What Does the Bible Say About Waiting? — Murray on Waiting on God
⏱ 11 min read
You have asked this question more times than you can count, and most of the times you have asked it the answer has come back as a verse on a shareable square — they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, in a sans-serif font, over a watercolour mountain. You have read the verse. You have screenshotted it. You have closed the phone, and the wait has continued, and the verse — which is a true verse — has begun to feel like a sentence that was meant for someone else’s wait, not yours. The wait you are inside is longer, quieter, less photogenic, and the cheerful framing of it on the Christian internet has started to scrape.
The older Christian tradition wrote about waiting in a different register. It did not promise the wait would be short. It did not promise the renewing would arrive on the schedule you were hoping for. It said something stranger and more durable — that waiting on God was not a holding pattern but its own form of nearness, its own particular school of the soul, a posture in which something was being done in you even while nothing was being done around you. The Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow daily waiting into a 140-day companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — let the framing be re-set.
The article that follows is a slow read of two passages from Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God — the small, dense thirty-one-day reading he wrote at the end of the nineteenth century for Christians inside long waits. Murray was not a sentimental writer. He was a Dutch Reformed pastor in South Africa, a serious man, and Waiting on God is one of the quieter classics of the devotional shelf because he refuses to soften what waiting actually requires. Read slowly.
What the older Christian view actually said
The modern Christian conversation about waiting tends to fold quickly into two impossible framings. The first is the timeline framing — God’s timing is perfect, the answer is on the way, hold on a little longer. The second is the lesson framing — God is using this wait to teach you something, so look for what He is teaching. Both framings, kindly meant, do the same quiet harm. They treat the wait as a means to an end. They borrow their dignity from the arrival they are pointing at. They cannot speak to the woman whose wait has now stretched long enough that the imagined arrival has become abstract, and whose interior life still has to be lived inside the long meanwhile.
Murray writes inside a different framing. For Murray, the wait is not the corridor between the prayer and the answer. The wait is the place where the soul learns the One it is waiting on — and the learning is the gift, not the answer. The wait, slowly entered, becomes a particular form of nearness that the soul could not have entered any other way. Murray would not have promised you a short wait. He would have told you, gently, that the wait you are inside is a school, and the curriculum is the One who is teaching, not the lesson He is teaching, and the curriculum has its own pace, and the pace will not be hurried by your wanting it to be.
So when you ask what does the Bible say about waiting, Murray’s answer is not the answer is coming, hold on. Murray’s answer is the One you are waiting on is here, in the waiting, and the waiting itself is where the nearness lives. That is the framing the rest of this article will sit inside.
(If the wait has been the kind that has emptied prayer of its earlier easiness, a prayer journal and devotion — 30 prompts that earn their place is the daily companion. If the wait has gone through a New Year and is now stretching into another year, a women’s prayer journal for the year ahead and a new-year prayer journal for women sit alongside this one. And if the wait has become the kind that holds the small asks you are now embarrassed to keep praying — please, the same ask, again, this year — a daily prayer journal that holds the asks you’re embarrassed to pray walks the practical companion.)
The first passage: the whole heart turned
“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.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The sentence to sit with is the last one. 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 that Murray is not separating the bad distractions from the good ones. He is not saying the fears hinder you and the hopes help you. He is saying — gently, devastatingly — that the hopes hinder too. The things that make you glad hinder. The objects of your waiting, the imagined arrivals, the small daily fantasies of how the answer will come — these are not neutral. They occupy the heart in places the heart needs to be vacant for God to fill.
This is the part of Murray’s diagnosis that the cheerful Christian internet cannot reach. The internet would tell you to cling to hope. Murray would tell you that the cling itself is the obstruction. The hope you have been clinging to — that the husband will arrive, that the diagnosis will reverse, that the prodigal will return, that the door will open — is a hope worth having, and it is also a hope that, when clung to, becomes a small substitute for the One you are actually waiting on. The cling is gentle. The cling is human. The cling is also, in Murray’s vocabulary, a quiet hindrance to the perfect waiting that would have been available if the heart could have set even the hope itself down at His feet.
This is hard to hear. Murray knew it was hard. The whole of Waiting on God is written in the voice of a man who is asking the reader to do something genuinely difficult — to release not only the bad attachments but the good ones, not only the fears but the hopes, into a quietness that the cleverer parts of the soul will resist. The releasing is not a single act. The releasing is the daily work of the wait. Each morning, the small daily setting-down of the hope at His feet. Each morning, the small daily thou hast made us for Thyself, not for the arrival. Each morning, the slow learning that the One who is enough has been enough all along, and the wait is the school in which the heart slowly catches up to what the head has always known.
