What Is the Practice of Soaking Prayer?

Question 4161.

Soaking prayer is a style of prayer that grew up in renewal and charismatic circles, in which a person lies down or sits quietly, often with gentle worship music playing, and simply rests in God’s presence for a long stretch without speaking much or asking for anything in particular. The aim is to soak in the love of God the way a sponge soaks in water, receiving rather than petitioning.

I want to handle soaking prayer carefully, because unlike some practices I have written about, this one is a genuine mixture. There is something in it worth keeping and something in it worth questioning, and a flat dismissal would be as unhelpful as an uncritical embrace. So let us sort the wheat from the chaff.

What soaking prayer looks like in practice

A typical session of soaking prayer involves stillness, soft music, low lighting, and an unhurried hour or more spent doing very little. The person is encouraged not to strive, not to fill the silence with requests, but to relax and let God minister to them. Some describe warmth, peace, or a sense of being held. Some report visions or impressions they take to be from the Spirit.

The roots of soaking prayer lie largely in the same renewal streams that produced the Toronto meetings of the 1990s, and certain ministries have built whole conferences and recordings around it. So when we assess soaking prayer we are partly assessing the theology of those streams, which is a reason for care, not a reason to switch off.

What is genuinely good about soaking prayer

Let me start with the wheat, because there is some. Much of modern Christian life is frantic, noisy, and rushed, and our prayers often amount to firing off a list and dashing away. The instinct behind soaking prayer, to slow down, to be still, to stop performing and simply be with God, is an instinct the Bible itself encourages. We are told to be still and know that He is God.

There is real biblical warrant for unhurried, meditative time with the Lord. The Psalmist speaks of meditating day and night, of waiting on God, of his soul being quieted like a weaned child. If soaking prayer means making room for that kind of restful attentiveness, I have no quarrel with it at all, and many believers would be healthier for a little more of it.

Where soaking prayer needs weighing

Now the chaff. The danger in soaking prayer is that the emptied, passive, receptive posture can shade into something the Bible never asks of us, a blank openness to whatever comes. Scripture nowhere tells us to empty the mind and wait for impressions to float in. It tells us to fill the mind with truth, to pray with understanding, and to test the spirits, because not every impression that arrives in a quiet room is from the Holy Spirit.

Biblical prayer is overwhelmingly active and verbal. Our Lord taught us to ask, to confess, to intercede, to give thanks, and the prayers recorded in Scripture are full of content and direction. Soaking prayer, at its weaker end, can drift into a wordless mysticism that is closer to Eastern meditation than to the praying we are actually taught. The cure is to keep it anchored in Scripture and shaped by the gospel.

Resting in God without emptying the mind

The way through is not to abandon stillness but to fill it rightly. When I sit quietly before God, I am not seeking a vacant mind that anything could occupy. I am turning my attention onto Him as He has revealed Himself, dwelling on a passage of Scripture, resting in what Jesus has done, letting the truth settle and warm me. That is biblical waiting, and it has content.

So if you practise something like soaking prayer, keep the Bible open in it. Let the music serve the word rather than replace it. Treat warm feelings as a kindness if they come and as no loss if they do not, because your fellowship with God does not depend on a particular sensation. This keeps you close to what I describe in praying in the Spirit and the wider role of the Spirit in prayer.

Testing the impressions that come

One practical safeguard matters more than any other with soaking prayer. Whatever impressions, pictures, or words arrive in the quiet must be weighed, never simply trusted because they came during prayer. The Spirit does lead and prompt, but our own imagination, our memories, and other influences also speak, and Scripture commands us to test rather than to swallow.

The test is straightforward. Does the impression agree with the Bible? Does it draw me toward Jesus, holiness, and love? Would it survive being spoken aloud to a wise believer? An impression that passes those tests can be received with thanks. One that fails them, however pleasant it felt, is to be let go. This same care is what I commend when I write about how the Spirit guides us.

Keeping soaking prayer tethered

My counsel, then, is neither to chase soaking prayer as a special technique that unlocks God, nor to forbid the quiet, restful waiting it gestures toward. Keep the good, which is stillness and unhurried attention to the Lord. Drop the risky, which is passivity and an empty receptiveness to any impression.

God is not more present in a darkened room with the right playlist than He is at your kitchen table with an open Bible. He gave you His Spirit, and that Spirit speaks chiefly through the Scriptures He inspired. Anchor your stillness there and it will do you good. Cut it loose from there and even the gentlest practice can drift somewhere you did not mean to go.

Stillness is a lost discipline

I want to press the positive side once more, because most of us need to hear it. We are people of noise. We wake to a screen and fall asleep to one, and the few quiet minutes that fall to us are filled at once with scrolling rather than silence. Into that frantic life the call to be still before God comes as a genuine kindness, and the church should not surrender stillness to others just because some have misused it.

The saints of earlier centuries spoke often of waiting on God, of unhurried meditation on a verse, of letting the truth move from the head to the heart by dwelling on it slowly. There is nothing strange or eastern about that. It is the plain practice of the Psalmist who meditated on God’s law day and night and on His steadfast love in the watches of the night. We have largely lost it, and we are the poorer for the loss.

So I would gently encourage the very thing the better instinct here is reaching for. Take a passage, sit with it, turn it over before the Lord, and resist the urge to rush on. Let it warm you. That is not idleness, and it is not mysticism. It is the slow fire by which Scripture does its work in a heart that will hold still long enough to let it.

The difference a Bible makes

The whole question turns, in the end, on whether the quiet is filled with the word or emptied of it. Fill your stillness with Scripture and you are doing something the Bible everywhere commends, fixing your mind on what is true and lovely and letting the Spirit press it home. Empty your stillness and wait for whatever comes, and you have left the door open to your own imagination and worse.

This is why I am neither a champion nor an opponent of the practice as a whole. The label matters far less than the content. A believer resting before God with an open Bible and a quiet heart has my warm blessing. A believer seeking an altered state through music and emptiness, treating impressions as messages without testing them, is on a path I would lovingly steer away from. Keep the word in your hands, and the rest tends to look after itself.

A simple shape for quiet time

If you want something practical to begin with, keep it plain. Take ten unhurried minutes, open to a short passage, read it slowly twice, and then sit with one line of it before the Lord, turning it over and letting it pray itself back to God. You are not waiting for a feeling or a voice. You are giving the truth time to sink in. Done day by day, that quiet shape will feed you more deeply than any number of intense sessions chasing an experience, because it keeps you anchored to the word the Spirit inspired.

So, now what?

If your life is too noisy to hear yourself think, let alone pray, then the impulse behind soaking prayer is one to heed. Slow down. Make space. Sit with God without an agenda for a while, and let the truth of the gospel sink past your defences into the tired places.

Just keep the word of God in your hands and the Spirit’s tests in your mind while you do it. Stillness filled with Scripture is a treasure. Stillness emptied of everything is a risk. Which will you bring into your quiet hour?

Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!

Psalm 46:10