Andrew Murray on the Three Stages of Abiding
⏱ 11 min read
You have been a Christian for years, and the relationship has, for some time now, sat at a surface that will not deepen. You read the verses. You pray the prayers. You attend the services. The interior is not cold; the interior is simply level — not falling away, but not opening either, and you have begun to wonder, in evenings you would not speak aloud, whether this is as much of Him as you are going to know in this life. Andrew Murray, in Abide in Christ, wrote with great pastoral patience for the Christian woman in exactly this stretch. He believed abiding was not a single position but a deepening journey, that the same word could carry an inexperienced soul through her first awkward yes and also carry a long-time Christian into depths she had not yet known existed, and that the question what are the stages of Christian growth could be answered, in part, by walking the slow widening of what abide itself means as the years pass. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries the daily form of this slow deepening, if you would like a place to take the next stretch. For now — read slowly.
Murray was sixty years into his own walk when he wrote much of what he wrote about abiding. He did not believe the journey ended at conversion, or at the first felt rest, or at the first crisis surrendered. He believed the journey opened, in stages, as the soul became willing to keep going. The three passages below are not three stages by Murray’s explicit numbering — he was less systematic than the modern reader prefers — but they map, naturally, onto the three deepenings most Christian women walk through across a long life of abiding.
The first stage — the soul that truly hears Him speak the word
The earliest stage of abiding, the one a Christian woman begins inside of after her first quiet yes, is the stage in which the word abide is heard for the first time as a word Christ Himself is speaking to her, not as a verse she has been reading about.
“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.
The line worth keeping near the page is the soul that truly hears Jesus Himself speak the word. The first stage of abiding is not the doing of the word. It is the hearing of it as personal speech. The verses about abiding have been on the page for years; the first stage begins on the evening when one of those verses lifts off the page and becomes a sentence Christ is saying, in the small inward voice, to you. The shift is quiet. The verse does not change. The hearing of it changes. The address becomes second-person singular. Abide in me becomes a thing said to you, in this kitchen, on this evening.
Murray’s first stage is the stage of receiving the address. The soul receives the word, and with the word the power to accept and to hold the blessing He offers. The receiving is not strenuous. The receiving requires the quiet trust in which the still small voice can be heard. This is why, in the early years of a deepening walk, the practice is mostly learning to be quiet enough. The verse, the chair, the longer exhale, the small evening half-hour — these are not the abiding itself. They are the quiet in which the abiding can begin to be heard.
For the woman who has been stuck at surface, the first thing to ask is whether the verses have ever lifted off the page in this way. If they have not, the next stretch is not more reading. The next stretch is more quiet around the reading. The address is being spoken. The hearing requires the hush. (For the foundational reading on the receiving posture, why Andrew Murray said abiding is not effort walks the slow companion essay. For the daily word that lives inside the address, the daily Word Andrew Murray spoke to his soul is the next reading in this hub.)
The somatic — for the body at the edge of the next stage
Pause here. The body has, for some time, been at the edge of the next stage without your noticing. The shoulders that lifted in the surface stretch have not, yet, learned to lower in the deeper one. The breath that pulled high in the chest during the level years has not, yet, been allowed to travel further down. The body has a sense the soul does not, yet, have words for — that there is more available, that the door has not been opened, that the next stage is sitting there waiting on a small permission you have not, yet, given.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat on the floor. Let your hands rest, palms up, on your knees. Take one slow inhale.
On the exhale, let the breath go further down than usual — past the upper chest, past the diaphragm, into the lower belly. Let the abdomen soften under the breath. Notice, if you can, the small unfamiliar feeling of breath in a place breath does not usually go.
One more slow inhale. One more longer exhale into the same lower place. Let the lower back soften against the chair. Let the small chronic hold at the base of the spine release by a quarter of an inch.
The body has just felt the difference between the surface stage and the next one. The surface stage uses the upper chest. The deeper stage uses the whole of the torso. The body knows the difference, and the body is willing to go further. The soul, in its own slower way, is being invited into the same widening. The journey is from a small chest-high prayer life to a whole-bodied one, and the body is, often, the part of you that is already most ready to take the next step.
The second stage — the giving up of oneself
The middle stage of abiding, the one a Christian woman enters into after the first hearing has settled into daily practice, is the stage in which the address is no longer just received but responded to with a slow handing-over of the parts of the self that had, until now, been quietly held back.
