What Andrew Murray Said About the Self-Life and the Christ-Life
⏱ 12 min read
You feel like there are two of you inside and the wrong one keeps winning. The morning version is patient, prayerful, attentive — the woman you mean to be. By two in the afternoon, the other one has taken the wheel, and the sharp word has been said, the small resentment has been nursed, the kindness has been withheld. You go to bed asking the same question you asked last night: which of these is actually me? The answer never arrives.
Andrew Murray, in The Master’s Indwelling, would tell you that both of them are you — and that the spiritual life is the slow shifting of which one is allowed to do the living. What is the flesh in Christianity, in Murray’s plain reading, is not a foreign invader you need to extract. It is the self-life you have been operating from since before you knew there was an alternative, and it has been the small managing centre of your days for so long that you cannot remember being anyone else. The Christ-life is the alternative. It is offered. It is real. And the choice between the two is not made once. It is made daily, and the day the choice goes the right way is the day the woman in the mirror is the morning one. The Prayer Journal for Women is the 140-day companion this article is the opening pages of, and it walks the small daily choice across short scripture-anchored pages.
What Murray names in The Master’s Indwelling, and what makes the book unusually useful for the modern woman caught between the two selves, is the gentleness with which he diagnoses the self-life. He does not call it evil. He does not call it the enemy. He calls it the life that cannot rest — the small managing self that has been doing too many jobs for too long and that, finally, is being asked to step aside so that the indwelling Christ can do the living from inside. Three passages from Murray will let you see the working answer in full.
The first passage: deliverance from self by being occupied with God
“The law may break the heart with fear; it is only grace that works that sweet humility which becomes a joy to the soul as its second nature. It was the revelation of God in His holiness, drawing nigh to make Himself known in His grace, that made Abraham and Jacob, Job and Isaiah, bow so low. It is the soul in which God the Creator, as the All of the creature in its nothingness, God the Redeemer in His grace, as the All of the sinner in his sinfulness, is waited for and trusted and worshipped, that will find itself so filled with His presence, that there will be no place for self. So alone can the promise be fulfilled: ‘The haughtiness of man shall be brought low, and the Lord alone be exalted in that day.’ It is the sinner dwelling in the full light of God’s holy, redeeming love, in the experience of that full indwelling of divine love, which comes through Christ and the Holy Spirit, who cannot but be humble. Not to be occupied with thy sin, but to be occupied with God, brings deliverance from self.”
— Andrew Murray, Like Christ
Read it twice. Slowly. The whole passage is one careful argument, and the last sentence is the hinge.
Not to be occupied with thy sin, but to be occupied with God, brings deliverance from self. This is the line that names what the modern Christian woman has been doing wrong in her struggle with the self-life. She has been trying to defeat the self-life by staring at it harder. The self-examination. The constant inward audit. The journaling of every failure. The careful tally of where she fell short today. All of it is intended to weaken the self. All of it, Murray says, accidentally feeds it. The self-life grows under the spotlight of attention. Pointing the spotlight at it more intensely is the precise opposite of the cure.
The cure is relocation of attention. Not to be occupied with thy sin — but to be occupied with God. The self-life shrinks not because you fight it directly but because the soul has been turned toward something else, and the something-else is so much larger and so much warmer that there is, gradually, no place left for self. This is the structural answer to what is the flesh in Christianity, and how it is actually defeated. The flesh is not extracted by force. The flesh is displaced by the indwelling of Christ. The room is the same room. What changes is who is filling it. The self-life leaves not because you have evicted it but because the new tenant has expanded into the space.
This is why Murray’s whole project across The Master’s Indwelling is the slow re-orientation of the soul’s attention away from the self-audit and toward the indwelling Christ. The audit-soul cannot win the fight she is fighting; the worship-soul does not have to fight the fight at all. The two natures are still both present. The question is which one the soul is facing, and the facing is, slowly, the work. (If the self-audit has been the long shape of your devotional life and the exhaustion of it has begun to register, why andrew murray said self-will is the root of all sin walks the diagnostic side of the same self-life, and andrew murray on the surrendered will walks the slow yielding the relocation is finally asking for.)
The second passage: the rest of faith that lives by Him doing everything
“I cannot tell all, but I can tell you this: if you will come to Christ Jesus and surrender all, the blessing of God will be on all that you have. There will be a blessing for your own soul. ‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.’ Try that; trust Jesus for everything, and trust everything to Him, and the blessing of God will come upon you — the sweet rest, the rest of faith. It is all in the hands of Jesus; He will guide you; He will teach you; He will work in you; He will keep you; He will be everything to you. What a blessed rest and freedom from responsibility and from care, because it is all in the hands of Jesus.”
— Andrew Murray, The Master’s Indwelling
Slow down here. This is the passage where Murray names the operational answer to which-self-is-winning.
He will guide you; He will teach you; He will work in you; He will keep you; He will be everything to you. Five verbs. All of them His. Notice what the self-life has been doing. The self-life has been guiding herself — making the small daily decisions out of her own assessment of what is best. The self-life has been teaching herself — interpreting her experience through her own framework. The self-life has been working in herself — trying to produce sanctification by effort. The self-life has been keeping herself — managing her own safety, her own image, her own well-being. The self-life has been trying to be everything to herself — the source of meaning, the centre of significance, the answer to her own deepest need.
