How to Pray for Healing — Murray on the Prayer of Faith
⏱ 16 min read
How to Pray for Healing — Murray on the Prayer of Faith
What do you do with a prayer for healing that has been the same prayer for two years now — the same diagnosis, the same waiting room, the same small white pills on the counter — and the answer has not come in the form you asked it in?
That is the question this slow read sits inside of. Not the question of whether to pray for healing. The question of how to keep praying for it after the first six months — when the urgent flare of the early prayers has settled into the slow chronic asking, and the body you are praying for is still the body it was, and the verses on the wall have begun to look thinner than they did. Andrew Murray, who wrote Divine Healing and Abide in Christ and Holy in Christ across thirty years of pastoral life that included his own long stretch of illness, has counsel for this exact person — and it is gentler, and more honest about the body, than the counsel she is usually given. The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries this slower kind of prayer into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly, and let the prayer for healing become something the body can stand inside of rather than something it is being asked to escape.
The instinct of most modern healing-prayer literature is to teach you how to pray for healing in the manner of a transaction. You produce the faith. God produces the healing. If the healing does not come, you must not have produced enough faith. There is nothing about that frame Murray would have recognised, and nothing in it that survives a careful reading of Divine Healing. Murray believed deeply in prayer for the body. He prayed for healing for himself and for hundreds of others in his decades of ministry. And he did so inside a frame that did not collapse when the healing tarried, because the frame was never the transaction. The frame was the slow abiding inside which the prayer for healing was held. (For the version of healing devotion that does not spiritualize the wound, faith-based healing devotionals that don’t spiritualize the wound walks the longer pastoral ground. For the protective prayer at night, when the body is most afraid, prayer for protection tonight — 10 scriptures to pray before bed holds the bedtime practice. And if the illness has settled into the relational landscape — a hardened response from someone who used to soften — how to pray for a hardened heart — Murray’s soft answer is the sibling pastoral piece.)
A note on what this prayer is not promising
The honest thing first.
Murray is not promising that if you pray rightly, the cancer will leave. He is not promising that the chronic pain will resolve by the season’s end. He is not promising that the diagnosis will reverse, the medication will become unnecessary, the body will look at sixty the way it looked at thirty-five. Murray prayed for many people who were healed and many people who were not, and his theology of healing held both. The prayer of faith, in his frame, is not the demand for a specific bodily outcome. It is the slow placing of the body — in its actual present state — inside the abiding of Christ, with the trust that the abiding holds the body whether the visible body alters or does not.
This is the frame in which Murray’s counsel becomes pastorally usable for the chronic illness, the long disease, the slow decline, the diagnosis that does not reverse. The prayer for healing is not in this frame a vending machine you are feeding the right coin into. It is the older Christian practice of bringing the body, with all its real frailty, into the presence of the One in whom the body abides. The healing that comes is the healing that comes — sometimes in the body, sometimes only in the soul, sometimes only in the manner the body is carried until the body lays itself down. Murray does not flinch from the third possibility. He writes inside the awareness of it.
The first passage: my heart be Thy resting-place
Murray writes, in Holy in Christ, the sentence the long-praying person should keep near her bed.
“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 that Murray begins, even in a passage that could have launched into bold petition, with the heart as resting-place. The first move of the prayer of faith is not the bold demand for the body’s repair. The first move is the slow consent of the interior to be a place the Lord can rest in. This is the move most modern healing literature skips. It moves straight to the petition without first quieting the soil the petition will be planted in.
I would, in the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee. The phrase restful faith is the one to mark. The faith Murray is teaching is not the urgent, straining, name-it-and-claim-it faith of the modern revival meeting. It is restful. It rests in Him. It has stopped striving to produce its own outcomes. It is the kind of faith that can pray for healing for the third year of an illness without the faith itself becoming exhausted, because the faith was never the engine of the healing. The faith was always the resting place inside which the healing was being asked for.
For the person who has been praying for healing for two years and is tired of her own prayer, this is the line that releases her. Restful faith. You are allowed to pray for healing in a posture that is not braced. You are allowed to ask the same thing for the eighth hundred time without the eighth hundred asking needing to be louder or sharper than the first. The Lord is not deaf. The repetition is not failure. The asking, inside the rest, is itself a form of the abiding.
Believing that Thou doest all in me. The verb is doest in me — not doest to me, not doest for me, but doest in me. The praying woman is being told to trust that the Lord is at work inside her, in the body itself, in the marrow and the breath and the slow biology, whether she can see what He is doing or not. The seeing is not required. The seeing is rarely given. The trust is the prayer.