“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 once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
The giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led. This is the work of the middle stage. The early stage is the hearing. The middle stage is the handing over. The two are different. In the early years, you sat in the chair and let the word be spoken. In the middle stretch, the word has been spoken often enough that something more is being asked — that the parts of your life you have been keeping in your own management be, gently and progressively, handed over to His. The money, the children, the calendar, the fear, the small dream you have been holding privately, the bitterness you have been carrying about a person who hurt you, the part of your inner life you have not, yet, let Him into.
The middle stage is uncomfortable in a way the early stage is not. The early stage feels like rest. The middle stage feels, often, like a series of small inward dyings. To be ruled — meaning your management is not the final word. To be taught — meaning the things you thought you already knew are being re-formed. To be led — meaning the direction is not, finally, yours to choose. Each verb is a small relinquishment. The relinquishments are not, however, losses. They are the slow opening of the room of the soul into chambers the surface stage did not have access to. Blessed rest is on the other side of the giving up. The blessed rest is deeper than the first rest was. The peace of God keeps the heart and mind in a way the early stage’s quieter peace did not, yet, have the depth to do.
For the woman who has been stuck at surface, the question of the middle stage is: what have I been holding back? Not as a moral inventory. As a slow inward asking, sat with for several quiet evenings, until the part you have been holding back becomes visible, and the giving-up can begin in the smallest possible increment. The middle stage does not require the whole handing-over at once. The middle stage requires the first handing-over, then the next, then the next, over years. (The Prayer Journal for Women is built as a daily companion for exactly this slow handing-over — one short page each evening, with room for the verse and room for the honest sentence about which small part of today might be set down at His feet.)
The third stage — entering deeper still into the covenant of dependence
The third stage of abiding, the one a long-time Christian woman walks into in the latter stretches of her life, is the stage in which the giving-up has become so practised that dependence itself has become the texture of the interior.
“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 twice. Slowly.
Enter deep. Enter deeper still. Notice the verbs Murray uses. The third stage is not a plateau. The third stage is a further descent — a continued deepening that does not end this side of glory. Enter deep into thy relation of dependence — meaning the surface acknowledgement that you are dependent on God for breath and bread becomes a felt, hourly, body-level acknowledgement that every moment what you have is given. The food. The breath in your chest. The next thought in your head. The small ability to keep going. None of it is yours by right. All of it is being given, freshly, this moment.
The third stage is the stage in which the giving up of self has settled so deeply that the soul lives, naturally, in receiving. To receive from Him every moment what He gives — this is the texture of the deepest abiding. The early stage was the hearing. The middle stage was the handing over. The third stage is the continuous receiving, in which the soul has stopped, at long last, trying to own anything, and lives instead inside the gift of each moment as it is given.
The line worth keeping near the page is enter deeper still into His covenant of redemption. The third stage is not a final arrival. Even in the third stage there is deeper still. Murray, who walked this himself for decades, was not promising a finishing line. He was promising that the journey opens, and keeps opening, for the soul willing to keep walking. The stages of Christian growth, in Murray’s vocabulary, do not end at three. The first three only open the door to the slow widening that the rest of your life will be the inside of. (For the wider context of dependence as the soil of all the rest, what Andrew Murray meant by Abide in Christ is the foundational reading. For a bridge essay on the quiet voice that speaks across all three stages, how to recognize God’s voice — Brother Lawrence’s quiet answer walks the same theme in Lawrence’s vocabulary.)
What the slow reading will do over a year
If you sit with Murray’s three passages — one a month for three months — and let the question what are the stages of Christian growth be a slow companion for the rest of the year, what shifts is not the location of your faith but the depth of it. The surface that had felt fixed begins, very quietly, to widen. The first stage’s hearing returns, and you find yourself listening more carefully. The middle stage’s handing-over begins again with a part of your life you had not, yet, given. The third stage’s continuous receiving begins to settle into the small hours of the day — at the kettle, in the queue, in the lift between floors — until receiving from Him every moment what He gives becomes less an idea and more the actual texture of the day. The stuckness lifts, not in one bright moment, but in the slow widening of a journey that, it turns out, was never going to end at the level you were standing on.
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A daily home for the slow practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, one short passage and a verse, with room for the honest sentence — a quiet daily place to let the abiding deepen, one small stage at a time, across a life rather than across a week. Abide in Christ, the small Dutch-Reformed book this article reads from, is on our list to reprint through Everspring Press in the coming year, for the readers who would like to walk Murray’s whole 31-day cycle of the deepening at the page.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — the soul that truly hears Him speak the word, the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, the entering deeper still into the covenant of dependence — into a daily companion for the Christian woman whose relationship with the Lord has, for years, been sitting at a surface ready to widen.
