Who Am I in Christ? — Murray on Abiding Identity
⏱ 13 min read
There is a particular kind of evening on which the question who am I in Christ stops being a Bible-study prompt and becomes a real question. It usually arrives quietly — after a hard day at work, after a phone call that did not go well, after the small accumulated weight of a season in which you have not been the version of yourself you wanted to be. The verses you have known since you were a girl rise up in your mind — a new creation, beloved, chosen, holy — and they feel oddly distant from the woman sitting in the kitchen with the cold tea. The words are right. The connection between the words and the woman has gone thin.
This is the slow version of the question. Not the catechism version. The version that arrives after the catechism version has been tried and found insufficient for the actual weight of a Tuesday evening. Andrew Murray spent his whole pastoral life on this exact gap — the gap between the verses a Christian woman knows and the felt sense of the identity those verses describe. Abide in Christ, his small Dutch-Reformed book from 1882, is the long, patient walk across that gap. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries a similar slow form into daily companionship, if you would like a place to take this practice after the article. For now — read slowly. The question who am I in Christ deserves a slower reading than the inspirational-quote version it usually gets.
Murray’s answer is not a list of attributes. It is not a printable wall card of I am chosen, I am loved, I am redeemed. The lists are not wrong — they are often the first scaffold a young Christian needs — but they tend to be performed at the soul rather than received by it. Murray’s answer is structural. He believes the identity you are reaching for is not produced by you at all. It is the slow inworking of a presence you do not have to manufacture, and the question who am I in Christ is, in his hands, less a thing to answer than a thing to abide inside of until the answer settles in the body.
The first passage: the heart as a 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 what Murray inverts. The modern Christian reflex is to ask how do I rest in God — as if rest were a posture you have to produce, a discipline you have to master, a thing the will achieves through effort. Murray turns the verb around. The first sentence is not about your resting in Him. It is about His resting in you. It is where Thou enterest to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself, that Thou makest holy. The identity Murray is describing — the who of who am I in Christ — is not a thing you arrive at by trying harder. It is the consequence of God taking up residence in you and slowly making the room of your soul into the kind of room He rests in.
This is the part that re-arranges the whole project of Christian identity. You have been asking, in effect, how do I become the woman the verses describe? Murray is saying: you do not become her by working at her. She emerges, slowly, as the natural consequence of His resting in you. Your part is not the manufacturing. Your part is the not-resisting — the slow yes that lets Him stay. (For the woman who is at the beginning of this and does not know where to put the first sentence, how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin walks the first three pages without any pressure attached.)
May my heart be Thy resting-place. This is Murray’s prayer. Notice he does not say may I rest in Thee. He says the reverse. The Christian woman has been taught for years to find her rest in the Lord, and the teaching is true — but Murray sees the deeper structure underneath it. Before you rest in Him, He rests in you. The indwelling is the prior thing. Your rest follows from His. You do not produce your own rest by an act of spiritual will. You make the room hospitable, and He does what He does in it, and the rest comes as a fruit of His being there.
For the modern Christian woman tangled in performance-based identity — am I a good enough wife, am I a good enough mother, am I a good enough Christian, am I doing the devotional consistently enough — this is the line that quietly dismantles the whole framework. The question who am I in Christ is not answered by doing more. It is answered by becoming a resting-place for Him, and the doing-more was, all along, the small ongoing effort that was making the room uninhabitable.
Believing that Thou doest all in me. That clause is the working theology of the passage. Thou doest all in me. Not I do all for Thee. The whole grammar of Christian identity, in Murray’s hands, is reversed from the activist version most modern women have been handed. The Christian life is not primarily what you are doing for Him. It is primarily what He is doing in you, while you stop interrupting Him by trying so hard.
The second passage: faith as the air around you
“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
This is the passage where Murray gives you his metaphor — and the metaphor is worth keeping near the page for a long time. Like the air that surrounds me, like the light that shines on me, here is my Lord Jesus with me.
The metaphor is doing precise theological work. Air and light are not things you produce; they are conditions you live inside. You do not generate the oxygen in the room. You do not generate the morning light. You breathe and see inside something that is given to you continuously by a source other than yourself. Murray is saying: this is what the indwelling of Christ is actually like. Who you are in Christ is not an interior achievement. It is a condition you are continuously held inside of, the way the lungs are held inside the surrounding air.
This breaks one of the deeper modern errors about Christian identity. You have been taught, perhaps unconsciously, to think of Christ in you as a small inner thing — a flame in the heart, a voice in the conscience, a private presence in an interior chamber. Murray is gently pointing out that the indwelling is also an outdwelling. He is the atmosphere. He is the light. He is the medium inside which the whole of your life is taking place, including the bits of it that feel godless on a Tuesday afternoon. The dryness of the afternoon is dry inside Him. The boredom is bored inside Him. The grief is grieved inside Him. The atmosphere does not depart when the weather is overcast.
He does it as I believe, and in believing open my whole soul to receive what is implied in it. The verb open is the practice. You do not produce the indwelling. You open. The opening is not striving. It is the small daily un-clenching that lets the air, which is already in the room, reach the parts of the lung that have been holding themselves closed against it.
