What to Do When You’re Doubting God — Murray on the Soul in Crisis
⏱ 12 min read
The doubt is not the bookish kind. It is not the philosophy-class doubt about the cosmological argument. It is the small, late-evening doubt that arrives in a body that has been a believer for twenty or thirty or forty years and that, this season, cannot quite locate God in the room. You did everything right. You prayed. You went. You served. You showed up for the prayer meeting on a wet Wednesday for a decade. And now there is a long quiet in the place where He used to feel near, and the quiet has gone on for longer than you can keep ignoring, and the question is starting to rise — what if. You hate that the question is rising. You are not sure what to do with it.
This is the slow read on what to do. The companion is Andrew Murray, who wrote Absolute Surrender in the long, patient evening of his life as a Dutch Reformed pastor in nineteenth-century South Africa, and who knew the soul in crisis well enough not to bully it. The 140-day daily companion to this practice — the Prayer Journal for Women — is built to hold the seasons when prayer has stopped feeling like prayer and has started feeling like sitting in a room with a closed door. Murray would have said the closed-door season is not a disqualification from the prayer life. He would have said it is the season the prayer life starts learning what it is actually made of.
We walk slowly. There is no hurry. The doubt has been here for a while. It can stay another hour.
What the loud advice gets wrong
The loud advice, when you tell a more confident Christian friend that you are doubting God, is some version of just trust. Just pray harder. Just remember His faithfulness in the past. Just open the Bible at random and see what He says. The advice is not wrong, exactly. The verses it gestures toward are real verses. The trouble is that the advice assumes the doubt is a willpower problem — a failure of the believer to do the trust she has stopped feeling.
The soul in real crisis cannot perform the trust by willpower. The doubt is not the soul declining to trust. The doubt is the soul unable to feel the ground it used to stand on, and being asked, by the loud advice, to stand harder on a ground it cannot find.
Murray, who wrote in a different century with a different vocabulary, called the loud advice’s whole approach by its right name. He said the believer who has been doing the trust as a work she performs will hit, sooner or later, the wall where the work cannot be performed anymore. And in the hitting of that wall — and this is the part Murray does that the loud advice cannot — he calls the wall good. The wall is where the real prayer life starts. The wall is the place absolute surrender begins to mean something other than a Sunday school phrase. (For the daytime companion read on what to do in the long quiet stretch, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence is the slow letter, written for the woman in the year God seems to have gone quiet.)
Murray’s first answer — the surrender is yours, the rest is His
Listen to him here, from a passage that sits at the centre of his whole reading of the soul in crisis:
“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.” — Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read that slowly. Three things matter.
First — His hidden but Divine and most real presence. Murray’s grammar is unusual here. He does not say His present-but-feeling-distant presence. He says His hidden but most real presence. The hiddenness is not the absence. The hidden God is not the absent God. He is, in Murray’s reading, most real in the seasons He is most hidden. The doubt is not happening in an empty room. It is happening in a room where He is in the way Murray says — like the air that surrounds me, like the light that shines on me — present at a depth too close to the soul for the soul to see, in the season the seeing has gone dim.
Second — the sense of sinfulness and unholiness must become the strength of my trust and dependence. This is the Murray inversion. The thing the loud piety treats as a disqualification — the soul’s own dim sense of unworthiness, the small ongoing awareness of failure that the doubting believer is usually carrying alongside the doubt — Murray treats as the foundation of the trust. The trust is not built on the believer’s confidence in herself. The trust is built on the very fact that the believer cannot trust herself. The doubt about her own sufficiency is, in Murray’s reading, the strength of her dependence on Him.
Third — He does it as I believe. The verb is He does. Not I do. He reveals. He clarifies. He gives growing clearness and power. The believer’s work is the small, slow act of believing-and-opening — bowing in quiet rest, opening the whole soul to receive. The doing is His. The receiving is hers. The loud advice that tells the doubting woman to do the trust harder has the grammar exactly inverted. Murray’s grammar is the right one. He does it as I believe. The believing is the opening of the soul. The doing is the work of the One whose presence is hidden but most real.
A pause, here. The shoulders. The chest. The small held tension you have been carrying as you read about the doubt — the part of you that has been reading defensively, half-arguing with the page. Let one slow inhale come in. Let one slow exhale go out. Murray is not arguing with you. He is sitting beside you. The whole thing is being walked at the pace your soul can actually walk it. You are not behind.
