How to pray while you’re waiting on God

Tom Harper Sept. 8, 2025

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My copy of Andrew Murray's classic, Waiting on God (1896), is full of highlighted passages. Here's one:

"In praying we are often occupied with ourselves, with our own needs…. In waiting upon God, the first thought is of the God upon whom we wait. We enter His presence, and feel we need just to be quiet, so that He, as God, can overshadow us with Himself."

I admit this style of praying—where we wait, listen, trust, worship—is foreign to many of us Westerners. It's especially hard for get-it-done leaders, no matter where we live!

Murray gives several additional tips on cultivating this kind of prayer:

• Before you pray, bow quietly before God, just to remember and realize who He is, how near He is, how certainly He can and will help.
• Just be still before Him, and allow His Holy Spirit to waken and stir up in your soul the childlike disposition of absolute dependence and confident expectation.
• Wait upon God as a Living Being, as the Living God, who notices you, and is just longing to fill you with His salvation.
• Let there be intervals of silence, reverent stillness of soul, in which you yield yourself to God, in case He may have aught He wishes to teach you or to work in you.

Murray suggests that "waiting on Him will become the most blessed part of prayer."

This is a powerful way to pray that leaders need to do more. I know I do. I need to come under the Father's leadership, bow to his power and authority. Like a child.

I need to wait. My words need to be few. What about you?

Expectantly,

Tom Harper
Founder, BiblicalLeadership.com
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Tom Harper is publisher of BiblicalLeadership.com and executive chairman of Networld Media Group, a business-to-business publisher and event producer. He has written five books, including Servant Leader Strong: Uniting Biblical Wisdom and High-Performance Leadership (DeepWater Books, 2019) as well as the Christian business fable Through Colored Glasses and its sequel Inner Threat (DeepWater, 2022). Learn More »

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