How to Know God’s Will for Your Life — Murray’s Three Tests
⏱ 14 min read
You have been asking the question for months — possibly years. Some seasons it sits quietly in the back of your mind. Other seasons it gets loud — the job that may or may not be the right job, the move that may or may not be the right move, the relationship that may or may not be the relationship you stay in, the calling you cannot quite name but feel pulled toward. The phrase God’s will hovers somewhere above your decision-making, and you have read the blog posts and listened to the sermons about open doors and closed doors and peace that passes understanding, and the doors keep being ambiguous and the peace keeps being intermittent.
This is the slow version. The question of how to know God’s will for your life is not — Andrew Murray would say — a question that gets answered by clearer signs. It is a question that gets answered by a different posture. Murray spent forty years writing about it, and his clearest pages on it are not in the famous Absolute Surrender sermons but in three quieter books — Holy in Christ, Abide in Christ, and Waiting on God — which together hold what we might call his three tests. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow daily reading into a small evening practice, if you want a place to take the question after the article. For now — read slowly.
Murray was a Dutch Reformed pastor in nineteenth-century South Africa, and most of what he wrote sounds, at first, like the kind of Victorian devotional prose you would skim. But underneath the surface piety is a precision that the modern Christian woman recognises immediately when she meets it slowly. Murray was not pious in the soft sense. He was clinical about the soul — about what it actually feels like to want to know God’s will and not know it, and what posture actually opens the answer when no posture seems to. His three tests, read together, are not three steps in a flowchart. They are three names for what surrender actually is.
Test one: Have you let Him make your heart His 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 strange direction of the prayer. Murray is not asking God to come and do something in him. He is asking that his own heart become the place where God comes to rest. The reversal is the whole point. The modern Christian woman asking how to know God’s will for your life usually frames the question as what does God want me to do? — as if God’s will were a list of assignments waiting for delivery, and the right kind of prayer would unlock the next item on the list.
Murray turns the question inside out. May my heart be Thy resting-place. The first question is not what is God asking of you; it is whether the inside of your life has become a place He can rest in. The second question — the one about action, calling, vocation, direction — only becomes answerable once the first has been answered.
This is uncomfortable, because it slows the asking down considerably. You came to the page wanting clarity about a decision. Murray, gently, says: the decision will become clearer when the inside of you becomes restful enough for Him to settle in. The clarity is not held back as a punishment. The clarity is held back because you have not yet built — in your inner life — the kind of stillness from which clarity becomes hearable.
In the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. Notice the verbs. Stillness. Confidence. Rest. The work is not striving. The work is — paradoxically — the small daily refusal of striving, the patient sitting in the trust that He is doing the work inside you whether you can detect it or not. The modern Christian woman is exhausted by this idea on first reading, because she has been trying for years to figure out God’s will through more effort, more prayer, more journaling, more counsel, and Murray is telling her the effort itself has been the obstacle.
The first test of God’s will, then, is not a test of the decision. It is a test of the asker. Has your heart become a place He can rest in? If the inside of your life is still chronically agitated — still busy with what-ifs and worst-cases and ten-year plans and the fear that the wrong choice will derail His plan for you — the agitation itself is the thing to address before the decision is. Not because He withholds direction from anxious women. Because the anxious woman cannot yet hear what is being said.
(If you have been trying to start a daily quiet practice and keep stalling at the page, how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin walks the slowest possible re-entry. And if the practice has been the morning that keeps falling apart, how to start your day with god (morning routine that sticks) is the companion piece.)
Test two: Is your trust quieter than your strategising?
“If we are to have our whole heart turned towards God, we must have it turned away from the creature, from all that occupies and interests, whether of joy or sorrow. God is a being of such infinite greatness and glory, and our nature has become so estranged from Him, that it needs our whole heart and desires set upon Him, even in some little measure to know and receive Him. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. The message is one of deep meaning: ‘Take heed and be quiet;’ ‘In quietness shall be your strength;’ ‘It is good that a man should quietly wait.’”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it twice. The second time, read it as if Murray were sitting across the table from you, talking gently.
This is the most demanding of the three tests, because it touches the part of you that has been doing most of the work. The modern Christian woman who wants to know God’s will for her life has typically been strategising about it — running scenarios, weighing pros and cons, asking trusted friends, drafting and re-drafting the next chapter of her life on a yellow pad at the kitchen table. The strategising is not bad. It is, by ordinary standards, responsible.
Murray names it precisely. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. Notice what he includes in the list of hindrances. Not just the fears. Not just the worst-cases. The hopes, too. The gladnesses, too. The good scenarios you keep playing in your head — the one where the new role lands, the move works out, the calling clicks into place — those also hinder the perfect waiting on Him, because they are still your imagination doing the work He has not yet been given quiet enough to do.
This is the part that breaks the modern how to know god’s will for your life genre completely. The genre tells you to pray about it and seek wise counsel and write out the pros and cons. Murray is telling you that all three — even the praying, if it has become another form of strategising — are noise compared to the deeper practice of being quiet enough that He can speak. The strategising is what your soul does to feel in control. The quietness is what your soul does to be led.
In quietness shall be your strength. The verse Murray is quoting is from Isaiah, and the strength being promised is not the strength to figure it out. It is the strength of the woman who has stopped trying to figure it out and has, slowly, learned to trust that He is figuring it out through her stillness, not around it.
