The Secret of Pentecost Andrew Murray Said the Church Forgot
⏱ 10 min read
Pentecost has come to feel, for most modern Christian women, like a story that happened to other people in another century. The flames rested on heads that were not your head. The languages were spoken in a room you were not in. The Spirit, as the church narrates the day, arrived once — and the church has, ever since, been living off the receding memory of an event you were never invited to. Andrew Murray, in The Spirit of Christ, wrote the patient extended argument against this misreading, and the slow walk below through three of his passages is for the Christian woman whose Pentecost has felt like history and is ready, slowly, to discover that it was never meant to be only that. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow doctrinal reading into a daily companion if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Murray’s argument is, in essence, that Pentecost is not the event of the founding of the church. Pentecost is the atmosphere of the church’s daily life, and the secret the modern church has forgotten is that the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost was not a one-time historical disbursement but the inauguration of a continuous condition the church was meant to live inside for the rest of its history. What does Pentecost mean today, in Murray’s reading? It means the same thing it meant on the day it happened. The Spirit is given. The Spirit is poured out. The Spirit is the daily atmosphere the believer is invited to breathe — and the church, by treating the giving as past tense, has been quietly cutting itself off from the air it was meant to be breathing every Tuesday morning since.
The first passage — the still small voice mightier than the storm
Murray, in the passages that turn from the historical event of Pentecost toward the continuous daily Pentecost the church was meant to live in, said the sentence that names how the Spirit’s ongoing arrival actually sounds.
“Come, my brethren, and let us day by day set ourselves at His feet, and meditate on this word of His, with an eye fixed on Him alone. Let us set ourselves in quiet trust before Him, waiting to hear His holy voice — the still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks — breathing its quickening spirit within us, as He speaks: ‘Abide in me.’ The soul that truly hears Jesus Himself speak the word, receives with the word the power to accept and to hold the blessing He offers.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The line at the centre is the diagnostic Murray is making for the church that has forgotten. The still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks. The Pentecost most modern Christians have been waiting for — and, in waiting for, have missed the actual Pentecost they were already in — is the storm version. The wind. The fire. The mighty rushing sound. The drama. Murray is not denying the original event had drama. He is saying that the drama was not the Spirit. The Spirit was the still small voice underneath the drama, and the same still small voice is the continuous voice the church has been invited to listen to ever since.
This is the first piece of the secret. The reason Pentecost feels like history is that the church has been listening for the storm and missing the voice. The ongoing Pentecost arrives, in any ordinary Christian week, as the still small voice. The voice does not announce itself. It does not ring through stadiums. It speaks low, inside the chest, in the small ordinary moments the woman is paying attention. The quickening spirit within us — Murray’s phrase — is the daily inward registration of the voice that has not stopped speaking since the day of Pentecost. The church forgot it because the church was looking elsewhere. The voice has been audible the whole time, to anyone who has set herself at His feet, day by day, in quiet trust.
What does Pentecost mean today, then, in this first reading? It means the daily small returning to the chair at His feet, where the still small voice — the same voice that filled the upper room — speaks low into the soul that has stopped listening for storms.
The second passage — the hidden but divine and most real presence
Murray, in Holy in Christ, said the sentence that names how the ongoing Pentecost feels from the inside. (If the wider Spirit-context would help, why Andrew Murray said the Holy Spirit is the Christian’s secret walks the Spirit-as-actual-presence reading, and the two covenants Andrew Murray distinguished walks the covenant-frame the ongoing Pentecost is given inside.)
“Like the air that surrounds me, like the light that shines on me, here is my Lord Jesus with me in His hidden but Divine and most real presence. 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.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
The two images Murray reaches for are deliberate. Like the air that surrounds me. Like the light that shines on me. Both are images of an atmosphere — a present condition that does not have to be summoned, because it has not stopped being present. This is the inward shape of the continuous Pentecost. The Spirit poured out on the church on the day of Pentecost was not stored in a vessel that has slowly been emptying for two thousand years. The Spirit was poured out as atmosphere, and the atmosphere has been the air the church has been breathing — or not breathing, depending on whether the woman has remembered to acknowledge the surrounding presence.
The secret the church forgot, in Murray’s reading, is that the Spirit’s pouring-out was not the inauguration of a limited supply. It was the inauguration of an unlimited atmosphere. Hidden but most real. The hiddenness is why the modern Christian has missed it. The reality is why the hiddenness has not interrupted the giving. The ongoing Pentecost is the daily condition of breathing the air the upper-room disciples breathed, in the same ordinary way they breathed it once the wind had quieted and the day had become a Tuesday.
