How to Pray for Strength — Murray on Strength for the Day
⏱ 15 min read
You have been asking for strength for a long time. Not the strength to win something — the strength to keep doing the ordinary thing that has worn you down past the place reserves usually reach. The early shift. The aged parent. The marriage that is not bad but is heavy. The child whose suffering you cannot fix. And the prayer for strength has, somewhere along the way, become the prayer that did not seem to be answered — because each morning the strength was not there in the form you had asked for it, and the day had to be carried anyway, on a kind of borrowed energy that you suspect is running out.
This is the slow version of the question. Not the cross-stitched one. Andrew Murray, who wrote Waiting on God in the last decade of a long life that had carried more than any one body should — six children, a wife buried, decades of pastoral work in the Karoo, a stretch of paralysed inability to speak — put down in that book the prayer for strength that does not ask for the strength you imagined. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow asking into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly. The way you have been praying for strength may not be wrong; it may simply be incomplete.
The modern wellness sibling of how to pray for strength is the breakfast smoothie and the cold plunge and the calendar block for self-care. None of these are bad. But Murray is praying for something different. Not the body’s capacity to push harder. The soul’s capacity to be carried. The two are not the same kind of strength. The first runs out at forty-five. The second is given afresh at every dawn, and the asking for it is older than your tiredness by several centuries.
What the prayer is not asking for
Before we walk the prayer, name what it is not. The prayer for strength is not the prayer to feel strong. The prayer for strength is not the prayer to be spared the hard thing. The prayer for strength is not even — and this is the harder one — the prayer to be made adequate to the day. Murray would say all three of these are misreadings of the older prayer, and that the misreadings are why the prayer feels unanswered.
The prayer for strength, in the older Christian vocabulary, is the prayer for His strength, given to you, for this day. Not yesterday’s day. Not tomorrow’s. Not the imagined day in which you would be a different woman with different reserves. The actual day in front of you, with the actual you in it, asking the actual God whose strength has been the bottom layer of every day you have already lived.
The shift is small in language. It is enormous in posture.
The first passage: In quietness shall be your strength
“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. God is a being of such infinite greatness and glory, and our nature has become so estranged from Him, that it needs our whole heart and desires set upon Him, even in some little measure to know and receive Him. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. 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.’”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the inversion. Murray is not saying be quiet so that you can muster strength. He is saying in the quietness, the strength already is. The quietness is not the preparation for the strength; the quietness is the place the strength is given. The order matters. The modern habit is to summon the strength first — caffeine, willpower, the morning pep-talk — and then carry it into the day. Murray is praying the opposite. Stop summoning. Be quiet. The strength is given inside the quietness, by Him, not produced by you out of resources you do not have.
For the woman who has been asking how to pray for strength in the form of the pep-talk prayer — Lord, make me equal to this day, give me the energy I need, help me push through — the older form of the prayer is almost shocking in its slowness. Take heed and be quiet. That is the first instruction. The strength comes in the second clause, not the first.
Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts. The phrase is exact. Murray sees that the day’s strength is leaked out, before it arrives, by the small ongoing efforts the soul makes to brace itself against fears it has not yet met. The day has not started yet. The body is already braced for it. The bracing itself is what consumes the strength that, in the older prayer, was meant to be received fresh in the quiet of the morning.
If the strength has been running out by mid-morning for years, this passage names why. The morning bracing is using up the strength before the day’s actual demands have arrived. The prayer for strength, properly walked, is the prayer to stop bracing first — and to receive the day’s portion in quietness instead of producing it ahead of time out of dwindling reserves.
(If the long arc of the depletion has been the part keeping you back from rest, how to pray for your children — a 30-day guide is the slow companion for the mother whose strength has been spent on the small unseen intercessions, and prayer for strength at work — pray through your hard days walks the same older grammar into the working week. For the related ask — how to pray when the heart of someone you love has gone stone — how to pray for a hardened heart walks Murray’s softer answer.)
The somatic that goes with the prayer
Pause here. Murray’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to a modern week through the body.
Sit somewhere quiet. Put both feet flat on the floor. Let the shoulders drop by an inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Notice the bracing. The bracing in the jaw. The bracing in the upper chest. The bracing in the back of the neck. Take one slow inhale and let it go out longer than it came in. Then take a second one, with the same slow exhale. The body that is bracing cannot receive strength; it is too busy producing the cheaper, faster substitute. The body that has un-braced for thirty seconds becomes a body the older strength can find.
That somatic minute is what in quietness shall be your strength feels like in the body. The strength does not arrive as a surge. It arrives as the slow filling that happens once the bracing stops. Murray would not have written about diaphragms and nervous systems. He knew the body and the soul were one in this regard, and the un-bracing of the morning is where his prayer for strength begins.
Do this once a day, for a week, before the prayer. The prayer for strength is more readily received in a body that has un-braced for one minute first. The body is not separate from the asking. The body is the room the asking happens inside of.
The second passage: blessed rest in the union with Him
“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 again, slowly.
This is the second move of the prayer. The first move was be quiet. The second move is abide. Murray is naming what the strength actually flows from — not a withdrawal you make from a personal account, but an overflowing fountain that has its source in the union with Him and that fills you because you are inside the union, not because you have earned the fill.
An overflowing fountain of joy and strength. The image is precise. The fountain is not yours; it is His. The fountain is overflowing; it has more than it needs. The strength comes to you as the spillover of the fountain, not as a careful ration measured against your worthiness. The modern self pictures the strength as a thing to be saved up — managed, conserved, doled out. Murray pictures the strength as a thing that is overflowing already, available to whoever has positioned themselves inside the union to receive it.