The sense of sinfulness and unholiness must become the strength of my trust and dependence. This is the line that most needs the slow reading. Murray is saying something almost paradoxical. The thing you have been most ashamed of — your sense that you are not holy enough, not consistent enough, not the Christian woman you wanted to be — is not the obstacle to your identity in Christ. It is the strength of your trust in Him. Because the sense of your own insufficiency is precisely what makes the dependence on His sufficiency real. If you were sufficient, you would not need the abiding. The insufficiency is the door. (For the woman who has been told her rest itself is selfish, what the Bible says about self-care walks the scriptural grounds; and for the daughter, granddaughter, or new believer who needs the youngest entry-point to this same slow work, a journal book for the young woman figuring out her faith is the gentle starting page.)
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow opening. One short passage each day, room for the response Murray names — in believing, open my whole soul to receive what is implied in it — and no demand to perform the identity you are receiving. The opening is the practice. The identity is His to settle.
A somatic for the opening
Pause here. Murray’s metaphor of air has a body to it, and the body is where the slow opening becomes available before the mind catches up.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat to the floor. Take one slow inhale through the nose — not deep, just slow — and on the exhale, let the shoulders lower by a small amount, the way a sigh lowers them without your having to ask. On the next inhale, notice the air that arrives. You did not make it. It was already there. You opened the lung, and the air came in. Stay with three slow breaths in this rhythm. Then take the awareness of the air away from the lungs and let it rest, for a moment, on the recognition that the same is true of Him. He is the atmosphere of the room. The opening is yours. The arriving is His.
That small somatic is the body’s translation of Murray’s clause. The body knows how to receive. It has been holding itself closed against the air for years out of habit. The slow exhale teaches it that the atmosphere is friendly. The friendly atmosphere is the indwelling Christ Murray is naming.
The third passage: the voice in the stillness
“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.
Murray is doing something here that the modern Christian self-help genre never does. He is collapsing the gap between the hearing of Christ’s word and the power to obey it. 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. The hearing and the power are not two separate steps. They are one act. When the word is truly heard, the strength to live inside the word is given with the word.
This re-frames the whole problem of Christian identity as you have probably been experiencing it. You have been hearing the verses for years. You have not been receiving the power. The reason, Murray would say gently, is not that the verses are weak. The reason is that they have been read at the speed of information and not received at the speed of fellowship. The verses become powerful when they are heard by the soul that has set itself at His feet — that has slowed enough, lowered enough, opened enough, to actually let Him speak them. The verses on the wall art are not the failure. The hurry inside which they were read is the failure.
Abide in me. That is the word He is speaking, in Murray’s account, to the soul that has slowed enough to hear it. Notice what He is not saying. He is not saying strive for me. He is not saying prove yourself to me. He is not saying become the woman the verses describe. He is saying abide — remain, stay, dwell, rest. The whole work of Christian identity, in Murray’s hands, is contained in this one verb. Not the verbs of effort. The verb of staying.
The identity you have been reaching for — the who of who am I in Christ — is the identity of one who stays in Him. You are not a woman trying to perform a list of Christian attributes. You are a woman who has been invited to remain inside the love that is already holding her. The attributes will follow. They follow as fruit, not as a checklist. (For the woman who would like a slower introduction to reading scripture this way — devotionally, slowly, with no academic apparatus — how to bible journal for beginners is the entry-level form of this same practice.)
The still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks. That is the line worth keeping near the page. Murray is borrowing from 1 Kings — the wind, the earthquake, the fire, and then the still small voice in which the Lord was actually present. The Christian identity Murray is describing is not built on dramatic moments. It is built on the slow accumulation of small, still hearings. The wall-art version of who am I in Christ is the storm version. The actual version is the still-small-voice version. Less dramatic. More durable. The kind of identity that does not shift when the performance does.
What this identity will feel like over a year
Murray’s Abide in Christ takes the form of thirty-one short meditations — one per day for a month, then again the next month, then again the next. He is explicit that the identity he is describing is not entered all at once. It is entered slowly, by daily small returns, over years. The first month feels like learning a new posture. The third month feels like the posture is starting to hold itself. The first year, the identity you are reaching for has moved from being a thing you reach for to being a thing you live inside of.
What you can expect, walking this slowly, is not a dramatic shift. The dramatic shifts are not how Murray works. What you can expect is a quiet relocation of where your sense of self is anchored. The performance-anchor — the version of you whose worth depended on the consistency of the devotional, the kindness of the marriage, the cleanness of the house, the patience with the children — will not disappear, but it will stop being the primary anchor. The new anchor is the simple ongoing fact that He is the atmosphere of the room, that He is resting in you while you rest in Him, and that the who of who am I in Christ is not a thing you have to achieve. It is a thing you slowly come home to.
The waves will still come. The boat will be anchored differently. (For the sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series, see what is my identity in Christ — Owen on the indwelling Christ and what does it mean to be a child of God — MacDonald on sonship.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day, a short passage and room for the slow opening Murray names — the small daily showing-up that holds the soul in proximity to the One who is already holding it.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — abide, rest, the indwelling air, the still small voice — into a daily companion built for the woman whose question who am I in Christ is, at last, ready to stop being rhetorical and start being lived.