He does it as I believe, and in believing open my whole soul to receive what is implied in it. The believing opens. The opening receives. This is the only thing the woman has to do for the ongoing Pentecost to become her actual inward weather. Believe. Open. The Spirit is already poured out. The atmosphere is already given. The receiving is the daily small inward act of letting the atmosphere into the lungs it was already surrounding. The church forgot the secret by forgetting the believing-and-opening — by treating the Pentecost as a historical event the church is the descendant of, rather than the continuous condition the church is the inhabitant of.
A small somatic, here
Set the article down for a moment. Take one slow inhale. As the breath comes in, acknowledge — once, quietly — that the air now in your lungs has also been the hidden but most real atmosphere of the Spirit since the day of Pentecost. You are not asked to feel a flame. You are asked, once, to breathe the air that has been there all along. The body learns the ongoing Pentecost in this kind of small registered breath before the mind does. That is the church’s forgotten secret beginning to be inwardly remembered.
The third passage — enter deeper into the covenant of redemption
The third passage names the daily practice the ongoing Pentecost is lived inside.
“Enter deep into thy relation of dependence as creature on God, to receive from Him every moment what He gives. Enter deeper still into His covenant of redemption, with His promise to restore more gloriously than ever what thou hadst lost, and by His Son and Spirit to give within you unceasingly, His actual divine Presence and Power. And thus wait upon your God continually and only.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
The hinge word, again, is unceasingly. The Spirit’s giving is not periodic. It is continuous. The ongoing Pentecost is the daily receiving from Him every moment what He gives — and the woman whose Pentecost has felt like ancient history has, very often, been operating from the unspoken assumption that the giving stopped. Murray, in the gentlest patient language, is saying it did not stop. The giving has been unceasing since the day it began. The receiving has been the part the church has forgotten how to do.
This is what makes the ongoing Pentecost more accessible than the modern Christian has been told. It does not require an event. It requires the daily small waiting — the enter deep into thy relation of dependence — and inside the waiting, the unceasing giving becomes the actual atmosphere of the inward life. The chair at His feet, kept warm by daily small returns, is the inward upper room. The wind has been blowing the whole time. The flame has been resting on the soul that returns to the chair. The languages the soul is given to speak are the small ordinary languages of love and patience and slow attention to the people the day puts in front of you — and these are the gifts of the ongoing Pentecost, given to the church that learns to keep coming back to the chair.
This is also where the Spirit-filled life Murray taught in the rest of The Spirit of Christ becomes, in practice, available to the modern woman. (If the filled-versus-empty interior question is the one that pulled you toward this article, Andrew Murray on the Spirit-filled Christian walks the practice from a different angle.) The daily small waiting upon God — the practice that lets the unceasing giving be received — has a daily small home in the Bible Study Workbook for Women, where each page sets a short scripture and a small space for the inward waiting to be practised by hand. The waiting is the practice. The journal is only the shape it sits inside. (If the contemplative tradition outside Murray helps you anchor this for now, what Brother Lawrence meant by practicing the presence of God is the kitchen-table cousin of the daily Pentecost, and union with Christ — what Teresa of Ávila actually taught walks the inward indwelling-side of the same long Christian witness.)
What the slow walk does over a year
What changes, if you sit with Murray’s three passages — one a month for three months — and then let the practice of return to the chair at His feet, acknowledge the surrounding presence, wait upon God continually become the daily small shape of your interior life, is not a sudden visitation. The change is quieter than that. The Pentecost that has felt like ancient history slowly stops being history and becomes weather — the hidden but most real atmosphere your inward life is, in small ordinary moments, learning to recognise. The still small voice becomes audible at the kettle, in the car, on the slow exhale before sleep. The wind has been blowing the whole time. You are, in small daily evenings, learning to feel it on your face.
What does Pentecost mean today, in Murray’s reading? It means what it meant on the day it began. The Spirit has been poured out. The atmosphere is given. The church that forgot the secret can return to it any morning, by the daily small setting of herself at His feet, in quiet trust, waiting for the still small voice. The voice has not stopped speaking. The church has only stopped listening. The slow walk back to the chair is, in Murray’s hand, the slow walk back into the Pentecost the day of Pentecost was always meant to inaugurate. (We hope, in time, to bring The Spirit of Christ back into print through Everspring Press, so the slow reading has a clean, contemplative edition to live inside.)
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A daily home for the slow listening
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — the still small voice mightier than the storm, the hidden but most real presence, the unceasing giving received in the daily waiting — into a daily companion for the woman whose Pentecost has felt like ancient history and is ready, in small mornings, to find it has been her weather all along.