It must be with us as with Him, the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within. The grammar here is critical. The strength is not a work you have to perform. It is the spontaneous outflowing of a life that is already, by virtue of the union, full. Your job is not to manufacture strength; your job is to stop blocking the outflow. The bracing blocks it. The fear blocks it. The frantic morning prayer that asks for strength as if from a distant God blocks it. The slow morning prayer that simply abides — that says, Lord, I am here, You are here, the union is real, the fountain is yours — does not block it. The strength flows on its own.
If the prayer for strength has felt unanswered for years, this is often why. The asking has been the asking of a beggar at a distance. The older asking is the asking of a child already in the room with her father, who only has to lean against him to receive what he was already pouring out.
The mid-article callout
It is worth pausing for one breath. The prayer for strength you have been walking — Lord, make me adequate, give me energy, help me push — is not wrong. It is simply the surface form of an older asking. The older asking is Lord, I am in You; let the strength of Your life overflow into mine for this day; I will not produce it, I will not brace for it, I will receive it in quietness. The 140-day version of that slower asking lives inside the Everspring Prayer Journal for Women — a daily page that holds the slow form when the day’s urgency would otherwise push you back into the surface one.
The third passage: the great calm of the eternal world
“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. Blessed rest! the fruit and the foretaste and the fellowship of God’s own rest! found of them who thus come to Jesus to abide in Him. It is the peace of God, the great calm of the eternal world, that passeth all understanding, and that keeps the heart and mind.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
This is the deepest part of the prayer. Read it twice.
Notice the phrase the great calm of the eternal world. Murray is locating the strength not in your week, not in your reserves, not even in the immediate next hour — but in the eternal world, of which the strength you need today is a small drawdown. The strength has no scarcity at the source. The source is the eternal calm. Your tired body and the morning that has not started yet sit inside that calm, whether or not you can feel it.
Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led. The strength is not given so that you can rule and teach and lead the day yourself. The strength is given to the woman who has given up the ruling and is being ruled, given up the leading and is being led. The prayer for strength, properly walked, is also a prayer of small surrender — the laying-down of the morning’s plan in exchange for the day’s direction from Him.
For the woman who has been carrying the household, the rota, the schedules, the bookkeeping of the family’s emotional life — all of which she does competently and without complaint — this is the line that quietly relocates the strength. The strength is not a top-up to your competence. The strength is what is given to the woman who has put the competence down at the edge of the chair and asked to be carried instead.
Resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. The image is older than the modern self can usually receive without flinching. But it is what Murray means by strength. Not the woman standing upright on her own legs by an effort of will. The woman resting inside an arm that has been holding her the whole time, whose strength is the bottom layer of every breath she takes.
How to pray for strength — the slow form
Bring the three passages together. The slow form of the prayer has three movements, not three sentences.
The first movement is the quietness. Before any words, the un-bracing minute. The body lowered. The shoulders dropped. The breath slowed. The mind released from the morning’s first urgent thought. Take heed and be quiet. This is the first thirty seconds of the prayer. Most modern prayers for strength skip this part and go straight to the asking. Murray would say the asking, without the quietness, is mostly noise.
The second movement is the abiding. Lord, I am in You. The union is real. The fountain is Yours. I am not asking for a measured ration of strength to push through the day; I am asking to remain inside the union, that Your strength might overflow into mine as it overflows naturally into anyone abiding here. The asking is the asking of a child against a father’s chest, not of a beggar at a closed door.
The third movement is the receiving. The strength, given, is not the strength you imagined. It is the strength for the day, given for the day, sufficient for the day. Tomorrow’s portion is not given today. Yesterday’s portion was sufficient for yesterday. The portion for the next eighteen hours is what you are receiving in this morning’s slow prayer, and the portion will be enough, by Him, for the day that He knows about even when you do not.
The prayer for strength, walked this way, does not feel like a power surge. It feels like a quiet settling. The body un-braces. The morning loses its panicked edge. The day is still hard. The carrying is still real. But you are no longer carrying the day on your own depleted reserves. You are carrying it inside the great calm of the eternal world, which Murray would say has been the bottom layer of every day you have ever lived, whether you noticed it or not.
(For the slow companions in the contemplative-fathers series, how to develop a quiet time with God — Brother Lawrence’s hidden method walks the wider quietness this prayer sits inside, and how to pray morning and evening — Habermann’s daily prayers holds the rhythm into which the day’s strength is most often given.)
What strength for the day will actually feel like over a year
The slow form of the prayer for strength does not produce a dramatic shift on Monday. Murray took decades to settle into the rest he wrote about. What happens over a year is quieter.
The morning bracing softens, by small increments, until the body is starting the day in an un-braced posture more often than not. The asking becomes shorter, because the union has become real enough that the long pleading is no longer needed. The strength arrives, most days, in a form you did not predict — not a surge of energy but the steady availability of what each next hour required, given as that hour arrived. The strength for the breakfast was there at breakfast. The strength for the difficult phone call was there at the difficult phone call. The strength for the evening — when the morning would have predicted collapse — was there in the evening.
This is what Murray means by strength for the day, not the imagined one. The imagined strength is the strength you would need to be a different woman with different reserves. The given strength is the strength for the actual day, given to the actual you, by the God who has been the overflowing fountain since the dawn was made.
That is what how to pray for strength actually answers. Not the wellness version. The older one. The one your body has been quietly asking for all along.
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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 slow asking for strength in proximity to the One whose strength has been the bottom layer of every day you have ever lived.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — in quietness shall be your strength, the overflowing fountain, the great calm of the eternal world — into a daily companion built for the woman whose reserves are gone and whose asking is, at last, ready to slow down.