The somatic that goes with the long prayer for healing
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the prayer for healing has a body to it more than any other prayer.
Sit, or lie, somewhere comfortable. The body that is being prayed for is going to do the somatic. Place one hand lightly on the place in the body that has been carrying the illness — the chest, the abdomen, the lower back, the leg, wherever the body has been carrying it. Do not press. Just rest the hand there.
Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, do not try to push the illness out. Do not try to visualise healing. Simply let the breath leave the body more slowly than it came in. Let the hand on the place that hurts feel the small rise and fall of the breath under it. Stay there for one minute, by a clock if you need to.
The practice is not to make the body feel better. The practice is to keep the body company while it is unwell. Most people in long illness have been treating their own body as an enemy, or as a project, or as a failed object — something to be fixed, blamed, hated, escaped. The slow hand resting on the place that hurts, with the slow breath, is the first move of a different posture. The body is being held by you, in the presence of the Lord who is also holding it, while you pray for whatever you are praying for.
Murray would not have used the language of nervous system regulation. But he understood, from inside his own decades of frailty, that the body that is permanently braced against itself cannot receive the slow inward work the Lord is doing in it. The slow hand. The slow breath. The body kept company by its own person, in the presence of the Lord. That is the somatic that goes with the prayer of faith.
Then take the hand away and continue reading.
The second passage: the still small voice
Murray returns, in Abide in Christ, to the older quiet.
“So we shall gaze on its blessedness, until desire be inflamed, and the will with all its energies be roused to claim and possess the unspeakable blessing. Come, my brethren, and let us day by day set ourselves at His feet, and meditate on this word of His, with an eye fixed on Him alone. 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
Read it twice.
The phrase the still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks is the one to keep near the page. Murray is drawing on the Elijah passage — the prophet who looked for God in the wind and the earthquake and the fire and found Him in the small voice that came afterwards. The prayer of faith, in Murray’s frame, is the prayer that has stopped waiting for God to arrive in the wind and the earthquake. The prayer of faith waits, instead, in the stillness, for the small voice.
For the person praying for healing, this is a structural shift. The modern healing prayer is usually framed in the wind-and-earthquake mode. The healing, if it comes, is supposed to come dramatically. The body, if it is to be repaired, is supposed to be repaired in a visible and unmistakable moment. Murray gently dismantles the assumption. The God who heals also heals in the still small voice — slowly, almost invisibly, in the slow interior work that is happening in the body and the soul over months and years while the person prays. The dramatic moment, if it comes, comes. Most of the time, it does not come. The small voice is what comes.
The small voice is harder to hear in a body that is braced. It is harder to hear in a soul that is rushing. It is harder to hear in a prayer that is demanding the dramatic moment. Let us set ourselves in quiet trust before Him, waiting to hear His holy voice. The quiet trust is the precondition. The waiting is the practice. The small voice is the gift.
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. Notice the precision of the phrase to accept and to hold. The blessing is given. The soul’s part is to receive it — and the receiving has two motions, accepting and holding. Accepting is the first moment, the openness to the gift. Holding is the longer motion, the slow carrying of the gift through the days that come after. The praying woman in long illness is being taught to hold what she has received — not to seize, not to brandish, not to demand the visible proof of what she has received — but to hold it, quietly, while the small voice continues its work.
This is what how to pray for healing looks like, in Murray’s frame. The waiting on the still small voice. The accepting and the holding of whatever the voice gives. The slow trust that what is being done in the body is being done by Him, whether the doing is visible to the body’s own eyes or not.
The mid-article callout
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal is built around exactly this Murray-shaped frame. The journal does not ask the long-ill woman to manufacture the dramatic faith of the wind and the earthquake. It asks her, on each daily page, to sit in the quiet trust and listen for the small voice. One short passage. Room for one honest sentence. A small space to name where the body is today, without pretending the body away. The page is built for the long illness, not for the quick miracle. It is built for the woman whose prayer for healing has been a prayer for longer than she expected it to be, and who needs a daily companion that will keep her in the chair through the slow stretch of the asking.
The third passage: abide in His love
Murray’s most pastoral counsel for the long healing prayer is in Abide in Christ.
