The Daily Word Andrew Murray Spoke to His Soul
⏱ 11 min read
You wake up, and you remember. The verses come back. You sit at the kitchen table with the tea and the Bible open, and for ten quiet minutes the position is solid — you are in Christ, you are loved, you are held. Then the day starts. By half past ten you have forgotten. Not in any dramatic way. The remembering simply thins. By lunchtime the woman in the meeting is not the woman who sat at the table. By mid-afternoon you would have to be reminded, gently, that the morning even happened. Andrew Murray knew this exact pattern. He wrote Abide in Christ not for the woman whose problem is unbelief but for the woman whose problem is forgetting — forgetting, by mid-morning, who she is in the One she had been near to at seven. The question what does it mean to be in Christ is, in Murray’s hands, less a doctrinal question than a question of daily re-remembering, and the re-remembering has a particular shape. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries the slow daily form of this practice, if you would like a place to let the morning word live across the day. For now — read slowly.
Murray spoke a small daily word to his own soul. The word was not original to him. It was the word Christ Himself spoke, in John 15, that Murray translated into the morning practice that held him for forty years of ministry. The three passages below are the spine of that word.
The first passage — the voice that says ‘Child, abide in me’
The sentence in Abide in Christ in which Murray most plainly names the daily word he spoke to himself is one of the gentlest sentences in the whole book.
“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
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command. Murray is naming the exact movement the forgetting Christian needs. By mid-morning, you have forgotten. The forgetting is not a moral failure; it is the chronic ordinary condition of a mind that lives inside a body that lives inside a household and a workplace and a culture, all of which compete loudly for the small remaining bandwidth of your attention. Murray does not scold the forgetting. He says: let the consciousness of the forgetting be the new urgency. The forgetting becomes the cue. The cue is what sends you back to the chair, to the verse, to the small inward word.
The word, in Murray’s account, is one Christ Himself speaks. Child, abide in me. That is the whole sentence. Two clauses. The first names the position — Child. You are not, in your own forgetting, the orphan you have been feeling like since half past ten. You are still Child. The position does not depend on the strength of your remembering. The position is the thing that holds, while your remembering thins. The second clause names the small daily yes — abide in me. Stay near. Sit a moment longer in the place you forgot you were already standing in. The word does both. It re-establishes who you are, and it asks the smallest possible next thing — that you stay.
Murray spoke this word to his own soul, daily, for the whole of his ministry. The forgetting was his too. He was not above it. He simply learned the small return. Child, abide in me. Spoken inwardly, at the kitchen counter, in the queue, in the lift between floors, in the half-hour of the evening when the day finally slows. The question what does it mean to be in Christ is, in his practice, answered by the daily speaking of this word — not once, in the morning, as a piece of theology, but many small times across the day, as a piece of identity-keeping. (For the foundational reading on the receiving posture this word lives inside of, why Andrew Murray said abiding is not effort walks the slow companion essay. For Murray’s treatment of the Christ who speaks the word from inside you, Andrew Murray on Christ as the indwelling life is the next slow reading in this hub.)
The somatic — for the body that forgot at mid-morning
Pause here. The forgetting is not only mental. By half past ten, the body has forgotten too. The shoulders have come up. The jaw has set. The breath has shortened. The body has slipped, without your noticing, out of the soft-rooted morning posture and into the small chronic bracing of a woman who is, again, holding the day up on her own.
Sit somewhere quiet, for thirty seconds. Both feet flat on the floor. Let your hands rest, palms up, on your knees. Take one slow inhale.
Then, on the exhale, speak the daily word inwardly. Child, abide in me. Two clauses. One slow breath each.
Child. Let the shoulders drop by half an inch. Notice that you have not stopped being Child. The position held while the mind was elsewhere.
Abide in me. Let the chest soften. The small ask. Stay near for the next few minutes. That is all.
Two breaths. Two clauses. The body has just re-remembered what the mind had forgotten. You did not have to restart the morning. The morning’s word was still there, waiting to be spoken back. This is the shape of the daily practice Murray walked. Not a one-time recitation. A small repeated re-saying, body included, as many times across the day as the forgetting requires.
The second passage — Of God are ye in Christ
Murray, in Holy in Christ, locates the source of being in Christ in a sentence that lifts the whole weight off your remembering.
“My faith must in quiet rest and trust bow before the Father, of whom and by whose Mighty Grace I am in Christ: He will reveal it to me with ever-growing clearness and power. He does it as I believe, and in believing open my whole soul to receive what is implied in it: the sense of sinfulness and unholiness must become the strength of my trust and dependence. In such faith I abide in Christ. But because it is of faith, therefore it is of the Holy Spirit. Of God are ye in Christ.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
Of God are ye in Christ. This is the line. Five words. Pauline, drawn from 1 Corinthians 1:30, and underlined in Murray’s prose because Murray knew that this small clause carries the whole answer to the forgetting. Of God — meaning, from Him, by His doing, not by yours. The fact of your being in Christ is not the product of your morning faithfulness. It is not undone by your mid-morning forgetting. Of God you are in Christ. The position is His establishing. The keeping of the position is His keeping. You did not put yourself in. He put you in. You cannot, by your forgetting, take yourself out.
