The Three Conditions of Answered Prayer According to Andrew Murray
⏱ 13 min read
Your prayers feel like they are not reaching God, and you do not know what is blocking them. You have asked, sometimes for years. You have asked in the right way as far as you could tell. You have asked things you believe He would want — the healing, the marriage, the child, the salvation of a friend — and the silence has been long enough now that the question underneath the asking has surfaced: what are the conditions for answered prayer, and have I been failing one of them without realising.
Andrew Murray wrote The Prayer Life in 1912, near the end of his pastoral life, partly to answer that question for the Christians who kept asking it of him. Chapter 5: The Power of Prayer names three conditions — faith, a surrendered will, and fellowship with the Father — and the three sound at first like a checklist. They are not. Murray was careful to show that the three are not separate requirements you tick off; they are one interior posture described from three angles, and the posture itself is the condition. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women holds the daily form of that posture in a companion page, for the evenings when the asking has become heavy and the answers have not yet arrived. We will get to it in its time. For now: the chair, the book, the slow read.
What Murray meant by “conditions”
Notice the careful word in Murray’s chapter. He says conditions, not requirements. The Edwardian distinction matters. A requirement is a thing you produce in order to deserve an outcome. A condition is the kind of soil a thing grows in. Faith is not the price you pay for an answered prayer. Faith is the soil answered prayer grows in. Surrender is not the toll at the gate. Surrender is the kind of heart the answer can safely arrive in. Fellowship is not the credential. Fellowship is the room the answer is given inside.
This shift matters because the modern Christian woman has often been told her unanswered prayer is her fault — that she did not believe enough, or did not surrender enough, or did not pray with the right phrasing. Murray did not write the chapter to add to that pile. He wrote it to gently re-describe the interior life answered prayer arises from, so the believer could stop performing the conditions and start being the kind of soul they describe. The three conditions are the diagnosis of the heart God answers, not the price-list for the answer.
The first condition: faith — as quiet trust, not produced certainty
“If the question arises in our mind: ‘will this continue?’ and the fear comes: ‘You know how often you have tried and been disappointed’, faith will find its strength, not in the thought of what you will, or do, but in the changeless faithfulness and love of Christ, who afresh has succoured you and assured you that those who wait on him shall not be ashamed. If fear and hesitation still remain, I pray you by the mercies of God in Jesus Christ, and by the unspeakable faithfulness of his tender love, dare to cast yourselves at his feet.”
— Andrew Murray, The Prayer Life
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice where Murray locates faith. Not in the thought of what you will, or do, but in the changeless faithfulness and love of Christ. This is the line that quiets the modern Christian woman’s deepest anxiety about her own prayer. She has been treating faith as something she has to manufacture in herself before she can pray expectantly — a certain interior heat, a certain confidence, a certain absence of doubt. Murray says: faith is not the heat in you. Faith is the resting of attention on the faithfulness in Him. The faith is not your achievement. The faith is His character recognised, and your part is the small daily turning toward it.
The first condition for answered prayer is not the absence of your doubt. The first condition is the quiet trust that He is what He has said He is, even when your interior weather is unstable. Dare to cast yourselves at his feet, Murray writes. The casting is the practice. The trembling under the casting is allowed. The faith is not the steadiness of your hands. The faith is the casting itself — the small daily decision to lay the request before Him again, into the hands of the One whose faithfulness has not depended on yours for a single hour of your life.
For the woman who has been failing to feel believing enough, this is the consolation. The believing is the showing-up. The showing-up is the faith. The certainty was never the requirement. His faithfulness was. The condition is met every time you sit, even tremblingly, and bring the request again to the One who has been waiting to hear it.
(For the wider companion read on what to do when even the showing-up has gone silent, see Andrew Murray’s Counsel for the Christian Who Cannot Pray. And for the daily-posture form of trusting in His faithfulness rather than your own, What Andrew Murray Taught About Praying Without Ceasing walks the continuous interior version.)
