How to Pray When You Don't Know What to Say

Prayer doesn't require words. Here's what Scripture says about wordless prayer, the Spirit's intercession, and practical starting points when you're stuck.

There’s a specific kind of spiritual paralysis that happens when you sit down to pray and nothing comes. You know you should pray. You believe prayer matters. And your mind is blank, or worse — too full of the wrong things.

The Bible has more to say about this than you might expect.

The Spirit prays when you can’t

Romans 8:26 is the most important verse for the person who doesn’t know what to say:

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”

Wordless groans. Paul doesn’t describe a failure state — he describes a kind of prayer. When you don’t have words, what you have is still prayer. The Spirit intercedes through it.

This is not a consolation prize for bad pray-ers. It’s a description of the Spirit’s work in every believer’s life. You don’t have to generate the right words. The Spirit is already interceding.

The Psalms give you words

If the problem is a blank mind, the Psalms are the solution. They are, among other things, a prayer book — a collection of prayers for every emotional state, written over centuries by people who also didn’t know what to say and found words anyway.

The practical move: open to a Psalm and read it as your prayer. Psalm 62 when you’re exhausted. Psalm 55 when you’re anxious — and Scripture has a lot more to say about anxiety than most people realize. Psalm 23 when you need to be reminded of who God is. Psalm 13 when you feel abandoned. Psalm 103 when you need to remember what God has done.

You’re not substituting someone else’s prayer for your own — you’re borrowing language that someone else found for the same experience, and making it yours.

Start with what you actually feel

The most common cause of “I don’t know what to say” is that what you actually feel seems like the wrong thing to bring to prayer. You’re angry at God. You’re disappointed. You’re not sure you believe anything right now. And those things feel like disqualifications rather than prayer material.

They’re not. The Psalms are full of complaint, anger, doubt, and grief directed at God — and they’re Scripture. Psalm 22 opens with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Job argued with God directly. Habakkuk opened his book with a complaint: “How long, Lord, must I call for help and you do not listen?”

God can handle what you’re actually feeling. Bringing the real thing — even the dark thing — is better than performing a prayer you don’t mean.

Use a framework when you have nothing

When you’re not bringing a specific emotion or need but just want to pray and can’t get started, the Lord’s Prayer provides a framework that covers the full range:

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name — remind yourself who you’re talking to and that he’s good
Your kingdom come, your will be done — align with God’s purposes before naming yours
Give us today our daily bread — ask for what you need today, specifically
Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors — deal with what needs dealing with
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil — ask for guidance and protection

This isn’t a formula to repeat mindlessly. It’s a checklist that covers every dimension of prayer in five moves. Use it as scaffolding when you have nothing of your own to start with.

One sentence is enough

“Lord, I’m here” is a prayer.

“I don’t know what to say” is a prayer.

“Help” is a prayer.

The pressure to have eloquent, substantial, spiritually mature prayer is not from Scripture. Jesus said not to babble “like pagans who think they will be heard because of their many words” (Matthew 6:7). Length and vocabulary are not the measures of prayer.

Showing up is.

How Rise helps

Rise’s AI Bible chat can help you find scripture for what you’re praying about, generate a prayer grounded in biblical language for what you’re facing, or help you study what the Bible says about a topic that’s weighing on you. You can also use Rise’s journaling feature as a form of written prayer — bringing what you can’t say aloud to the page, connected to the Scripture that speaks to it.

If you’re stuck in prayer, the best next step is usually honesty. Start there.