Five vacancies. The self has been filling all of them. Murray, with extraordinary patience, names them as the five jobs Christ was waiting to do from inside. The Christ-life is what begins when the soul lets these five jobs be returned to the One who volunteered for them. He will be everything to you. The sentence is the operational description of the indwelling Christ-life — He is the new occupant of the five rooms the self has been filling, and the soul whose five rooms are now His is the soul in whom the Christ-life has begun to win the day.
This is the part the modern Christian woman often most needs. The two-selves problem is not finally a moral one. It is a vacancy problem. The self-life keeps winning because the self has been doing five jobs no one else has been allowed to do. The Christ-life cannot win as long as the self is still doing them. The relocation of who fills the rooms is the work. The self-life does not get defeated; it gets displaced by the indwelling One who is finally allowed to occupy what He was always meant to fill.
A small bodily pause. Sit upright for a moment. Let the hands rest, palms up, on the legs. Notice, without judgement, which of the five jobs you have been doing today. Guiding yourself. Teaching yourself. Working in yourself. Keeping yourself. Trying to be everything to yourself. Pick the one that is most heavily yours this week. Do not solve it. Inwardly, say the small Murray phrase: He will be that to me. Let one breath go out slowly. The body has been carrying the five jobs in its shoulders and jaw for years; the carrying is part of why the self-life feels so heavy. The releasing of one of the jobs, even by a small amount, is the body’s first piece of the relocation. (The Prayer Journal for Women is the slow daily place to walk this kind of relocation — a page each morning to name the job being returned today, and the slow accumulation of the small returns into a different inward arrangement.)
The third passage: the abundant life He has been waiting to reveal
“Let us go our way quietly, restfully, full of praise, and joy, and trust; ever hearing the words of our Master, ‘Go thy way, thy soul liveth;’ and ever saying, ‘I have trusted Christ to reveal His abundant life in my soul; by His grace I will wait upon Him to fulfill His promise.’”
— Andrew Murray, The Master’s Indwelling
This is the line that names the inward posture of the Christ-life when it has begun, finally, to be the one in the room.
Quietly, restfully, full of praise, and joy, and trust. Read the four words slowly. The Christ-life does not announce itself. It does not perform. It does not demand the platform. It moves quietly, restfully. The contrast with the self-life is precise. The self-life is loud — even when no one else hears it. The self-life is busy — even when nothing is being done. The self-life is tense, the jaw set, the shoulders up, the inward monologue running constantly. The Christ-life is quiet. The Christ-life is rested. The Christ-life is full of praise, joy, trust — and the woman in whom it is winning is, slowly, the woman who has stopped performing for the room and started being, inwardly, somewhere with Him.
Go thy way, thy soul liveth. The line is a quotation from the prophet Elisha to the Shunammite woman whose son had been raised. Murray repurposes it. Your soul lives. The soul that has begun to let the Christ-life do the living from inside is a soul that lives, and the living is felt in the body before it is named in the mind. The afternoon arrives differently. The traffic does not provoke the same sharp response. The small interruption does not break the inward composure. The other version of you that used to win by two in the afternoon does not win quite as automatically anymore, because the other one — the morning one, the one who has been with Him in the morning page — has begun, slowly, to be in the room a little longer into the day.
The two natures are still both present. Murray does not promise the absence of the self-life this side of glory. What he promises is that the choice can begin to go more often the right way, and that the more often compounds. A year of small daily choices in which the Christ-life is allowed to occupy one more of the rooms it was meant to fill is the slow shape of what spiritual maturity actually looks like in real time. Not the absence of the two selves. The slow shifting of which one is in the room when the afternoon difficulty comes.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take one sentence of Murray’s into the week ahead, take this one:
“Not to be occupied with thy sin, but to be occupied with God, brings deliverance from self.”
Write it small. Put it where you will see it on the day the self-audit is loudest — the morning after the failure, the evening of the harsh inward critic, the hour the wrong-self has just won again. The line is the corrective. The way out of the self-life is not more attention to the self-life. The way out is the relocation of attention to the One indwelling, and the slow displacement of the self by His expanding presence.
You will still go to bed some nights asking which of the two is really you. Murray would not promise otherwise. What changes is that you no longer treat the question as a verdict. The question becomes the cue to relocate attention again. Occupied with God, not with sin. The self-life loses its grip not by being fought but by being slowly emptied of the attention that had been feeding it. Ten thousand small relocations, across a year, are how the Christ-life finally becomes the one most often in the room. (For the all-or-nothing question that this daily choice is finally a working-out of, what andrew murray meant by absolute surrender walks the larger frame, and a ‘let it go’ mom journal — 30 prompts for the things you’re done carrying is the lighter companion for the things the self-life has been holding too tightly.)
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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 room being returned to Him today. Built for the woman who has been losing to the wrong self by two in the afternoon and is ready, slowly, to let the indwelling Christ occupy the rooms He was meant to fill.
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 Master’s Indwelling 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.
