Andrew Murray on the Inner Chamber and the Outer Life
⏱ 12 min read
Your outer life is full. The calendar is loaded. The roles are many. The work matters. The household runs. The relationships are tended. And your inner life is hollow — not absent, exactly, but thinned, intermittent, lived in fragments between the larger demands, never quite settling into the country it used to inhabit when you were younger and less in demand. The hollowness has not been caused by anything wrong. It has been caused, slowly, by the outer life expanding to fill the time the inner life used to occupy. Andrew Murray, in The Deeper Christian Life, named the small room the outer-life Christian has been losing — and the slow practice of returning to it. What is a contemplative Christian, in Murray’s reading? Not a monastic. Not a person with a different calling than yours. A Christian who has kept, faithfully, the small daily entering of the inner chamber — the hidden interior that holds, like a quiet root, every visible part of the outer life. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of inner-chamber practice into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Murray wrote the chapter The Inner Chamber in The Deeper Christian Life for the active Christian — the believer whose Christianity had become almost entirely outer. The chapter is not a rebuke. It is a recovery instruction. The outer life is good. The outer life is the legitimate field of Christian work. The outer life cannot, however, carry itself. The inner chamber is the small daily room from which the outer life is fed — and without that room, the outer life slowly hollows, no matter how visibly faithful it remains. Murray’s pastoral concern was that an entire generation of his believers was running on the outer life alone, with the inner chamber quietly unused.
The first passage — the abiding work is the work of the heart
Murray, in Absolute Surrender, named where the inner life actually lives, with a precision the active Christian needs to hear.
“But the abiding work is the work of the heart, not of the brain, the work of the heart clinging to and resting in Jesus, a work in which the Holy Spirit links us to Christ Jesus. Oh, do believe that deeper down than the brain, deep down in the inner life, you can abide in Christ, so that every moment you are free the consciousness will come: ‘Blessed Jesus, I am still in Thee.’ If you will learn for a time to put aside other work and to get into this abiding contact with the heavenly Vine, you will find that fruit will come.”
— Andrew Murray, Absolute Surrender
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is deeper down than the brain, deep down in the inner life, you can abide in Christ. The inner chamber is not a metaphor. It is a location. The outer life lives mostly in the brain — the planning, the calendar, the email, the analysis, the strategy, the management. The inner life lives deeper down than that. The active Christian has been trying to do her inner life from the brain — by reading more, by analysing the sermon more carefully, by adding another book to the pile, by thinking harder about God — and the inner chamber, by its nature, cannot be reached from the brain. The brain is in the wrong room.
The work of the heart clinging to and resting in Jesus. This is the inner-chamber work in seven words. Clinging. Resting. Two verbs the brain cannot perform. The brain analyses, plans, comprehends — and the heart clings and rests. The active Christian has been using the brain’s verbs to attempt the heart’s work, and the work has not happened. The inner chamber is the small daily room where the brain is allowed to quiet long enough for the heart’s verbs to start working again. That is, finally, what a contemplative Christian is — a believer who has learned to drop, daily, beneath the brain’s room into the heart’s room, where the abiding is actually done.
If you will learn for a time to put aside other work and to get into this abiding contact with the heavenly Vine, you will find that fruit will come. The phrase for a time is Murray’s gentle realism. He is not asking the active Christian to abandon the outer life. He is asking for the small daily time in which the other work is put aside. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. The first hour of the morning. The last hour of the evening. Some daily window in which the brain is allowed to quiet and the heart is allowed to enter the chamber. The fruit will come. The outer life, fed from inside, will start to be the outer expression of a fed interior rather than the chronic depletion of an unfed one.
(For the way the active Christian has more often lost her inner life, the sibling article what Andrew Murray meant by the deeper Christian life walks the inward turn itself, the two covenants Andrew Murray distinguished names why the outer effort cannot finally carry the inner life, and why Andrew Murray said the Holy Spirit is the Christian’s secret describes the Person who waits in the chamber when you enter.)
The somatic — for the body that has been holding the outer life together
Pause here. The outer life has not only lived in your calendar. It has lived in your shoulders. The bracing has been the body’s way of keeping the schedule moving. The jaw has been set against the next demand. The chest has been working at the surface, in shallow breaths, because deep breaths take time the outer life has not been granting.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders lower by a small amount — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small effort of holding them up. Let the jaw release. Place one hand lightly on the lower belly, well below the navel, where the deepest breath would land if the body were permitted to take one. Take one slow inhale, not deep, only slow — and let the breath travel all the way down to the hand. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale, until the next breath arrives on its own. Repeat once.
The lowering of the breath into the lower belly is the body’s literal small entering of the inner chamber. The breath, like the soul, has been living near the surface because the outer life has not been making room for the depth. The slow lower breath teaches the body that the depth is still reachable. The body has not forgotten how. It has been waiting for the small daily permission. The inner chamber is, at its most ordinary bodily level, the room your breath can finally reach the bottom of.
The second passage — the place of secret prayer
Murray, in Lord, Teach Us to Pray, named the inner chamber under its older biblical name — the closet — and gave the sentence that the outer-life Christian most needs to take into the small daily window.
