It's time to stop praying.
how stopping could be more faithful than ploughing on.
‘When do you know it’s time to stop praying?’, my friend asked me.
There are times, it seems, when the Lord looks across the earth for people who would be willing to share His burdens with Him. It seems that He looks for people who would watch and pray with Him on topics that don’t necessarily impact them. Topics that don’t benefit them. But things that matter to the Lord.
My friend had been interceding faithfully for a burden that was not their own. It was something that the Lord had entrusted them with.
It was His burden.
The intercessory burden can feel like heartbreak without you being in a relationship, like heaviness on your chest or shoulders without you carrying a backpack, it can feel like gut-wrenching sorrow for pain that is not your own, or sometimes just the an inability to move on from the topic even when you know there is nothing that you can do.
These are all indications that it is probably time for you to start praying.
But how do you know when it is time to stop praying?
Do we ever stop praying?
Well yes and no.
The well-known Christian phrase of ‘Pray Until Something Happens’ is good but easily misunderstood we should pray until what we pray for comes to pass. We then easily get caught up in the trap that our breakthrough has not happened because we haven’t prayed enough. Or worse in some weird way, our prayers can manipulate God into doing something.
I think more accurately our prayer phrase should be ‘pray in step with Jesus’. We pray as He leads and we stop as He leads.
These are the two scriptures that I am thinking about as I write about prayer and knowing when to stop.
‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.’ 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
‘For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.’ 1 Corinthian 1:20
They seem contradictory in some ways. On one hand, prayer is unceasing, and on the other hand, there is a truth that promises (often things we are praying for) have been already sealed as ‘yes’ in Christ. Almost like they are already ‘done’, ‘completed’, ‘ticked off’.
In some places of scripture, we see the church praying continuously for a certain topic, and in other areas, we see promises given and no real record of continuous prayer for the coming to pass of the promise.
Two examples of unceasing prayer until an answer comes:
The early church prayed night and day for the release of Peter from prison.1
Whilst waiting for the fulfilment of the promise of the Holy Spirit.2
But we also see examples of promises given, like BIG promises, to Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Hannah, David, even Mary and Joseph and no recorded mention of praying until ‘something happens’.3
So how does it all work?
I believe that the juxtaposition is not there to cause confusion but to cause reliance.
We, humans, are great at turning practically anything into something legalistic and performance-based.
The call to unceasing prayer is the invitation to continuous back and forth communication with God. An invitation to listen to the heart of Jesus, saying yes to the burdens that He wants to share with us, and praying the will of His heart for any given situation or circumstance.It is the call to constant conversation and listening.
The knowledge that all promises are ‘yes’ in Christ is the foundation for our interactions with Jesus in prayer. It is what reminds us that our prayers are powerful only because of the One in whom they are directed to. Not because of our dedication or long suffering but because it is in Him that the answer is ‘yes’.
The ‘amen’ is spoken by us as a response and an indication of our part in the process. It is an invitation to an interactive relationship with Jesus, where in prayer add our agreement to the will of God.
You see there is God’s will, which is everything that He desires to come to pass on earth, the paths He desires each human to take, and the outcomes of situations that would flourish humanity and give glory to Him.
He has desires, a plan, and a will for the earth.
And then there is what actually happens on earth due to sin, the kingdom of darkness and the freewill of man.
God has a will but it is not always brought to pass. You don’t need to look far to see that.
Yet we are invited into a position of intercession for the will of God to come to pass on the earth. We are invited to stand in the gap as beings that belong both in the spirit and earth realms and be the voice that says ‘amen’ to the promises that are ‘yes’ in Christ. We get to cry aloud in prayer ‘Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’.
To confidently know the foundational truths that His promises are fulfilled and available for full manifestation on earth, and to know the role of prayer in this.
Unceasing prayer keeps us in communication with the promise keeper, interceding as He leads. And the knowledge of promises fulfilled is the confidence in which we pray by.
So how do we know it is time to stop praying for something?
Initially, I was thinking of making up a scenario but the reality is that if you are reading this you are probably carrying a heavy burden, thinking of picking one up, or prayerfully asking whether it is time to stop. And a hypothetical scenario would not be fair.
Let’s use a real life example from my life, here goes.
In 2016, got married. By 2018 I had been separated twice.
Praise God this year we celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary and 16th year together. God has and is working miracles before our waking eyes, but it was not an easy run.
From 2017ish-2020 my posture in prayer flitted between that of Hannah weeping at the altar and that of Ezekiel in the valley with the bones.
I prayed because I didn’t know what else to do, I prayed because God was calling me to pray, I prayed because there were promises spoken over our marriage that had not been manifested in the natural realms yet.
But from 2020 until 2024 my posture changed almost completed. On one hand, I was tired, but more significantly there was a command from heaven to ‘rest on the promises given’. It was time to stop warfaring and declaring. Though at times I still wept, it was time to stand on the finished work of Christ.
In those years, I barely prayed for my marriage apart from in crisis moments. At times, I would try to work myself up to go back into the unceasing place of prayer, but every time I would be put back into my posture of rest. God was so serious about my resting in his promises that he would bring words through others about rest and the finished warfare over my marriage. Almost correcting me back into the right posture of rest.
