Andrew Murray on the Secret of the Holy Walk
⏱ 10 min read
You are walking by rules and you keep stumbling. The rules are good ones, more or less — the morning quiet time, the avoidance of the obvious wrongs, the weekly church, the careful speech, the regular giving — and the stumbling is not dramatic, but it is wearying, and you have begun to suspect that the rules themselves are not what was meant to carry you. There is a holy walk that is supposed to be available, and what you have been doing has not become it.
Andrew Murray wrote Holy in Christ for the woman in that exact stumble. Published in 1887 from his Wellington pulpit, the book was Murray’s long pastoral counter to the rule-based holiness teaching of his generation — the Victorian piety of don’ts, the moralism of the careful list, the steady substitution of behaviour-management for the inner life it was meant to express. Murray’s case is that the secret of the holy walk is not the rule but the Spirit — that the question how to walk in holiness is mis-answered when it is answered by a longer list, and rightly answered only by a deeper abiding. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women walks scripture with that same assumption underneath it, holding space for the slow re-grounding the rule-stumbling woman needs. For now, the Murray text.
The rule-stumble, named
The pattern is older than your stumbling. Murray was watching it in the Reformed congregations of his own day — the woman who had been taught that holiness was the careful management of behaviour, and who therefore had nowhere to go when the behaviour failed except to tighten the rule and try harder. The tightening produces more stumbling, not less, because the rule-based holy walk is structurally unstable. It depends on the woman’s strength, and the woman’s strength was never meant to be the load-bearing thing.
Murray’s whole counsel in Holy in Christ is that this stumbling is not a failure of your effort. It is a feature of the wrong substrate. The rule was never meant to be the substrate. The Spirit was. And the question how to walk in holiness changes shape entirely when the substrate changes — when the woman stops asking which rule did I miss and starts asking which abiding did I let slip.
The first passage: the resting-place
“It is where Thou enterest to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself, that Thou makest holy. O my God! may my heart be Thy resting-place. I would, in the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. Let such fellowship with Thee, and Thy love, and Thy will be to me the secret of a life of holiness.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the closing phrase. Let such fellowship with Thee, and Thy love, and Thy will be to me the secret of a life of holiness. The word secret is Murray’s, and it is doing pastoral work. The rule-stumbling woman has been looking for the secret of holiness in the wrong place — in the technique, the discipline, the schedule, the longer list — and Murray quietly relocates the secret. The secret is the fellowship. The fellowship is the thing the rule was meant to express, and which the rule cannot substitute for.
Believing that Thou doest all in me. The grammar of the holy walk is reversed from the grammar of the rule. The rule-walk has the woman as the active party — I have done, I have avoided, I have kept, I have completed. Murray’s fellowship-walk has Him as the active party — Thou doest all in me. The woman’s job is not to perform the walk. The woman’s job is to keep the room available to the One who is walking through her.
This is the small theological move that undoes the rule-stumble. The rule cannot make you holy. The rule can at best describe what holiness sometimes looks like from the outside. The making-holy is His work in the room of the woman’s heart, and the woman’s part is the resting in Him, the keeping-available, the fellowship the rule was always pointing at but could not produce.
The second passage: the air and the light
“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: the sense of sinfulness and unholiness must become the strength of my trust and dependence. In such faith I abide in Christ.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read this one twice. Like the air that surrounds me, like the light that shines on me.
The two images are answering the how to walk in holiness question directly. The air does not have to be summoned by a rule. The light does not have to be earned by a discipline. They are present because they are the medium the breathing and the seeing happen inside of. Murray’s case is that Christ is that to the holy walk — not a standard the woman is climbing toward, but a presence she is already walking inside of, and the walk becomes holy as she remembers, daily, what room she is walking in.
The rule-stumble assumes the woman is walking alone, with the rule as her external guide. The Spirit-walk assumes the woman is walking inside the presence of Christ, with the Spirit as the internal moving. The same step, in the same kitchen, on the same Tuesday, looks externally identical in both cases. The substrate is wholly different. The rule-stumble depends on the woman’s effort, and the effort is what is wearying her. The Spirit-walk depends on the air-and-light presence, and the presence does not wear her out, because the presence is doing the carrying.
The sense of sinfulness and unholiness must become the strength of my trust and dependence. This is the line that turns the stumbling itself. The rule-walking woman experiences each stumble as evidence that she must tighten the rule. The fellowship-walking woman experiences each stumble as the daily occasion to re-deepen the dependence — to recognise, again, that the holy walk was never her project, and to return to the room of the resting-fellowship the walk actually grows in.
