Andrew Murray on Obedience as the Test of Love
⏱ 10 min read
You feel love for God but rarely obey, and you do not know what to do with that gap. The Sunday-morning feeling is real; the Wednesday-afternoon obedience is missing. The verses move you when you read them, and the small clear thing they would have you do has not been done. You are not in rebellion. You are in something quieter and more uncomfortable — a soul that means it on the inside and does not, somehow, deliver it on the outside.
Andrew Murray, in The School of Obedience, would tell you that the gap is the most important diagnostic the Christian life gives you, and the most misread. The gap is not a problem of devotion. The gap is, in Murray’s plain reading, a problem of the definition of love itself. What is Christian obedience, slowly answered, turns out to be the only honest test of whether the inside feeling is what it claims to be — because love, for Murray, is measured by obedience and by nothing else. The Prayer Journal for Women is the 140-day companion this article is the opening pages of, and it walks the slow daily yes that the gap is closed by, one short morning at a time.
Murray’s argument in The School of Obedience is severe and tender in the way only the contemplative tradition can be. He does not shame the soul for the gap. He simply refuses to let the soul comfort itself with the feeling while the obedience is missing. The feeling, he says, is not the love. The feeling is the foam. The love is what shows up on Tuesday at three in the afternoon when the easier thing is available and you do the harder right thing instead. Three passages from Murray will let you see the working argument in full.
The first passage: the only way under heaven
“Let us pray God very earnestly that by His Holy Spirit its light may transfigure our daily obedience with its heavenly glory. See how all this is confirmed in the next chapter. How well we know the parable of the vine. How often and how earnestly we have asked how to be able to abide continually in Christ. We have thought of more study of the Word, more faith, more prayer, more communion with God, and we have overlooked the simple truth that Jesus teaches so clearly, ‘If ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love,’ with its divine sanction, ‘Even as I kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His love.’ For Him as for us, the only way under heaven to abide in divine love is to keep the commandments. Do let me ask, have you known it, have you heard it preached, have you believed it and proved it true in your experience: obedience on earth is the key to a place in God’s love in heaven?”
— Andrew Murray, The School of Obedience
Read it twice. Slowly. Notice what Murray is doing with the list.
He names, with quiet precision, the things the modern devout woman has been substituting for obedience. More study of the Word, more faith, more prayer, more communion with God. None of them is wrong. All of them are good. And none of them, Murray says, is what Jesus actually told us would produce abiding in His love. If ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love. The verse is in the Gospels. It has been there the whole time. The substitutions have been the soul’s quiet way of avoiding the only thing Jesus actually named. The Christian woman who is exhausted from doing the substitutions and still feeling the gap has been, very gently in Murray’s hand, looking at the answer for years and not letting it land.
The only way under heaven to abide in divine love is to keep the commandments. The sentence is the hinge of Murray’s whole book. The abiding the soul has been longing for — the steady inward sense of being held, of being loved, of being in the warm part of God’s presence — is not produced by more inputs. It is produced by the daily small yes to what He has actually asked. The yes to the conversation that needs to happen. The yes to the apology owed. The yes to the giving that costs. The yes to the quiet refusal of the thing the soul knows she should refuse. Obedience on earth is the key to a place in God’s love in heaven. Not the doctrine of obedience. The practice of it. The Tuesday-afternoon practice.
This is the part the modern Christian woman often most needs. The feeling-life has been treated as the measurement; Murray returns the measurement to the acted life. Not because the feelings do not matter, but because the feelings have proved, over years, to be unreliable as evidence of what the soul actually loves. The acted life is the evidence. What you actually do, when no one is watching and the choice is real, is what tells you what you love. The gap between feeling and action is the gap between what you think you love and what you actually love.
If the wider question of how the daily walk holds together for you has been hard recently, the sibling essay andrew murray on the surrendered will walks the will-side of the same diagnosis, and what andrew murray meant by absolute surrender walks the all-or-nothing question that the obedience-question is finally asking.
