Rest Beyond Answers—The Puritan Way to Pray

Have you ever experienced spiritual despair that paralysed your prayer life?

I have.

What troubled me most was not my circumstances, but the deafening silence from God. No matter how earnestly I prayed, how many tears I shed, and towards the end, how much pain I was in, He did not seem to respond.

“If You won’t fix my problems,” I pleaded, “why can’t You at least show me You are there?”

But then—still nothing.

I felt like my prayers, once uttered, quickly vapourised into a void. What if no one was listening? What if God was not real, and all the sacrifice I once willingly bore for Him was for nothing? Wouldn’t it be easier, freer even, to just... walk away?

At the time, I was studying the puritans for my doctoral research, and oh, let me tell you how distant and unrelatable these spiritual heroes seemed! If I was a cynic, puritans were hopeless romantics. They set the bar so high that few could reach it (have you read The Valley of Vision?). Their rich literature on practical divinity might have inspired generations of evangelical Christians to cultivate godly habits, but they remained spiritual superheroes, not real humans with real doubts and vulnerabilities.

But as I dug deeper into their seemingly untroubled confidence, something surprising emerged.

Puritans, too, were often disheartened by divine silence and the mystery of providence. Not only did they live through plague, war, and other forms of turmoil, but their communities were often stricken by fierce divisions that drove them to pray for contradictory things! Some prayed for King Charles I to triumph, others for his downfall. Some welcomed the Cromwellian regime, others lamented it. Some longed for reunion with the Church of England, while others pushed for total separation. Many poured out their hearts in prayer only to see their hopes dashed.

After witnessing the devastation of the civil wars, king-killing, and years of puritan infighting, Edward Reynolds, Westminster divine and later Bishop of Norwich, lamented in 1659 that England was “afflicted both with our diseases and with our remedies”.[1] Hopes were high when God raised up an “eminent Instrument”, i.e., Oliver Cromwell, but the Protector was “suddenly taken away.”[2] Reynolds’ friend Richard Baxter echoed the sentiment when the Protectorate collapsed: “we find our selves in the tempestuous Ocean, when even now we thought we had been almost at the shore!”[3] So, what were prayers to them, if years of toil and hardship did not turn into triumphs, and the Church of England remained half reformed at best?

What struck me, therefore, was not their uncritical optimism, as if every setback could be reinterpreted into triumph, but their resolve to rest in God’s wisdom, even when there were no answers to their long, tortured pleas for clarity. Not sarcastically or deterministically, as if quiet submission were spiritual inertia, but sincerely and ever so joyfully, because they knew that their lives were not self-contained stories, but plotlines in God’s history, all finding their resolution in Him.

Reynolds exhorted his hearers to “glorifie God by believing” even in their “greatest perplexities and feares”. [4] Baxter likewise urged: “Shall we presume to call the heavenly Majesty to account? … God seeth all his works at once: were it possible for us to have such a sight, it would answer all our doubts at once.” [5] In our pain, longings, and bewilderment, prayer is not a demand for clarity or control, but a relinquishing of both. A resting in God’s loving revelation as well as His awesome incomprehensibility.

During my own spiritual crisis, my mentor Nick gave me a rather extraordinary assignment: pray to a wall.

“Take everything—your innermost desires, frustrations, and sense of powerlessness—and put them into the wall,” he said. “Push the wall and pray.”

So I did. Standing in my flat, I faced the wall, named my burdens, pushed, and prayed. The wall stood firm. I intuitively pushed harder. Still unmoved. But eventually, something else shifted.

From “Why won’t you?” to “I can’t”, from “Help me fix this” to “It’s all yours”, my prayers changed. What a liberating reckoning it was to realise that the burdens I tried to carry were never mine, but His! What a relief to know that all I needed to do was… nothing. No spiritual breakthrough. No scraping the barrel for the last bit of faith to “move forward”.

He will do the work.

“Rest upon his name, I AM, who calleth the things which are not, as if they were. He that gave Being to the world out of nothing to make good his decree of Creation, can give unto any man comfort out of nothing, to make good a promise of mercy and deliverance … when all second causes, Vines, Olives, Fig-trees, Fields, Herds, Stalls, do wholly miscarry, we may rejoyce in God.” – Edward Reynolds. [6]

Footnotes:

[1] Edward Reynolds, The Brand Pluck’d out of Fire (London, 1659: Wing R1240), 11.

[2]Idem, Gods Fidelity, the Churches Safety (London, 1659: Wing R1252), 38.

[3]Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, or Political Aphorisms, Opening the True Principles of Government (London, 1659: Wing B1281), 492.

[4]Reynolds, The Brand Pluck’d out of Fire, 29.

[5] Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, 493–4.

[6] Reynolds, The Brand Pluck’d out of Fire, 10–11.

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Dr Christy Wang holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, focused on Puritan conformity, church polity, and Anglican identity in the seventeenth century. She is now doing her postdoctoral research at the University of Tokyo

Views expressed in blogs published by the Latimer Trust are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Latimer Trust.