The second condition: surrendered will — as fellowship-with, not surrender-of
“But the abiding work is the work of the heart, not of the brain, the work of the heart clinging to and resting in Jesus, a work in which the Holy Spirit links us to Christ Jesus. Oh, do believe that deeper down than the brain, deep down in the inner life, you can abide in Christ, so that every moment you are free the consciousness will come: ‘Blessed Jesus, I am still in Thee.’ If you will learn for a time to put aside other work and to get into this abiding contact with the heavenly Vine, you will find that fruit will come. What is the application to our life of this abiding communion? It means close fellowship with Christ in secret prayer.”
— Andrew Murray, Absolute Surrender
Read it slowly. Twice if you can.
Murray is doing something delicate here. He is naming the second condition for answered prayer — the surrendered will — but he refuses to let surrender mean the thing it has often been bent to mean. Surrender in the modern Christian women’s culture has often been weaponised: give up your own desire, do not ask for anything for yourself, accept whatever comes and call it His will. Murray would not have called that surrender. He would have called it resignation, which is a different posture entirely and which God does not require.
True surrender, in Murray’s grammar, is the moving of the heart into Christ’s heart so that what the woman wants and what He wants slowly converge. The work of the heart clinging to and resting in Jesus. The surrender is not the suppression of your asking. The surrender is the abiding in Him so deeply that your asking is shaped by the Vine you are abiding in. The asks that arise from a surrendered will are not arbitrary. They are the asks the Spirit has been forming in you, through the abiding, all along.
This is the second condition for answered prayer. Not stop wanting things. Rather, abide so closely in Christ that the wanting itself comes from the closeness. The asks that arise from that closeness are the asks the Father is glad to answer, because they are, in their deepest grammar, His own desires for that life, surfacing through the soul of the woman who has been abiding. The unanswered prayer is sometimes — not always, but sometimes — the prayer that arose from the surface of the woman’s life rather than from the closeness. The remedy is not to stop asking. The remedy is to deepen the abiding, and let the asks rise from there.
For the woman who has been told to surrender her every desire as a condition for being heard, this is the slow correction. The desires that arise from inside the abiding are His desires forming in you. They are not the things to surrender. They are the things to bring. The surrender is of the will to live outside the Vine. The desires that grow on the Vine are part of the harvest.
A somatic for the stiff body of the long asker
Pause here. The body of a woman who has been asking the same prayer for a long time often holds a small stiffness in the shoulders and the upper back — the body of someone who has been holding the prayer up on her own, as if the carrying depended on her grip.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat on the floor. Notice the stiffness across the upper back and shoulders. Take one slow inhale, lifting the shoulders gently up toward the ears as the breath comes in. On the exhale, let the shoulders drop — fully, not by force but by simply releasing the small ongoing lift you did not realise you were doing. Take one more inhale. On the next exhale, let the small phrase form silently: Lord, You hold the request. Two breaths. No more.
The stiffness will not fully release. But the upper back, by a small fraction, will let the prayer be carried by the One it is being prayed to, rather than by the woman who has been asking it. The somatic small release is the body’s enactment of the surrender Murray was describing. The shoulders lower because the will has, by a small fraction, consented to abide. The condition has begun to be met in the body before the mind has fully understood the move.
The Prayer Journal for Women is built around this small daily abiding. One page each evening, a short scripture, room for the held request, room for the honest sentence about how the abiding is going. The journal is not the cure for the silence on the prayer. He is. But the daily showing-up to the page is the slow rebuilding of the abiding the surrendered will rises from. The conditions are met more easily through a soul that has been abiding all week than through a soul that arrives at the request having forgotten where the Vine is.
The third condition: fellowship — as the room the answer is given in
“The thought, ONLY THE GLORY of GOD, becomes more and more the keynote of the life hid in Christ. At first this subdues, and quiets, and makes the soul almost afraid to dare entertain a wish, lest it should not be to the Father’s glory. But when once its supremacy has been accepted, and everything yielded to it, it comes with mighty power to elevate and enlarge the heart, and open it to the vast field open to the glory of God. Abiding in Christ, the soul learns not only to desire, but spiritually to discern what will be for God’s glory; and one of the first conditions of acceptable prayer is fulfilled in it when, as the fruit of its union with Christ, the whole mind is brought into harmony with that of the Son as He said: ‘Father, glorify Thy name.’”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly.