For the slow study this re-grounding needs, the Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women walks the abiding passages — John 15, Galatians 5, Romans 8 — at the pace of one short page per evening, with the assumption underneath the study that the reader is being taught to walk by the Spirit, not by the list. Not a programme. A page per passage.
The somatic — the released gait
Pause here. Stand up if you are sitting. Take three slow steps across the room. Notice the small held-ness in the body as you walk. The rule-stumbling woman has been carrying her walking in her shoulders and her jaw — a low-grade muscular trying that is doing the spiritual equivalent of forcing each step.
Take three more steps. This time, let the shoulders drop by an inch. Let the jaw release. Let the breath be a little longer than usual. Like the air that surrounds me. The steps become slightly easier without becoming slower. The body is walking in the same room, on the same floor, but the walking is no longer being forced.
Sit back down. Stay there for thirty seconds.
The released gait is the body’s version of the holy walk Murray is describing. The braced walking has been confusing effort with holiness. The released walking lets the same steps be taken in fellowship with the One who is the air the lungs are breathing. The how-to-walk-in-holiness question is partly answered by what the body lets go of, not by what the body adds.
The third passage: the daily setting at His feet
“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
The third passage names the daily form of the Spirit-walk. Day by day set ourselves at His feet. The unit is the day. The Spirit-walk is not maintained by a single foundational decision; it is maintained by the small daily returning to His feet, the daily setting-of-the-self in quiet trust, the daily listening for the still small voice that quickens the inner walking.
Notice the phrase receives with the word the power to accept and to hold the blessing He offers. This is the line that completes the answer. The rule-walking woman has been trying to produce the holy walk by her own holding. Murray relocates the holding. The power to accept and to hold is given with the word, by the Spirit, in the small daily listening at His feet. The woman is not generating the power. The power is being deposited, day by day, in the room of the morning chair. The walk follows the deposit.
This is the secret of the holy walk in one line. The woman who is walking by rules has been treating holiness as a goal she is moving toward. Murray’s whole counter is that holiness is a daily deposit she is receiving and walking out of. The how-to-walk-in-holiness question is not a question about more rules. It is a question about more daily setting-at-His-feet, more daily listening for the still small voice, more daily receiving of the power and the blessing the rule could never produce.
Three small returns
If you take nothing else from Holy in Christ, these three returns are the spine of the holy-walk posture:
The first return is the resting-place sentence — beginning the day with one quiet line: May my heart be Thy resting-place. Before the rule. Before the list.
The second return is the air-and-light recognition — pausing, in the small middle of the day, to remember that you are walking inside His presence, not toward a standard you have failed to reach. One slow breath.
The third return is the evening setting-at-His-feet — five unhurried minutes in which the soul stops doing and listens, day by day, for the still small voice that quickens the inner walking. The deposit is given here.
(For the sibling readings in the holiness cluster: what Andrew Murray meant by holiness walks the foundational holiness as Christ’s, given to you the walk grows out of, Andrew Murray on working for God without striving walks the strength-not-strain question that sits alongside, and Andrew Murray on the Christian’s whole life as service walks the all-of-life posture the Spirit-walk opens into. If the framework has been the question, what is sanctification and how does it actually happen and the difference between justification and sanctification walk the doctrinal grounds.)
What changes, slowly
The rules do not disappear. Murray would not have asked you to abandon them. What changes is the room the rules sit inside. The rules inside the fellowship are descriptions of what the Spirit-walk looks like from the outside; the rules outside the fellowship are an exhausting attempt to substitute behaviour for life. The same rule, kept by the same woman, on the same Tuesday — but with the fellowship underneath it, the keeping is no longer wearying. The keeping is the natural shape of a life being walked, inside, by the Spirit Murray spent his life describing.
By month three of daily setting-at-His-feet, the stumbling becomes different. The stumbles still happen — Murray was not promising sinless perfection — but the stumbles no longer drive the woman back to a longer list. They drive her deeper into the dependence the walk grows in. The walk steadies, not because the rule has been tightened, but because the room of the resting-fellowship has become daily home, and the walking is being carried, not forced.
How to walk in holiness, in one sentence: keep the morning room available, walk inside the air-and-light presence, listen at His feet in the evening. The rule will keep itself, more or less, when the fellowship is held.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women.
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This article is part of an Andrew Murray reading library on Everspring Press — slow readings of the South African pastor’s writings on the inner life, with the matched journal at the centre of the practice. Everspring is preparing reprints of Murray’s corpus, including Holy in Christ, for the woman whose holy walk is ready, slowly, to be carried by the Spirit rather than enforced by the list.