The second test, then, is internal. Is your trust quieter than your strategising? When you sit with the decision in a quiet room, do you feel — underneath the question — a settled trust, or a chronic anxious churning? If the churning is louder than the trust, the answer is not yet ready to be heard. Not because He is withholding. Because the noise inside you is louder than the still small voice. The second test is the patient reduction of the noise.
A pause — the body knows this
Sit somewhere quiet for a moment. The teaching has a body to it.
Put both feet flat on the floor. Let one slow breath in. On the exhale, drop the shoulders by an inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let the jaw unclench. Notice, if it helps, the small private inventory of decisions you have been carrying — the calling question, the next-step question, the what is God doing with my life question — and let your hands open slightly in your lap, palms upward, as you hold the second breath.
This is what Murray means by quietness. Not the absence of the questions. The lowering of the body that has been carrying them. The questions can stay. The carrying changes. Take one more slow exhale. Then read on.
(For the kind of evening journal practice that holds the unresolved questions without forcing them, a daily prayer journal that holds the asks you’re embarrassed to pray is the practical companion to this slow Murray reading.)
A note before the third test. The slow practice we have been walking — restful faith, the heart as His resting-place, the quietness that is louder than the strategising — is the daily shape the Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around. One short page each evening, room for the honest sentence, no demand to perform. If you have been trying to live this kind of quietness without a daily anchor and keep losing it by Wednesday, the journal is the held form of it.
Test three: Has the still small voice become hearable yet?
“So we shall gaze on its blessedness, until desire be inflamed, and the will with all its energies be roused to claim and possess the unspeakable blessing. 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.’”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it slowly. Hold the long phrase in the middle — the still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks.
Murray is drawing the image from First Kings 19, where Elijah, exhausted and suicidal under the juniper tree, is asked by God to wait at the mouth of a cave. The wind comes — and God is not in the wind. The earthquake comes — and God is not in the earthquake. The fire comes — and God is not in the fire. And then there is a still small voice, and Elijah wraps his face in his mantle and goes out, because the voice is finally the One he came for.
Murray takes this passage and makes it diagnostic. The third test of how to know God’s will for your life is not whether you can hear something. It is whether the still small voice — the voice that is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire — has become hearable. The dramatic forms are not where He usually speaks. The dramatic forms are decoys. The voice is quieter than the dramatic forms, and the woman whose interior life is too loud to hear something quieter than the wind will keep waiting at the cave for the wrong manifestation.
This is the test that turns the question of God’s will for your life from a question of external signs into a question of internal hearing. The signs are usually present. The hearing is what has been missing. Set yourselves in quiet trust before Him, waiting to hear His holy voice. The verb is waiting. The practice is the patient sitting in the cave, day by day, until the dramatic manifestations have all passed and the small voice — the one that is mightier than the storm but quieter than it — can be heard at last.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the most relieving of the three tests. The relief is in what Murray is not asking. He is not asking you to figure out the right job. He is not asking you to discern the next ten years. He is asking you to come, day by day, and sit at His feet long enough that the voice you have been listening for can finally land somewhere quiet enough to be heard. The will of God for your life is not, in Murray’s reading, a master plan you must decode. It is a Person you are slowly learning to hear, and the hearing of Him is itself the will. The decisions follow. The decisions are downstream.
Abide in me. The two words Murray ends the paragraph with are the whole of his answer. The will of God for your life is — first, before any specific assignment — that you abide in Him. The abiding is the calling. The job, the move, the relationship, the chapter ahead — those become clear from inside the abiding, not from outside it. The abiding is not the prerequisite for hearing the will. The abiding is the will. Everything else is its expression.
(The sibling articles in this Father-Analysis series sit at what is my purpose in life as a christian — tozer’s plain answer and how to discern god’s calling — ignatian discernment, which together carry the same question into Tozer’s and Ignatius’s vocabulary.)
What the three tests look like together, over a year
The three tests do not, in practice, get walked in order. They get walked simultaneously, slowly, in the small daily showing-up that Murray spent his life writing about. Has your heart become His resting-place? — the test of inward stillness. Is your trust quieter than your strategising? — the test of released control. Has the still small voice become hearable yet? — the test of patient listening.
A year of small daily prayer does not deliver the answer to how to know god’s will for your life in the form of a decision tree. It delivers a different woman. The woman at the end of the year is one in whom the chronic strategising has quieted, the heart has become the kind of resting-place He can settle in, and the still small voice has slowly become audible underneath the daily weather. From inside that woman, the decisions become clearer — not because she has more information, but because she has more interior space for the voice that was always speaking.
Murray would say: the question of how to know God’s will for your life is the wrong question, slightly. The right question is am I becoming the kind of woman God’s will can be heard inside? The two questions look similar from the outside. From the inside they are very different. The first is a question of strategy. The second is a question of formation. Murray’s three tests are about formation. The strategy is downstream.
What you can do this week is the small thing. Pick one of the three tests — the one that pricks. Hold it as the question for the week. Not the decision. The test. Is my heart His resting-place this morning? Or Is my trust quieter than my strategising right now? Or Have I sat still long enough today for the small voice to become hearable? Walk it for a week. Then the next test. Then the next.
The decision will surface. It usually surfaces from inside the third test — the patient listening — not from inside the strategising. The will of God is rarely loud. The will of God is rarely dramatic. The will of God is, almost always, the quiet thing that becomes obvious to the woman who has finally stopped being too loud inside to hear it.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds Murray’s three tests in proximity to the One whose will, slowly, becomes hearable.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — restful faith, the heart as His resting-place, the still small voice — into a daily companion built for the woman whose question of God’s will is, at last, ready to be held rather than solved.
