31 Things I've Learned About Prayer

Ryan Patrick Murphy
July 03, 2025

Last week, I turned 31 years old.

The week before that, I picked up an old copy of Madame Guyon’s Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ, and I confess that have fallen in love again with another 16th-century mystic. The treasures in these works are rich and worth the pursuit. What strikes me about her writing is its accessibility, even across four centuries and numerous denominational lines.

There’s something about a pithy, wise statement on prayer (of which Madame Guyon has many) that can provoke the mind and, in special cases, the heart, with affection for God.

So, in the spirit of turning 31, I thought I would offer 31 things that I have learned about prayer in no particular order of importance. While I do not claim to have the expertise of Madame Guyon, I hope they provoke some thought in you and, by God’s grace, perhaps one or two will stir real affection and love for Jesus in your heart!

Here we go:

90% of prayer is simply showing up. The other 10% is what we read, say, think about, or do. Most of building a prayer life is simply showing up consistently, and if we lose our rhythm, we just pick it back up again. As many have said, “If you don’t quit, you win.”
Learning how to pray is a lot like learning an art form. There are skills we can learn, masters to emulate, and a rich history of training and discipline that you can tap into — but at the end of the day, we have to innovate and pray the way that God made us.
Spiritual disciplines are helpful, but only to the extent that they catapult us into a dynamic, interactive relationship with the living God. Romans 8:26 says that the Spirit was given to help us learn how to pray — not silence or any other spiritual discipline. At the end of the day, prayer is primarily friendship with God and practices are only as helpful as they help us engage in that friendship.
The most valuable resource in our entire life is our internal longing for God. Guard it, cultivate it, celebrate, protect it, steward it, nurture it, channel it, and honor it. If we’ve lost touch with it, we need do whatever it takes to get it back.
If we feel a prompting to pray or worship, stop and pray or worship. We can’t wait to do it later. It’s the only way to learn how to pray without ceasing.
Boredom in prayer is normal, but so is deep delight and joy. The “inexpressible and glorious joy” that Peter talks about (1 Peter 1:8) is real and attested to by the saints throughout history. If prayer is mostly boring for us, we need to ask God for help to feel his deep delight for us.
When we ask God to help us pray, he always will. God is always kinder and quicker to speak than we think he is.
Less is more when reading the Bible. The goal of Scripture is incarnation, not information. Reading a single verse and meditating on it is better than reading a chapter.
Prayer is the engine of our lives. Without prayer, our lives might look nice on the outside, but we’ll never go anywhere for God.
Prayer is the engine of a church. Without prayer, we might look nice on the outside, but we’ll never gain any real ground in the kingdom of God. As Leonard Ravenhill says, “The church that isn’t praying is playing.”
Prayer is as simple as falling in love. Growing in prayer is as simple as staying in love.
Nothing stirs up my heart with affection for Jesus like fasting. When my heart feels dead, dull, tired, or disconnected from God, fasting is usually what rekindles my love and affection. I am not earning God’s love, but I’m surrendering and getting out of the way through fasting and letting him love me in my surrender.
One of the quickest killers of affection for Jesus is cynicism. We must steward the vineyard of our hearts, catch the little foxes (Song of Songs 2:15), and diligently cast them out. Cynicism is a bit trendy at the moment in the Body of Christ (and perhaps for many justifiable reasons), but it kills affection for Jesus. While it may not be a “sin,” it’s just not worth it. Fighting cynicism and cultivating wonder is the key to the kingdom, and it’s the key to prayer life that can endure for decades.
God is not looking for elaborate prayers. A simple remembrance of Jesus throughout the day is all it takes to bring a smile to his face.
Growing in prayer takes all the skills we learn in maintaining long-term friendships and relationships. Commitment, remembering someone’s likes and dislikes, learning what moves their heart at a deep level, how to keep showing up, and how to cultivate passion, joy, and increasing intimacy over many years — all of these skills are things that help us build a prayer life.
Condemnation and that internal voice that says you “should” pray more are useless. A sense of duty, obligation, or even discipline in prayer are a faulty foundation to build a prayer life on, and they will never work long term. The only foundation on which to build a prayer life is love and longing. Just like Jesus asks his disciples in John 1:38 “What do you want?”, we can only begin to build a prayer life when we name this for ourselves.