“O let the place of secret prayer become to me the most beloved spot on earth. And, Lord! hear me as I pray that Thou wouldest everywhere bless the closets of Thy believing people. Let Thy wonderful revelation of a Father’s tenderness free all young Christians from every thought of secret prayer as a duty or a burden, and lead them to regard it as the highest privilege of their life, a joy and a blessing. Bring back all who are discouraged, because they cannot find aught to bring Thee in prayer. O give them to understand that they have only to come with their emptiness to Him who has all to give, and delights to do it.”
— Andrew Murray, Lord, Teach Us to Pray
Read it twice. Slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is the place of secret prayer become to me the most beloved spot on earth. This is the inner chamber, named in plain affection. Not the most disciplined spot. Not the most productive spot. The most beloved. The chamber is a place — a small physical location in your house, a chair, a corner, a window seat — that has, over months and years of small daily returning, become the spot you actually want to be in. The outer life has been displacing the love of that spot. The recovery of the inner chamber is, in part, the recovery of its belovedness.
Free all young Christians from every thought of secret prayer as a duty or a burden, and lead them to regard it as the highest privilege of their life. This is Murray’s quiet correction of the language the active Christian has been using. Should pray more. Need to pray. Must do my prayer time. The vocabulary of duty has hollowed the chamber by treating it as a task. Murray asks the language to rotate — from duty to privilege, from burden to beloved spot. The inner chamber is not a thing you owe God. The inner chamber is a gift God is offering you, and the daily small entering is the receiving of a gift, not the discharging of an obligation.
They have only to come with their emptiness to Him who has all to give, and delights to do it. This is the sentence the discouraged Christian needs to write down. The inner chamber does not require you to arrive full. It is the room you come to empty — with nothing to bring, with no prepared prayer list, with no clarity about what to say. Him who has all to give, and delights to do it. The Father, in Murray’s vocabulary, delights in the emptiness brought to the closet. The emptiness is not the problem. The emptiness is the small daily honesty that lets the giving happen. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around this exact arrival — a small page, a short passage, room for the honest empty sentence — so the chamber can be entered tonight without your having to manufacture the fullness that has, for years, kept you from entering at all.
The third passage — the divine Presence given unceasingly within
Murray, in Waiting on God, gave the sentence that names what is in the inner chamber when you enter it — and what makes the chamber the source the outer life has been thirsting for.
“Enter deep into thy relation of dependence as creature on God, to receive from Him every moment what He gives. Enter deeper still into His covenant of redemption, with His promise to restore more gloriously than ever what thou hadst lost, and by His Son and Spirit to give within you unceasingly, His actual divine Presence and Power. And thus wait upon your God continually and only.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
The verb is enter. Repeated twice. Enter deep — and enter deeper still. The inner chamber is not a single room. It is a series of rooms, each one further in, each one quieter, each one closer to the actual divine Presence and Power that is being given within you unceasingly. The outer life has kept you in the foyer. The slow daily practice walks you, room by room, further in.
To receive from Him every moment what He gives. This is what is in the inner chamber — the unceasing inward giving, the moment-by-moment receiving, the slow soaking of the soul in what He has been quietly handing across the whole time. The outer life has been thirsting because it has been trying to run on what it could generate by itself. The inner chamber is where the generated stops and the received starts. The chamber feeds the outer life by being the room in which the outer life is, daily, slowly, refilled from the only source that fills.
This answers the question. What is a contemplative Christian? A Christian whose outer life is held by the small daily entering of the inner chamber. Not a quietist. Not a withdrawn person. Not someone who has abandoned the outer life — Murray himself was a furiously active pastor, missionary advocate, writer, and preacher, and he was, by his own definition, a contemplative Christian, because he kept the inner chamber faithfully. The contemplative Christian is the active Christian whose action is fed from the inside, by the unceasing inward Giver who waits in the chamber for the small daily receiving. The activity and the contemplation are not opposites. The contemplation is what makes the activity sustainable.
What the slow practice will do over a year
If you walk the question what is a contemplative Christian with Murray’s three passages as your quiet companion for the next year, what changes is not the outer life. The calendar will still be full. The roles will still be many. The work will still matter. What changes is the source of the energy that is doing the outer life. The energy stops being scraped from the bottom of an unfed interior. It starts being drawn, slowly, from the small daily filling that happens when you enter the chamber. The hollowness lifts. The outer life, fed from inside, begins to feel like the outflow of a fed soul rather than the chronic depletion of an unfed one. The contemplative Christian is not a person you become by stepping away from your life. She is a person you become by entering, faithfully, the inner room your life has been waiting for you to come back to.
Murray would say — and The Deeper Christian Life says, in its closing pages — that the chamber is always open. The slow daily entering is the practice. The unceasing inward giving is His.
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A daily home for the inner-chamber 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 — a small daily inner-chamber on the page, into which the outer life can be set down for half an hour, and from which the outer life can be slowly fed.
We plan, in time, to reprint The Deeper Christian Life through Everspring Press in a slow modern edition for the Christian whose outer life has been the whole of her Christianity for too long, and whose inner chamber is, finally, ready to be entered again.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — the abiding work of the heart deeper than the brain, the place of secret prayer as the most beloved spot on earth, the unceasing inward giving received in quiet — into a daily companion for the active Christian whose outer life is full, and whose inner chamber is ready, slowly, to become the room everything else is held from.