And so I stopped praying.
How did I know it was time to stop praying? Looking back these are the key things that I registered at that time, and these are the points that I go through whenever I review my prayer assignments:
Is there grace to keep praying in this way?
Especially when we are in an intense season of intercession, it is important that we are leaning into the grace that abounds for the good works given to us to do.4 When the grace lifts, sometimes it means that the good works has been finished in the way we hadn’t known it in the season past.
In 2020, I found that the grace to pray for long hours to declare and contend in such a way was gone. I could technically muster it up and work myself into it but the grace was gone.
Wherw in the past it felt like each one of my declarations was striking true in the spirit and I could almost feel ground being taken in the spirit, in 2020-2024 it felt like a whole lot of work with minimal spiritual impact.
It was like I was going through the actions but it wasn’t the rhythm of grace Jesus was leading me in. There was, however, a LOT of grace to rest, to not push or strive for the breakthrough but to rest in the finished work.
Do I have peace?
Peace is underrated as a way of discerning the Lord’s way.
But it is peace that Jesus instructed the disciples to use as a tester for whether to continue their ministry in a certain household or not5. Peace is the Holy Spirit’s way of guiding His followers.
Peace not being the absence of chaos but the presence of His presence.
In those years of ‘rest’, whenever I felt like I ‘should’ be pushing into warfare for my marriage I also felt a lack of peace. I felt condemnation for not doing enough and a temptation to strive. But when I rested, I knew God’s peace.
a. Do you feel a release from the prayer burden? I.e. does it feel lighter or shifted altogether, b. Is there a ‘knowing’ of completion?
This last test point is hard to describe, so bear with me. It could be subjective to the way God has made me but I will describe what I experience and maybe you can see if it resonates with you.
For my marriage, in those years of rest, I just knew that a lot of the major warfare was done. In other situations, this has felt like a shift or like a spacious place has been opened up in the spirit. For me, this indicates that it is time to shift how I pray or what my posture is, and it is often how Holy Spirit shows me that my prayer assignment is done.
Wow, it really is a new practice to put such spiritual experiences into words but I hope that this has been helpful.
Going back to the conversation with my friend about their prayer assignment, it can sometimes feel so serious that we are scared to get it all wrong.
But the reality is that you are the young oxen yoked to the Great Ox. The burden is His and we have the privilege to share it with Him. And because we are yoked together, if we are sensitive to where He is, we will know if we have stepped a little out of alignment with Him.
So relax, take a breath and trust Him to show you.
If you really don’t know whether to stop, why not try putting it down for a day or so (depending on how you have been carrying the intercessory burden, maybe you need to take a week or month off) and see what happens?
Is there grace to move on? Is there peace?
You will know if you need to pick it up again.
And lastly, in the nicest possible way, it is not all dependent on you. And I say that in the kindest possible way. Let me tell you why I know this.
During the years 2020-2024 where the Lord instructed me to rest in His promises for our marriage and the finished work of the cross. I truly thought no one was praying for our marriage, who could know the depths of the healing that we needed, the childhood and generational trauma that we needed freedom for, the potential, hopes and dreams that God had laid on us. In my human understanding, no one could know these things.
But do you remember what I said earlier? That God searches the earth for those who are willing to take on the burdens of His heart?
During those years, I met multiple women who I hardly knew but were intercessors running in the same church spheres as me. Women who eventually became my friends, but before they were my friends, they were intercessors for my marriage. In my years of rest and healing, God put the call out on behalf of my marriage and intercessors responded.
They prayed for us in ways I did not know were possible for people who hardly knew us, they prayed and waged war on our behalf. Faithfully lifting up my marriage to the Lord, and as we became friends they shared the words God gave to them about us, accurate to the ‘t’, and so hopeful and powerful.
In the years I could no longer pray, in the years when the burden of my marriage was no longer for me to carry.
The Lord carried me,
He carried us,
and intercessors came alongside Him.
‘Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father's care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.’ Matthew 10:29-31
My years of ‘not praying’ were the years I learned about the power of the praying church. The years I understood God my Father as the one who contends on my behalf. The years I discovered just how great His love was for me. That He would awaken those who didn’t even know me to pray for me.
Oh He loves you, and He loves the ones He has given you a burden for. Trust Him to lead you as you pray. Trust Him to lead you in how to pray. Trust HIm to lead you to when to stop.
Stopping when he says ‘stop’ takes just as much faith as praying and contending when he says so.
Both are a declaration of our trust in Him, and His leading as the Captain of angel armies.
Stopping when He says stop is just as much a declaration of His Lordship as going head long in unceasing prayer. Because at the end of it all, it is not about what we do, it is about who we rely on as we do what we do.
As always I am cheering for you guys, willing you to run the race with faithfulness and joy.
Until next time,
Love, Anna x
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Acts 2 it is generally agreed that the apostles were waiting in prayer for the gift of the Holy Spirit.
I have not referenced these stories because there are too many. Just google each name and you will find them easily.