There will come a time in everyone’s journey towards God that everything that everyone else has ever told us about God will fall short, and we’ll have to name God for ourselves. Everyone else’s words will feel insufficient and hollow. For the Bride in Song of Songs, this comes after her long dark night and she desperately declares, “This is my Beloved, this is my Friend” (5:16). For Peter, this comes when he says “You are the Christ, Son of the Living God” (Matt 16:15). Have we reached the point when everyone else’s words about God have fallen short?
It will always be more fun to pray with charismatics. Apologies to everyone else.
St Augustine famously said that “singing is praying twice.” When my heart has grown bored, cynical, apathetic, or disillusioned, nothing stirs my affection for Jesus like singing. Sometimes the best way to break out of a funk is to find a song that moves our heart towards Jesus, and to sing it.
Similarly, nothing amplifies intercession like singing. There’s nothing like being in a room of Spirit-filled believers singing a chorus of intercession. If you haven’t tried this, you really should.
There is nothing like the silence of an older man or woman of faith who has spent years learning how to wait on God. I want such resilience of soul that my silence speaks louder than my words when I am old.
It is possible to grow in prayer. Prayer isn’t something we either do or don’t do, we can actually grow in our relational knowledge of God — something Paul prays for frequently for the early churches, and something attested to by every saint in history. I love external goals - but what about the goal of growing in God? What do I want my prayer life to look like when I am 80?
Nothing stirs my hunger and longing for God like reading the saints and those who have gone before us. When I need strength for my prayer life, I reach for Teresa of Avila and Rees Howells, for St John of the Cross and EM Bounds, for Madame Guyon and Leonard Ravenhill, for Bernard of Clairvoix and AW Tozer. God is infinitely real - not a mystical force - and we must learn from those who have truly tasted and seen of him.
The biggest enemy of building a prayer life is not busyness, it’s perfectionism. There are always creative ways to talk to God throughout our days, but the “should” voice of perfectionism can prevent us from finding them.
My being with God always has to be the foundation upon which I do for God. Anytime my “doing” outpaces my prayer life, I am anxious, uncentered, and lacking the grace to do all that I am doing. Martin Luther famously said, “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” This is, counterintuitively, quite true.
Anyone who feels skeptical about charismatic spirituality should read Teresa of Avila or Julian of Norwich. They are wilder than many of the wildest charismatics you can meet at the latest Heaven Glory Revival conference. While the charismatic movement is new, the Holy Spirit has always been in the church, helping the saints to pray.
Charles Finney talks about praying until we have the assurance that our prayer has been heard. This experience of partnering with God and seeking answered prayer is real and an under-taught dynamic of contending prayer. It’s the key to true partnership. When we feel like God is inviting us to pray for something, we need to learn to pray until we get the breakthrough. Jesus invited us in John 15:7 to ask for whatever we wish! Many of us need to rediscover the wild audacity of contending prayer.
Prayer is primarily about friendship and partnership. Friendship comes first, but partnership is a natural response. If you care about your friend enough, you’ll care about what they care about. Healthy intimacy with God should always lead to intercession. Intimacy that does not lead to intercession can become too self-focused, while intercession that does not start with intimacy will never last.
Fasting accelerates everything — affection for Jesus, breakthrough, favor, anointing, and authority. I really don’t know why. It’s not about earning any of those things; it’s about getting out of the way and increasing our dependency on God.
Prayer is about more than our spiritual formation. To view prayer primarily as a spiritual discipline that forms us as individuals (or even communities) is good to an extent, but it’s got to be more than that. Biblically, prayer the heartbeat of the whole Bible, the soundtrack of the early church, the greatest joy of any saint on the pages of Scripture and throughout human history, and it’s actually how God enacts his will on the earth (see Psalm 2 and basically every chapter in the Book of Acts). To reduce it as one practice in a toolbelt of other practices is to cheapen it and reduce it’s power, presence, and persistence in the biblical storyline. Prayer is more than a spiritual discipline. Prayer is everything for the believer because God is everything. He is our prize.
Nothing on this entire earth or even beyond it is better or more fulfilling than the inexplicable joy of being loved by God and loving him back.

Best,
Ryan

P.S. We’ve just released a copy of the Prayer Journal Volume 1: Hearing God’s Voice. We hope it helps you to hear God more clearly, and to engage with God creatively every single day.