How to Find God’s Will — Murray on the Daily Yes
⏱ 16 min read
You have been waiting for the master plan to arrive. The vocational clarity, the directional sign, the moment of obvious leading that the discipleship books promised would come if you prayed long enough and listened carefully enough. The master plan has not arrived. The question of how to find God’s will keeps sitting in your week the way an unanswered letter sits on the kitchen counter — not urgent enough to deal with right now, not small enough to throw away. You have started, quietly, to wonder if you are doing the asking wrong, or if there is something about your particular life that has made you difficult to lead.
This is the slow version. Andrew Murray spent forty years writing about the same question, and the answer he kept returning to is not the answer the master-plan framework expects. Murray’s answer is that God’s will is rarely found in advance, as a blueprint. God’s will is found, day by day, in the next obedience — the small thing the soul knows it is being asked for today, which when said yes to becomes the doorway to tomorrow’s small asking, which becomes the doorway to the next, and the cumulative path of small daily yeses turns out, in retrospect, to have been the will of God for the life — walked rather than handed over in advance. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow daily attention into a small evening practice, if you would like 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 his most patient teaching on how to find God’s will is in two books — Waiting on God and Abide in Christ — which together describe what the daily yes actually looks like in the life of a Christian who has, slowly, given up on the master-plan model. The three passages we will walk are not technique. They are a description of a posture, and the posture is, in Murray’s reading, the will of God in motion.
The first passage: the perfect waiting
“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 slowly. Then read it again, attending to the phrase perfect waiting.
Murray is making a careful distinction the modern Christian ear does not usually catch. The waiting he describes is not waiting for something. The waiting is not the agitated, leaning-forward kind of waiting you do at the airport when the flight is delayed. The waiting is perfect — meaning, in Murray’s vocabulary, complete, settled, undivided. It is the kind of waiting that has stopped trying to extract an answer from God and has, slowly, become content to be in His presence whether or not the answer is given today.
This is the first thing Murray says about how to find God’s will. The finding does not begin with searching. The finding begins with the settling of a soul that has stopped searching long enough to be present to 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 list of hindrances includes things the modern Christian woman would not have thought to put on a list of hindrances. The fears, of course. The efforts to figure things out, of course. But also the hopes — the imagined good outcomes you have been rehearsing. Also the gladness — the joy attached to the option you are hoping He will choose. Murray includes all of these because all of them are something other than God Himself, and any one of them, when the soul attaches to it, displaces the perfect waiting.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the line that exposes what the chronic question how to find God’s will has actually been. The question has been, often, a sophisticated form of strategising — a polite religious version of how do I get to the outcome I am quietly hoping for, in a way that feels like obedience. Murray, gently, names this. Stirs our efforts. Awakens our hopes. These are not the absence of God’s will. These are the noise that drowns out God’s will. The perfect waiting is the slow patient lowering of the noise until the still, small voice of His leading becomes audible.
In quietness shall be your strength. The verse Murray quotes 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, settled into the quiet trust that He is leading her, whether or not she can yet see where. The quietness is not passivity. The quietness is the kind of active, sustained attention that the soul learns over months, and which becomes — in the patient woman — the soil in which the daily yes is heard.
The first practice for the woman trying to learn how to find God’s will, then, is not journalling about her future. It is the slow daily showing-up to be quiet enough that He can be the only thing in the room. The decisions will surface. The decisions are downstream. The first move is the perfect waiting.
(If the daily small practice of this kind of quietness has been the thing you keep losing track of by Wednesday, how to start your day with god (morning routine that sticks) walks the slowest practical re-entry. And if the practice keeps falling apart at the page itself — that you sit down and the hopes and fears flood in — what to write in a christian journal when you feel blank holds the empty-page evenings.)
The second passage: the daily setting at His feet
“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. Then again, attending to the words day by day.
This is the passage where Murray names the daily yes most plainly. Day by day. Not once. Not weekly. Not in moments of dramatic seeking. Day by day. The will of God for your life, in Murray’s reading, is not a thing you discover once and then live out. It is a thing you sit at the feet of, daily, and the daily setting-down at His feet is — in fact — the form the discovery takes.
This is the line that reframes the whole how to find God’s will question for the modern Christian woman. The question has assumed that finding is a one-time event. I find the will. Then I do the will. Murray says: the finding is the doing, in the only form the finding ever actually takes. Day by day let us set ourselves at His feet. The sitting at His feet is the will, in motion. Tomorrow’s small obedience will come from inside today’s sitting. Next month’s clarity will come from inside this month’s daily presence. The will of God is not a destination revealed at the start of the journey. The will of God is the daily yes, said freshly each morning, walked freshly each day.
The image Murray uses is precise. The still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks. This is from First Kings 19, where Elijah, exhausted and suicidal under the juniper tree, is asked 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. The voice was quieter than all the dramatic manifestations, but it was the One Elijah came for.
Murray takes this story and makes it diagnostic. The will of God is rarely loud. The will of God is rarely dramatic. The will of God is, almost always, the quiet daily thing that becomes hearable to the woman who has set herself, day by day, at His feet — and which is missed by the woman who is waiting for the dramatic manifestations.
‘Abide in me.’ Two words. Murray ends the paragraph with the two words of Jesus from John 15, and they carry the whole of his answer to the how to find God’s will question. The will is not, in the first instance, a what. The will is a where. Abide in me. The where is the will. The doing — the activities, the decisions, the callings, the seasons — emerge from inside the abiding. The abiding is what you say yes to first, and the daily yes to the abiding is what generates the smaller daily yeses to the specific obediences that, cumulatively, become the shape of a life walked in His will.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the move that turns the abstract find God’s will question into a practical daily question. The daily question is not what is the master plan? The daily question is am I abiding in Him today? The yes to the daily question is the yes that, repeated over years, becomes the will of God for the life. The master plan question, in this framing, mostly dissolves. It is not that the master plan is unreal. It is that the master plan is what the cumulative daily yeses turn out to have been, when you look back at the life from the far end of it. Walking it is the only way to discover it.