“Let this truth, accepted under the teaching of the Spirit in faith, remove every vestige of fear, as if abiding in Christ were a burden and a work. In the light of His life in the Father, let it henceforth be to you a blessed rest in the union with Him, an overflowing fountain of joy and strength. To abide in His love, His mighty, saving, keeping, satisfying love, even as He abode in the Father’s love — surely the very greatness of our calling teaches us that it never can be a work we have to perform; it must be with us as with Him, the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it once at speed. Then read it slowly.
Notice the verb abide. Not strive. Not believe harder. Not produce more faith. Abide. The praying person in long illness is being released, by this passage, from the secret performance that has crept into her healing prayer. She has been trying to produce the faith that will produce the healing. Murray gently dismantles the trying. The abiding is not a work. It is the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within. The praying person is not asked to manufacture the prayer. She is asked to abide — and to let the prayer arise from inside the abiding the way fruit arises from a tree that is not straining to fruit.
Remove every vestige of fear, as if abiding in Christ were a burden and a work. This is the line for the woman who has been afraid that her prayer for healing has not been enough. The abiding is not the production. The abiding is the resting in what is already true — that you are in Him, and He is in you, and the body that you are praying for is being held by the love that holds you, whether the visible body alters or does not.
His mighty, saving, keeping, satisfying love. Notice the four adjectives. Mighty — the love that has the strength to hold the body through the long illness. Saving — the love that has already done its eternal work, regardless of whether the temporal body recovers. Keeping — the love that is keeping the praying woman through the wait, hour by hour, even when the keeping is invisible. Satisfying — the love that, finally, is sufficient by itself, even on the days the body is not.
For the praying woman in the third year of an illness that has not lifted, satisfying is the word to keep. The love is satisfying in itself, not only when paired with the bodily outcome she wanted. The body that recovers is a gift. The body that does not is held by the same love that would have held the body that did. The praying woman is being slowly taught, through the long prayer for healing, that the love itself is what she was asking for the whole time — and that the love has been answering, in abide, all along.
(The sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series sit at how to develop a quiet time with God — Brother Lawrence’s hidden method and how to pray morning and evening — Habermann’s daily prayers.)
How to pray for healing, in Murray’s frame, this week
Not a thirty-day plan. A different posture, walked slowly.
The first evening, sit in the chair without the petition. Let the hand rest on the place in the body that hurts. Take three slow breaths. Say, Lord, may my heart be Thy resting-place. The body with me. Do not move to the request yet. Stay there.
The second evening, name the request once. The specific thing you have been praying for. Say it plainly. Then return to the abiding. The prayer is mostly the abiding. The specific is a small placing of the body within the abiding, not the centre of the practice.
The third evening, sit in quiet trust and listen for the small voice. You will not hear a voice in the audible sense. You may notice, after the minute, a small interior settling. A small piece of language you did not have at the start of the minute. A small clarity about the next small step in the body’s care. The small voice speaks in small things. The praying woman who has learned to listen for it begins to hear it more often.
By the end of the week, you will have prayed for healing in a manner that does not look much like the prayer you started with. The change is not in the body yet, or it is the slow change that will only be visible in retrospect. The change is in the praying woman, who is learning to ask for healing from inside Murray’s older, quieter frame. The body is held, the same way, by the love that was holding it the whole time. The asking is now held by that love too.
What the long arc looks like
The person who walks Murray’s counsel for ten years through long illness is not the person who arrives at a fixed body. She is the person who arrives, slowly, at a deeper interior — and whose illness, whatever shape it has settled into, is held in a different ground than the one she was holding it in at the start.
Some illnesses do lift, over those years. Some lift in the way the praying woman asked. Some lift in different ways than she asked, or only partially. Some do not lift in this life. Murray does not promise the outcome. He promises only the abiding, and the small voice, and the satisfying love, and the slow inward work the prayer does in the woman who keeps showing up to it. The prayer of faith is the prayer that has stopped requiring the bodily outcome to be the proof of the love. The love has already been the answer, the whole time. The body’s shape is held inside the love, not the other way around.
That is the slow shape of how to pray for healing, in the older Murray frame. Not the transaction. The abiding. Not the demanded dramatic moment. The still small voice, slowly, over years, satisfying the soul whether the body lifts or does not.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Christian Healing Journal. Each evening, a short passage, room for the honest sentence, and the slow place to bring the body you actually have — not the one you keep editing in your head — before the Lord whose love is mighty, saving, keeping, and satisfying.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries Murray’s older vocabulary — restful faith, the still small voice, abide in His love — into a daily companion built for the long-praying person whose request for healing is ready to be held in a quieter ground than the one it started in.