This is the passage where Murray names the third condition. Fellowship. He calls it here the life hid in Christ, and the fellowship is the room the answered prayer is given inside. The condition is not a posture you adopt for the prayer. The condition is the room you live in the rest of the week. The Father gives answers freely to the soul that has been with Him — not because the with-ness is a credential, but because the soul that has been with Him is shaped to receive the answer as glory rather than as private acquisition.
Notice the slow movement Murray describes. At first this subdues, and quiets, and makes the soul almost afraid to dare entertain a wish. Yes. That is the early stage. The fellowship makes you cautious about asking for things, because you are not sure which asks belong inside the fellowship and which do not. But when once its supremacy has been accepted, and everything yielded to it, it comes with mighty power to elevate and enlarge the heart. The later stage. The fellowship that began by quieting your asking eventually enlarges it — because the asks that arise from inside the deep fellowship are the asks the Father is glad to give, and the soul becomes bold in asking them.
What are the conditions for answered prayer. Faith, in the form of quiet trust in His faithfulness. A surrendered will, in the form of abiding so closely the wanting itself comes from the closeness. And fellowship, in the form of a life so hid in Christ that the asks that arise from it are the asks the Father is shaping the soul to want. The three are one posture described from three angles. The posture is the slow daily life with Him. The conditions are met in the life, not in the moment of asking.
(For the wider companion read on what corporate intercession looks like when many women have built this kind of life, see Why Andrew Murray Said the Church Is Not Praying. For the long form of carrying one specific name across years inside this posture, Andrew Murray on Praying for the Conversion of Loved Ones walks the slow patient version. And the practical setup of the page that holds the year is at How to Set Up a Prayer Journal — The 6-Section System.)
What the three conditions actually free you from
Murray did not write Chapter 5 to load you with three new performances. He wrote it to free you from the seven or ten or twenty performances the discouraged intercessor had been quietly carrying. The three conditions are what is actually happening in the answered-prayer life — the soil it grows in, the heart it is given to, the room it is received in. You meet them not by trying to manufacture them in the moment of asking but by living the life they describe — the daily abiding, the daily quiet trust, the daily fellowship, the small slow showing-up that builds the soul the answered prayer arises in.
The unanswered prayer is not always a failure of the conditions. Sometimes the asking has been right and the timing has not yet come. Sometimes the asking is being answered in a form the asker has not yet recognised. Sometimes the asking is being slowly reshaped by the abiding into a deeper asking the Father is preparing to answer fully. Murray would not have promised you an answered Tuesday for every Tuesday-asked prayer. He would have promised you that the life that meets the three conditions is a life inside of which the Father’s answering, in His own timing and form, becomes the slow undercurrent of the years — and the unanswered stretches lose their power to frighten you, because you have come to live so close to Him that His timing has become trustable in a way it could not be before the abiding.
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A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week. Built around the older voices, Murray among them. A small slow thread for the woman whose prayers have felt unheard and who is ready, slowly, to rebuild the abiding the conditions actually grow inside.
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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. One page each evening, a short scripture, room for the held request, room for the honest sentence — the small daily abiding that the three conditions arise inside of. We are also slowly working toward reprinting The Prayer Life itself through Everspring Press, so the book Murray wrote for the discouraged long-asker can be back in her hands in a clean modern edition.
What are the conditions for answered prayer, Murray would have told you. Faith, surrender, fellowship — but understood as one interior posture, not three separate hurdles. The posture is the slow daily life with Him. The conditions are met in the life. The answers come, in His timing and form, into the soul that has been abiding. Your part is the small daily showing-up. His part is the rest, and the answer when it arrives.
