How long should we pray?

Question 11051.

The length of prayer is one of those questions that makes people squirm before they even ask it. Somewhere in the back of most Christian minds sits a suspicion that real believers pray for an hour before breakfast and we are all quietly failing an exam nobody set.

I want to take the sting out of that, and then put something better in its place. Scripture has a good deal to say about praying, and rather less than you might expect about the length of prayer.

Jesus warned against measuring by the clock

The one place Jesus directly addresses the length of prayer, he warns us off it. In Matthew 6:7 he says not to heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, who think they will be heard for their many words. The problem there is not long praying as such. It is the assumption that volume purchases attention.

He then gives a model prayer that takes under thirty seconds to say. If the length of prayer were the point, the Lord’s Prayer is an odd thing to hand your disciples. It is short, dense, and utterly comprehensive, which tells us God is after weight rather than duration.

The Greek behind those empty phrases, battalogeo, carries the idea of stammering repetition, the babble of someone trying to wear a deity down. That is what he forbids, not fervent persistence.

It is worth noticing what surrounds that warning. Jesus has just dealt with people praying on street corners to be seen, and he follows it with a model prayer. The whole passage is about audience and content rather than duration, which is exactly where our anxiety about the length of prayer tends not to look.

Yet Jesus himself prayed for hours

The same Jesus spent a whole night in prayer before choosing the twelve, and rose long before dawn to pray in a desolate place. So he is plainly not against extended praying. He is against the theology that thinks extended praying is a lever.

There is no contradiction. The length of prayer in Jesus’ own life flows out of desire, not obligation. He prayed long because he wanted to be with his Father, and because the weight of what lay ahead pressed him there. Nobody had to tell him to put in the hours.

That is the shift I want to press. Duration is a symptom, not a discipline. When the heart is engaged the clock takes care of itself, and when the heart is not engaged the clock becomes a torment.

Short prayers all through Scripture

Nehemiah prayed a prayer so brief it happened between a king’s question and his own answer. Peter, sinking in the waves, managed three words. The tax collector in the temple said one sentence and went home justified while the man with the long speech did not.

None of that is an argument for laziness. It is an argument that God is not standing at the door with a stopwatch. A short prayer prayed in faith is not a lesser thing than a long prayer prayed out of duty.

Which means the length of prayer can vary enormously across a single day without any of it being second class. The arrow prayer in the car park and the hour in the study are the same activity at different scales.

Even the shortest recorded prayers carry real theology. The thief on the cross asked to be remembered, which is about eight words, and received a promise about paradise that same day. You can read it at Luke 23:42 to 43, and it settles the question of whether God grades on length.

Why long praying still matters

Having said all that, I would be doing you no favours if I left you thinking that two minutes a day is a settled Christian life. Extended prayer does something to us that brief prayer cannot. It gives the noise time to settle. It lets us get past our own agenda and start hearing.

Most of us find the first ten minutes are largely admin. We are still listing, still lobbying, still rehearsing. It is often after that that we begin to pray about the things that actually matter, and that is one honest reason the length of prayer is not irrelevant.

The Spirit has a real part in this, helping us in our weakness when we do not know what to pray for as we ought. I have written about that in the role of the Spirit in prayer, and it changes how you think about time spent praying.

There is also the simple matter of attention. We give time to what we treasure, and if praying never gets more than the scraps of a day, that tells us something worth knowing about ourselves. I would rather face that honestly than argue about the length of prayer in the abstract.

A better question than length of prayer

Instead of asking about the length of prayer, ask about the regularity of it. Daniel prayed three times a day, and the striking thing about him is not how long each session ran but that a death sentence could not shift the pattern.

Ask also about honesty. Ten sincere minutes will do more for you than an hour of religious performance, and God is not fooled by either. Ask about breadth as well, because a prayer life that only ever covers my needs has a shape problem no amount of extra minutes will fix.

If your praying feels thin, the answer is usually not to double the time but to change the diet. Praying Scripture back to God is the oldest remedy there is.

What about praying without ceasing?

Paul’s instruction to pray without ceasing is not a call to a twenty four hour prayer meeting. It describes a settled orientation, a life lived with the line open, so that turning to God is the reflex rather than the appointment.

That takes the pressure off the length of prayer entirely. If prayer is a running conversation rather than a scheduled meeting, then a day full of thirty second exchanges is not a failure. It may be closer to what Paul meant than a heroic hour followed by twenty three hours of practical atheism.

Both are needed. Set times give the relationship a spine, and constant turning gives it a pulse.

Set times also protect us from praying only when we are desperate. A man who only telephones his father in a crisis has a relationship of a sort, but not much of one, and the same is true here.

Fasting, urgency and seasons

There are seasons when praying lengthens on its own. A diagnosis, a crisis in the church, a child in trouble, and suddenly nobody needs to be told to pray longer. Scripture recognises those seasons and often pairs them with fasting, which I have looked at in whether fasting makes prayer more effective.

There are also flat seasons when praying is hard work and five minutes feels like fifty. I would not despise those minutes. Prayer offered when you feel nothing is arguably the purest kind, since there is no emotional payoff propping it up.

I have known believers who kept praying through years of flatness and came out the other side with a depth I could not manufacture in myself. They did not get there by timing themselves. They got there by refusing to stop, which is a different thing altogether from worrying about the length of prayer.

God reads the heart behind the hours. 1 Samuel 16:7 tells us man looks on the outward appearance but the LORD looks on the heart, and that principle applies to prayer as much as to anything else.

So, now what?

Start where you actually are, not where you think a proper Christian starts. If five minutes is honest for you now, give God five honest minutes rather than thirty resentful ones. Growth in prayer works much like growth in anything else, by steady increase rather than heroic leaps.

Then vary the shape of it. Praying aloud on a walk suits some people far better than sitting still with eyes closed, and I have looked at that in whether we should pray aloud or silently. The length of prayer often takes care of itself once the form fits the person.

Give it a fixed slot in the day so it is not competing with everything else for attention, and let the length of prayer grow out of that rather than being imposed on it. Most people who pray at length today began by praying briefly and regularly.

And take the guilt out of it. Your Father is not disappointed with you for praying for eight minutes. He is delighted you came. What would happen if you stopped auditing your prayer life and simply started talking to him tomorrow morning?

“Pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

1 Thessalonians 5:17 to 18, ESV