The second passage: at Thy bidding I take Thy yoke
“‘At Thy bidding I take Thy yoke; I undertake the duty without delay; I abide in Thee.’ Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command, and teach us to listen more earnestly than ever till the Spirit again give us to hear the voice of Jesus saying, with a love and authority that inspire both hope and obedience, ‘Child, abide in me.’ That word, listened to as coming from Himself, will be an end of all doubting — a divine promise of what shall surely be granted. And with ever-increasing simplicity its meaning will be interpreted. Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Slow down here. This is the passage that names the inward posture obedience actually grows out of.
At Thy bidding I take Thy yoke; I undertake the duty without delay. Read those two clauses several times. The two verbs do the work. Take. Undertake. The soul that has heard the bidding does not deliberate. It takes. It undertakes. The yoke is not something resisted; the yoke is something received. Without delay is the small phrase the modern devout woman most needs. The gap between hearing and doing has, over years, been filled with deliberation. The deliberation has become the place obedience went to die. Murray’s correction is not severity; it is immediacy. You hear; you do. The deliberation is the spot where the not-loving sneaks in disguised as wisdom.
But notice what Murray does next, with extraordinary tenderness. Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command. He has seen the soul’s response to the gap. He knows it. He has been there himself. The Christian who has been failing at obedience and is now hearing Murray’s high view of it expects to be condemned. Murray refuses the condemnation. Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command. The failures are not the disqualification. The failures are the fuel. Each time you notice the gap, the noticing itself is the new beginning. The point is not that you never fail; the point is that the failure is folded back into the urgency rather than collapsing the urgency.
And then the final image — abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Three things being given up. The self-rule. The self-instruction. The self-direction. And the receiving, in their place, of the arms of Everlasting Love. Obedience, in Murray’s reading, is not the soul being asked to deliver something it does not have. Obedience is the soul being asked to let Him rule, teach, lead — and the obedience flows out of the abiding the way fruit flows out of a vine. The work is not the soul producing obedience by willpower. The work is the soul abiding in the One who produces the obedience through it.
A small bodily pause. Sit upright for a moment. Let the jaw soften. Let the hands open. Notice the one small thing He has been asking of you this week — the conversation, the apology, the refusal, the giving — that you have been deliberating about instead of doing. Do not solve it. Simply notice it. Let one breath go out, and inwardly say the small Murray phrase: at Thy bidding, without delay. Let the body register that the deliberation has, in this small moment, ended. The body is the first place obedience either happens or does not. The releasing of the bracing is the body’s first piece of the yes.
The Prayer Journal for Women holds this particular yes across its 140 days — a place to name, in writing, the one small thing being asked today and to put a quiet mark beside it when the doing has been done. Not a productivity tracker. A slow record of the small daily yeses that, accumulated, become a life.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take one sentence of Murray’s into the week ahead, take this one:
“The only way under heaven to abide in divine love is to keep the commandments.”
Write it small. Put it where you will see it on the day the deliberation reflex is strongest — the morning of the difficult yes, the evening of the small apology owed, the hour the substitution-instinct is strongest. The line is the corrective. The love you have been longing to feel more steadily is not produced by more input. It is produced by the small daily acted yes to what He has already asked.
You will not obey perfectly. Murray would expect that. Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command. The gap is not the disqualification; the gap is the renewed beginning. Ten thousand small yeses, taken across a year, are how Christian obedience is finally built — slowly, untheatrically, in the woman whose feeling-life has stopped being the measurement and whose acted life has started, by grace, to catch up with what her heart has been claiming all along.
If the part of your week that has been hardest is the carrying of more than you should have been carrying, a ‘let it go’ mom journal — 30 prompts for the things you’re done carrying is the lighter companion piece, and if the long stretch of feeling nothing has been the part that broke the obedience, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence is the slow letter that meets that season directly.
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A 140-day home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. One short page each day. Scripture pre-printed. Space for the small honest sentence of the yes being given today. Built for the woman who has been deliberating and is ready, slowly, to let the obedience catch up with the love.
It is the format of this article made into a daily companion, so the page you sit down at tomorrow already has a shape and you do not have to invent one from scratch on the evening you finally have five minutes.
Everspring Press plans, in time, to reprint Andrew Murray’s The School of Obedience under our quiet contemplative imprint. Until then, the Prayer Journal for Women is the daily companion that carries Murray’s posture into the contemporary woman’s morning page.