Murray’s second answer — the surrender before the answer, not after
Here is the line from Absolute Surrender that, in one sentence, is what to do when you doubt God. He writes — slowly, like a man who has watched believers walk through this for fifty years and knows how the path actually goes:
“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
Stop. Read the middle clause again. 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 is what to do when you doubt God. Slow it down. Each consciousness of failure — every small evening when the prayer felt empty, every Wednesday when the verse did not land, every late hour when the silence was loud — give new urgency to the command. Not new despair. New urgency. The failure is not the verdict on the prayer life. The failure is the kindling — the small repeated pressure that drives the soul back to the listening posture more earnestly than before.
And the soul listens. Not for an explanation. Not for a vindication. Not for the doubt to be intellectually answered. The soul listens for one word. Child. Murray hears the voice of Jesus, across the centuries, in two short clauses — Child, abide in me. That word, he says, listened to as coming from Himself, will be an end of all doubting — a divine promise of what shall surely be granted.
This is the part the loud advice has missed for a long time now. The end of the doubt is not the winning of an argument. The end of the doubt is the hearing of a word. Child. The believer is not asked to solve the doubt by reasoning. She is asked to be still long enough that the voice can come back. Sometimes the stillness takes a week. Sometimes the stillness takes a year. The voice comes back at its own pace. Murray would have said — and did say, in chapter after chapter — that the believer’s only work in the meantime is to keep showing up for the listening.
The companion that holds the showing-up in a page-a-day form, for the seasons when generating the structure yourself has become impossible, is the Prayer Journal for Women. It is the 140-day form of this practice — the page already shaped, the prompt already there, the slow structure for the listening that the soul in crisis cannot invent from scratch on a Tuesday evening. It is not a cure for the doubt. It is the chair you sit in while the listening does its slow work. (For the wider companion to the long-silence year, when you feel spiritually dry — the practice for the year God goes quiet is the practice; for the prayer side, prayer for anxiety and overthinking is the late-night companion. The longer-form devotional version for the woman in the long stretch is a devotional on fear and anxiety for the long stretch.)
What “absolute surrender” actually is in the crisis
The phrase absolute surrender has been used badly by the cheerful piety. It has been used to mean give up trying to feel anything, just obey by willpower. That is not what Murray meant. Absolute surrender, in the actual book, is the surrender of the project of generating your own faith. It is the laying down of the believer’s lifelong assumption that her prayer life is a thing she makes — by her effort, her discipline, her feeling, her trying. Absolute surrender is the moment the believer stops believing the prayer life is hers to engineer.
What replaces the engineering is what Murray, in the passage you just read, called resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. 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. The doubt does not have to be resolved before the abiding starts. The abiding is the posture in the doubt. The believer in crisis is not waiting to abide until she trusts again. She abides while she doubts. The doubt is in the room. The arms of Everlasting Love are also in the room. Both can be true. Murray would have said both must be true, in the seasons the soul is being remade. The resting is bodily, in Murray’s grammar — it happens in real shoulders, real chests, real evenings. The body that has been bracing the doubt is the body that, slowly, learns the lowering.
What to do this week
Slow. One small thing.
The first night the doubt is loud, do not try to argue with it. Do not stack verses against it. Sit down, somewhere quiet, and read the Murray paragraph again. 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. Read it three times. Slowly. Let the third reading be the one that has nothing to prove. The doubt may still be in the room. The hidden presence is also in the room. You are not asked to feel the presence. You are asked to read the line as a true description of where you actually are.
Then, if you can manage one more thing, write one sentence in a notebook. I doubted God today. Or — I sat with the silence. Or — I did not feel Him, but I read the Murray. One sentence. By hand. The notebook is not for anyone else. The notebook is the small place where the listening posture is being practised. Murray would have called the notebook a means of grace, in the slow sense — a chair you sit in while the abiding does its own work.
Do that for a week. Then do it for another week. By the end of a month, you will not have solved the doubt. You will have, slowly, started living differently with it. The arguing has lowered. The listening has begun. The crisis is not over. The crisis is, in Murray’s grammar, becoming the place absolute surrender starts to mean something.
For the wider sibling reading from a different older voice — Augustine, who walked his own version of this crisis in the Confessions — why does God feel so distant — the restless heart of Augustine is the slow companion, and why does God allow suffering — Augustine’s answer in City of God is the longer letter to the soul wrestling with the why underneath the doubt.
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Closing
What to do when you doubt God. Slow down. Stop trying to engineer the trust. Sit in the chair. Read the Murray. Write the one sentence. Show up for the listening. The voice that ends the doubt is the voice that says Child, abide in me, and it comes back at its own pace, sometimes after a long while, into the same room the doubt is sitting in. The surrender is the posture. The surrender is the chair. The rest is His.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. The chair, in daily page form. The listening posture, made into a small daily structure for the seasons your soul cannot invent one from scratch.