A note before the third passage. The daily small practice of day by day at His feet is the kind of slow contemplative work the Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around. One short passage each evening, a place to record the small yes of the day, no demand to perform. If you have been trying to live this kind of daily abiding without a structure that holds the yeses, the journal is the held form of it.
A pause — the body knows this too
Sit somewhere quiet. Murray’s vocabulary is theological, but the practice has a body to it, and the body is where the daily yes becomes most usable.
Put both feet flat on the floor. Let your hands rest in your lap, palms upward — the small physical gesture of receiving. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the shoulders drop by an inch. Notice — gently — that the question you came to the page with (the decision, the calling, the what is God doing with my life question) is not, right now, asked to be answered. Right now, the only question is the small one: am I willing, today, to abide? Take one more slow breath. On the second exhale, silently say the daily yes: Yes. Today. I will sit at His feet today. Not for the master plan. For this day. The yes is for the day.
This is what Murray’s daily yes feels like in the body. Not a dramatic resolve. A quiet, sustainable, repeatable inner movement — the kind of yes a woman can actually say every morning, for years, because it does not require her to know the future. It only requires her to be willing for today. Let one more exhale go all the way out. Then read on.
(For the kind of evening practice that holds the daily yes when the rest of the day has been chaotic, a morning devotional for today (when you have six minutes before the day starts) is the morning companion, and a daily prayer journal that holds the asks you’re embarrassed to pray holds the evening side.)
The third passage: child, abide in me
“‘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
Read it once. Then again, slowly, with attention to the line let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command.
This is the passage that holds the woman who has tried to walk the daily yes and has failed to walk it consistently. The pages above describe the practice — the perfect waiting, the daily setting at His feet — but the honest woman knows what has happened in the weeks she has tried it. The waiting has been imperfect. The daily has been twice-weekly at best. The yes has been said in the morning and forgotten by ten. The chronic failure to walk the daily yes consistently is the part the discipleship books rarely address, and Murray addresses it here directly.
Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command. The line is doing careful work. Murray is not telling the woman who has failed to walk the daily yes that she should feel ashamed. He is telling her — gently — that the consciousness of failure is itself the doorway back into the practice. The failure is not the end of the discernment. The failure is the renewed invitation. Listen more earnestly than ever is what comes after the failure, not what comes after the success. The path is not linear. The path is the slow repeated returning, after each falling away, to the voice that is still saying — patiently — Child, abide in me.
The word child is doing the rest of the work. Murray is quoting Jesus’s tenderness — the way the voice that calls the woman back is not stern, not punishing, not impatient with her chronic falling away from the practice. The voice is the voice of a parent calling a tired child home. Child, abide in me. The form of address shapes the form of the returning. You do not come back to the practice as a failed disciple. You come back as a child being called by name, lovingly, again. The daily yes is renewable, because the One asking for it is the kind of One who renews the asking with tenderness rather than withdrawal.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the line that makes the daily yes sustainable over years. The practice is not maintained by performance. The practice is maintained by the patient renewal of the call. You will fall away from the daily yes. You will go through weeks of forgetting. You will return to the page and find the prayer dry. Murray would say: the dryness is not a sign that you have lost the will of God. The dryness is the season inside which the voice — Child, abide in me — is, slowly, becoming hearable again. The renewal is His to give. The returning is yours.
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. Murray ends the passage with the deepest of his lines on the will of God. The will is not — finally — a project the woman is executing. The will is the slow surrender of a woman who is being taught, led, and held by a Love older than time. The daily yes is the small daily participation in being held. The being held is the will.
(The sibling articles in this Father-Analysis cluster sit at how to know god’s will for your life — murray’s three tests and what is my purpose in life as a christian — tozer’s plain answer, which together carry the calling and purpose questions in Murray’s and Tozer’s longer vocabulary.)
What the daily yes does, over a year
The woman who walks the daily yes for a year does not, at the end of the year, have the master plan in hand. She has something different and more durable. She has a soul that has been formed by daily abiding — a soul whose centre of gravity has slowly shifted toward Him, whose interior noise has slowly lowered, whose ear has slowly become tuned to the still small voice, whose decisions, when they arrive, surface from inside a settled abiding rather than from an anxious search.
The decisions, walked from inside that soul, will not feel like solving a puzzle. They will feel like the next thing. The next obedience. The next small yes that, in the context of the daily abiding, is obvious. The master plan, Murray would say, is what the cumulative next-things turn out to have been, when the life is looked back on from the far end. Walking it is the only way to write it.
What you can do this week is the smallest possible thing. Pick one of the three passages. Write a line from it on a small piece of paper. Put it where you will see it. Each morning, read the line slowly. Each evening, say the daily yes: today, I will sit at His feet. Today, I will abide. That is the practice. The practice repeated for a year is the answer to how to find God’s will, in the only form the answer ever takes.
The will of God is rarely loud. The will of God is rarely dramatic. The will of God is, almost always, the quiet daily thing that becomes obvious to the woman who has finally said yes to the daily abiding, and who walks the next step from inside it. The daily yes is the answer. The daily yes is the will, in motion.
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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 daily yes in proximity to the One whose will is, day by day, walked rather than handed over in advance.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — perfect waiting, day by day at His feet, child abide in me — into a daily companion built for the woman whose question of God’s will is, at last, ready to be lived rather than solved.
