The faith you are praying for is not generated by the asking. It is grown by the sitting.
The somatic that goes with the asking
Pause here. Spurgeon’s vocabulary has a body to it, and the body is where the weak believer most needs the teaching translated.
Sit somewhere quiet. Place one hand, palm open, on your lap — not gripping anything, just open. Notice that the hand wants to close. The body of the woman whose faith feels thin is often a body that is gripping — gripping the worry, the doubt, the question, the asking. Let the hand stay open for thirty seconds. Take one slow inhale, and one slow exhale, with the hand still open. On the exhale, let the small ongoing effort to make something happen in your chest set itself down for a moment. The open hand is the body’s small picture of the soul’s posture toward grace. I am not gripping the answer. I am opening to whatever You will give.
That small somatic opening is the body’s equivalent of the most delightful sense of perfect peace Spurgeon describes arriving in his meditating heart. The peace does not come into a closed hand. The peace comes into the hand that is open enough to receive what is being placed in it. The praying for faith, repeated daily over a year, is the slow learning of the body to stay open while the asking is being made — so that when the answer comes, the hand is ready to receive it.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around this kind of small daily opening. One page each evening, a short verse, room for one honest sentence, no demand to perform. The journal is not the cure for the thinness — He is — but the daily small practice keeps the hand open. The faith you are praying for will arrive in the open hand on a day you are not expecting it.
The second passage: the Lord of grace passing through the air
“He is so prolific of grace, that like the sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit, his path is radiant with lovingkindness. He is a swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, as sweet odours exhale from flowers; and it always will be emanating from him, as water from a sparkling fountain. What delightful encouragement this truth affords us! If our Lord is so ready to heal the sick and bless the needy, then, my soul, be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
This is the passage that quiets the weak believer. Read it twice.
Spurgeon is doing something specific here. He is naming what is true about Christ, regardless of how the believer is feeling on a given day. He is so prolific of grace. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus. It always will be emanating from him. Notice the verbs. Prolific. Evermore. Always. These are not the verbs of a Christ whose grace is rationed to the strong-feeling believer and withheld from the weak one. These are the verbs of a Christ whose grace is constantly exhaling outward, the way a flower’s scent does — and the believer’s job, weak or strong, is not to manufacture more capacity to receive but to put herself in his way.
That last phrase is the line worth keeping near the page. Be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee. Spurgeon is not asking for great faith. He is asking for proximity. Put yourself in His way. Stand where the grace is being exhaled. Sit in the chair. Open the older book. Walk past the cross slowly. The grace is already coming. Your part is the small daily standing-in-its-path, so that what is being given may land on you instead of on the empty air beside you.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the line that reorganises how to pray for faith. The praying is not the building of belief out of nothing. The praying is the placing of yourself in His way. The grace He is exhaling — moment by moment, in the orbit of His love — is already coming. The asking is the act of standing where the grace falls. The faith, slowly, builds itself in the body of the woman who keeps standing in the path of grace whether or not she feels anything on a given Sunday.
If our Lord is so ready to heal the sick and bless the needy. Spurgeon’s pastoral instinct, here, is to address the weak believer directly: you are the sick and the needy he is so ready to bless. The strong-faith believer does not need this verse. The mustard-seed believer is the one Spurgeon is writing for. Be not thou slow. Do not wait until the faith feels strong before you put yourself in His way. Put yourself in His way because the faith feels weak. The smile of His face is what builds the faith back. The faith does not build the smile.
The third passage: the Spirit who enables us to receive
“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 the most pastoral of the three. Read it slowly.
Spurgeon is naming the whole architecture of grace — Father as source, Son as channel, Spirit as the one who enables us to receive — and he is putting the weight of the receiving on the Spirit, not on the believer. Thou, O Spirit, art He who enables us to receive. The receiving is not your work. The receiving is the Spirit’s work in you.
This is the line that ends the weak believer’s chronic self-blame. You have been blaming yourself for not receiving His grace better. You have been telling yourself if I had more faith, I would feel His love more. Spurgeon would, gently, set that down too. The enabling-to-receive is the Spirit’s gift, not your achievement. Your asking give me faith is, in the older grammar, the asking for the Spirit to do in you what only He can do — to enable the receiving of what is already flowing from the Father through the Son toward you.
The mustard-seed believer does not produce the receiving. The mustard-seed believer asks the Spirit to enable it. Spirit, enable me to receive what is being given. That is the praying for faith, in its most precise grammatical form. You are not asking God to make you stronger. You are asking the Spirit to do the receiving for you, in you — so that the divine virtue that has been flowing from the Father, through Christ, all along, finally enters the heart and abides there and brings forth its fruit.
For the Christian woman whose faith has felt thin, this is the doorway. The praying for faith is the asking for the Spirit’s enabling. The asking is itself the beginning of the receiving. The Spirit honours that asking. The faith, slowly, over a year of daily small askings, grows — not because you have produced it, but because He has been enabling you to receive what He has been giving the whole time.
What praying for faith will actually feel like over a year
The thinness will not vanish in a week. You will keep asking. You will keep showing up to the chair. Some days the feeling will not come. Some weeks the felt sense of His nearness will be entirely absent, and you will continue to put yourself in His way anyway. That is the practice. That is the praying for faith in its mature, weak-believer’s form. You are not producing a feeling. You are standing in the path of His grace and asking the Spirit to enable the receiving.
By the end of the first month, the asking will have become familiar. By the third month, the small open hand on the lap during prayer will have become a body-memory — a small unconscious gesture you find yourself making at red lights and in the queue at the supermarket. By the sixth month, the suddenly Spurgeon described will have visited you at least once — a Tuesday afternoon when, with no warning, the sense of His mercy surfaces in your chest while you are washing the dishes. By the end of the year, the faith will not feel larger. The faith will feel more rested — the same mustard-seed, leaning more confidently on the One it has been leaning on the whole time.
That is what the praying for faith promises, in Spurgeon’s grammar. Not a great burst of belief. The slow daily standing in the path of grace, until the receiving — the Spirit’s work, not yours — has built a quiet, weight-bearing trust in the One who has been holding you all along.
(For the wider context this sits inside, how to develop a quiet time with God walks the foundational daily practice. 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 open hand in the path of grace, until the receiving becomes the faith.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, the Spirit who enables us to receive — into a daily companion built for the weak believer whose mustard-seed faith is, at last, ready to lean its full weight on the One who is holding it.