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.’ Murray gives you three Old Testament fragments here, and the verbs are doing the work. Take heed. Be quiet. Quietly wait. Not strive. Not hold on. Not cling. The verbs of the older tradition’s waiting are small, slow, almost passive — and the passivity is not weakness. The passivity is the trained posture of the soul that has learned the wait is not its work to perform.
Mid-page: a small note
The Prayer Journal for Women was built around this kind of slow daily setting-down — one short passage each evening, room for one honest sentence, no demand to perform the contentment you do not yet feel. The 140 days are not a programme to finish the wait. They are a daily home for the wait — the small evening place where the hope can be set down again at His feet, and the soul can practise the quietly wait that the older tradition asked for.
The somatic that goes with the long wait
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it.
Sit somewhere quiet. Notice where the wait is sitting in the body today. Most women in long waits carry the wait low — across the lower belly, the hips, the place where breath stops short on the way down. The body of a long-waiting soul has begun to breathe shallowly, almost without noticing, because breathing all the way down would mean meeting the ache that has been living there. Put one hand low on the belly, below the navel. Take one slow inhale, not deep, just slow, and let it go all the way to the hand. On the exhale, let the breath stay slow on the way out — slower than the inhale — until the lungs are empty enough that the next inhale arrives on its own.
The body of the woman who has been waiting a long time has stopped letting the breath touch the ache. The somatic of quietly wait is the slow re-permission of the breath to go all the way down — not because the ache will be solved by breathing, but because the body learns it can hold the ache without bracing against it. The bracing is the part that exhausts. The slow downward breath is the body’s version of take heed and be quiet. Three slow breaths. Then take the hand away and continue reading.
The second passage: rest 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. Blessed rest! the fruit and the foretaste and the fellowship of God’s own rest! found of them who thus come to Jesus to abide in Him. It is the peace of God, the great calm of the eternal world, that passeth all understanding, and that keeps the heart and mind.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it twice. The phrase to keep is resting in the arms of Everlasting Love.
Murray is doing two things in this passage that the cheerful internet rarely manages together. The first is that he names the abiding as giving up — the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led. The verb is plain. The waiting Christian does not strive. She gives up. The giving-up is not collapse; it is the deliberate release of the controlling motion of the soul that has been trying to manage the wait. The release is daily. The release is what the wait is for.
The second thing Murray does is name the rest — resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Notice the image. Not a corridor. Not a holding cell. Not a queue at the divine office. Arms. The wait, when it is entered Murray’s way, is not the absence of the One you are waiting on. The wait is the arms. The waiting is where the holding happens. The answer you are waiting for may or may not arrive on the timeline you are hoping for. The arms — the Everlasting Love whose holding is the actual substance of the wait — are present now, in the wait, and the wait is the place where the soul learns the holding.
This is what Murray means by the great calm of the eternal world. The calm is not a calm that the wait produces. The calm is a calm that already exists, in the heart of God, and the soul that has learned to abide is the soul that has learned to settle inside a calm that was already there. The calm is not your achievement. The calm is the climate of the One you are waiting on, and the long wait is the slow acclimatising of the heart to His climate.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the line worth keeping near the page. Resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Not because the wait is not hard — Murray knew it was. Not because the arrival is guaranteed — Murray would not promise it. Because the arms are not at the end of the wait. The arms are the wait. The waiting on God is, in its slow daily form, the practice of letting yourself be held while the answer takes the time it takes.
What the practice will actually feel like over a year
The slow daily setting-down Murray is teaching will not, in the first weeks, feel like rest. It will feel like the absence of striving — which, to a soul that has been striving for a long time, will feel uncomfortably close to giving up. There will be days the setting-down feels false, performed, like you are doing a contemplative exercise from a book while the actual ache continues underneath. Murray would tell you that this is ordinary. The contemplative posture does not begin in feeling. It begins in the small daily commitment to the posture, regardless of the feeling, and the feeling slowly catches up.
Over a year of small daily practice, the centre of gravity moves. The ache will still surface — Murray never promised it would not — but the soul that has spent a year practising the abiding will start to notice that the ache surfaces inside a wider container. The arms have become, slowly, familiar. The settling has become, slowly, a daily home. The wait still has not ended. The waiting on God has become, however, the place the soul actually lives — and that, in the older Christian tradition, is the rest the verse always meant.
(The sibling articles in this series sit at what does the Bible say about singleness — Augustine and de Sales and how to be content in singleness — Hannah More on the single life.)
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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.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — quietly wait, the giving-up of oneself, the arms of Everlasting Love — into a daily companion built for the woman whose long wait is, at last, ready to be lived as nearness rather than corridor.