This is what the forgetting woman needs to hear. The position is not held by the strength of your remembering. The position is held by God. The thing you forgot at half past ten was not the position itself. The position was still in place. You only forgot to notice it. The re-noticing is the daily word — Child, abide in me. The position has been there continuously. The noticing comes and goes, and Murray, very gently, says: yes, of course it does, and the coming-back to the noticing is the practice, and the position itself is not in any danger.
This re-arranges the felt weight of the question what does it mean to be in Christ. It does not mean that you must hold yourself in Christ by the constancy of your attention. It means that you are of God placed in Christ, and the placement is His to keep, and your part is the slow daily re-noticing of where He has already put you. The re-noticing is the morning verse. The re-noticing is the inward word at the meeting. The re-noticing is the longer exhale in the lift between floors. None of it is the work of being in Christ. All of it is the work of remembering you already are. (The Prayer Journal for Women is built as the daily home for this exact remembering — one short page each evening, with room for the verse and room for the honest sentence about where the forgetting happened today, and the morning word ready for tomorrow.)
The third passage — soul, be still and listen
Murray’s third passage, late in Abide in Christ, names the inward posture that lets the daily word be heard.
“What we only need is this: to take time and study the divine image of this life of love set before us in Christ. We need to have our souls still unto God, gazing upon that life of Christ in the Father until the light from heaven falls on it, and we hear the living voice of our Beloved whispering gently to us personally the teaching He gave to the disciples. Soul, be still and listen; let every thought be hushed until the word has entered your heart too: ‘Child!’”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it twice. Slowly.
Soul, be still and listen; let every thought be hushed until the word has entered your heart too: ‘Child!’ This is the practice in its smallest form. The daily word is not something you generate. The daily word is something you become still enough to hear. Murray spoke the word to himself, but the word was given to him by Christ, in the same way Christ first gave it to the disciples — Child. The address is personal. The address is identity-establishing. The address is the small interior naming that, when heard, reorders the rest of the day.
The line worth keeping near the page is let every thought be hushed until the word has entered your heart too. The hush is the work. The thoughts have been many — the lists, the worries, the small chronic running of the mind through the day’s unfinished things — and the daily word does not break in over the top of all that. The daily word arrives in the hush. You sit, for a moment. The thoughts settle by their own weight. And then, into the small silence underneath, the word comes — Child — and the position you had forgotten by mid-morning is, gently, restored.
This is the third thing to say about what it means to be in Christ. It means there is a voice that says Child into the inside of you, and the saying of it is His, and your part is the small daily hushing that lets the saying be heard. The morning ten minutes is the hush. The longer exhale at half past ten is a smaller hush. The evening sentence before sleep is the day’s last hush. Each hush is a small place where the daily word can be spoken to your soul again, and each speaking is the slow daily re-remembering of who you have been the whole time. (For a companion practice in a different father’s voice, how to recognize God’s voice — Brother Lawrence’s quiet answer walks the same hush in Lawrence’s vocabulary, and why God whispers instead of shouts — Tozer on the still small voice is the bridge essay on the quiet voice itself.)
What the slow reading will do over a year
If you let the daily word Child, abide in me be your slow companion through the next year, what shifts is not the frequency of your forgetting — which, this side of glory, will likely not change — but the speed of your re-remembering. By month three, the forgetting at half past ten still happens, but the return is faster. The cue is well-worn. The shoulders drop by half an inch. The inward word is spoken. The position is re-noticed. The day continues from a re-rooted place rather than from a forgotten one. What does it mean to be in Christ, by year-mark, has become less a question you ask and more a quiet underneath you live from. The forgetting becomes the cue, and the cue becomes the small daily return, and the small daily return becomes the rhythm of an interior life that is, slowly, learning to live by His keeping rather than by its own remembering.
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A daily home for the slow practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, one short passage and a verse, with room for the honest sentence — a small daily place to receive the word Child, abide in me again, after a day of forgetting. Abide in Christ, the small Dutch-Reformed book this article reads from, is on our list to reprint through Everspring Press in the coming year, for the readers who would like to walk Murray’s whole 31-day cycle of the daily word at the page.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — the daily word ‘Child, abide in me’, the ‘Of God are ye in Christ’ that holds when remembering thins, the soul stilled and listening — into a daily companion for the woman who forgets by mid-morning who she has been in the One she sat with at seven.