How to Fight Spiritual Warfare — Murray on Standing Firm
⏱ 14 min read
What if the question how to fight spiritual warfare has been the wrong question all along, and the older tradition would gently turn it around — asking, instead, how you might learn to stand in a fight that is already being fought for you? You have read the manuals. You have heard the conferences. You have been handed lists of declarations, sequences of prayers, midnight intercessions, the right combinations of fasting and scripture to wield against a named enemy. And the part of you that has tried all of it has noticed, by the end of a year, that the louder you have fought the tireder you are, and the quieter your prayer life is, and the further from the Lord you sometimes feel after a season of so much warfare. That noticing is not a failure. The noticing is the soul’s older instinct asking whether the war was always meant to be fought the way you were taught.
This essay reads three slow passages from Andrew Murray — the Scottish-South African pastor who, more than any other voice in the late nineteenth century, recovered the deep Reformed doctrine of abiding and made it the daily practice of Christians who had been over-exhorted into striving. The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety is the contextual companion for the kind of week this article describes — the daily standing in a fight whose strength is not yours to produce. For now, read slowly. The question how to fight spiritual warfare opens, in Murray’s reading, into a much quieter room than the modern manual ever lets on.
Andrew Murray was born in 1828 in the Cape Colony, ministered for sixty years in the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa, raised eight children, buried a daughter, watched two wars sweep across the territory of his parishes, and wrote, across a long lifetime, more than 240 books on the inner life of the Christian. He was not a hothouse mystic. He was a working pastor with frontier parishes the size of small countries, riding on horseback between farmhouses to take communion to dying farmers, and what he taught about spiritual warfare was the slow Reformed practice that kept him on the horse — not a theatre of declarations, but the daily quiet abiding in a Saviour whose strength was the actual content of the standing-firm.
The apostle’s word in Ephesians 6 is stand. Withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. The modern manual reads stand as a posture of muscular resistance — feet apart, sword drawn, fists clenched. Murray reads stand the way the older Reformed tradition read it: as a verb of abiding, of being held in place, of not being moved from the room you have been brought into by Christ. The fight is not yours to win by force. The fight is yours to stand inside while a stronger One does the fighting. How to fight spiritual warfare, in Murray’s tradition, is mostly the question of how to learn to stand still.
The first passage: the resting in Thee
“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, and let the verbs land.
Murray is naming, in one short paragraph, the entire structure of how to fight spiritual warfare in the older Reformed reading. The Lord is the one who enters to rest, to refresh and reveal Himself. The heart’s job is to be His resting-place. The believer rests in Him, believing that He does all in me. The fellowship is the secret. The doing is His. The standing is mine. The fight is fought from inside that arrangement, and from no other.
Notice the word believing in the middle of the passage. Rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. Murray is making belief the engine of the standing-firm. Not effort. Belief. The whole muscular vocabulary of the modern spiritual warfare manual is replaced, in Murray’s sentence, with a verb of receptive trust. The believer who stands firm is the believer who has stopped trying to do what only Christ can do and has begun, instead, to rest in Him, believing that He does all in me. The standing is the believing. The fight is the resting. The strength is His.
This is the part the modern conference cannot sell tickets to, because it does not photograph well. The woman who has stood for fifteen years inside the abiding Murray names — through the loss of the parent, the difficult marriage, the silent Saturday afternoons of the season she could not see her way out of — is not a woman who looks like she has been fighting a war. She looks like a woman who has been resting in something. The standing is the resting. The two are not opposites. The deeper Reformed tradition does not pit them against each other. Murray’s whole life was the demonstration of that.
For the modern Christian woman whose year has been the year of trying to fight harder and finding herself tireder than when she began, Murray’s first passage is the gentlest possible correction. You have not been failing to fight. You have been mistaught about what the fighting is. The fight, in Murray’s reading, is the slow daily making of your heart into His resting-place, in the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, believing that He does all in you. The exhaustion you have been carrying is the exhaustion of a soldier who has been told to win a battle Christ has already won. The remedy is not more striving. The remedy is the slow learning of abide.
If your week has been the week of trying-too-hard-at-the-fight, how to pray when you’re under spiritual attack is the practical companion for the night-prayer that needs to learn this rest, and Christian devotionals on anxiety that don’t pretend it goes away walks the daily reading the soul tired of pretending will recognise.
The somatic that goes with the standing
Pause here, because Murray’s whole teaching has a body to it, and the body is where the modern soul has been carrying the wrong war for years.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet on the floor. Notice the legs — there is likely a small held tension in the thighs, the kind that does not relax even when you sit down. The body has been bracing to fight. The legs have been bracing to run. The shoulders have been bracing to defend. The body has internalised the muscular spiritual warfare manual whether the mind has consciously believed it or not.
Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the legs soften by a fraction — not by collapsing them, but by allowing the held tension to release into the chair. Take one more inhale. On the exhale, let one phrase settle in the legs: believing that He does all in me. The phrase is for the body, not just the soul. The legs that have been bracing to run will not believe the doctrine until the body has had a chance to soften under it. Stay with the longer exhale for forty seconds.
Then continue reading. The standing-firm of Ephesians 6, in the older Reformed reading, is a standing that begins in a softened body — not a clenched one. The body has been wearing the wrong armor. The right armor lands first in the loosening of the long-held muscular brace, by the slow received-ness of the doctrine He does all in me. The body knows how to stand still. It has forgotten because no one has asked it to remember for years.
The second passage: the take heed and be quiet
“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
This is the central passage on how to fight spiritual warfare, and it should be read three times — once for the doctrine, once for the prescription, once for the rest.
Murray is naming the strange, counter-intuitive logic at the heart of the older Reformed warfare tradition. The strength of the believer in the fight is not produced by more effort but by more quietness. In quietness shall be your strength. The verse is Isaiah’s, but the doctrine is everywhere in scripture, and Murray will not let you skip past it. The whole modern manual for spiritual warfare reads the verse the opposite way — in striving shall be your strength — and the soul has been exhausted, year after year, in service of that misreading. Murray is restoring the verse to its actual sense. The strength is in the quietness. The fight is in the waiting. The standing is in the stillness.
Notice the list of things that hinder perfect waiting on Him. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad. Murray includes the good things in the list of hindrances. The hopes. The gladnesses. The efforts. Not because hope and gladness are wrong in themselves, but because the modern soul has located its strength in those secondary streams — the daily efforts, the small hopes, the gladnesses extracted from circumstance — and has not learned to be strengthened in the quietness with Him directly. The quietness, for Murray, is not the absence of activity. The quietness is the whole heart turned toward God, undivided by the secondary excitements, so that the soul’s strength is sourced from the One source it was made to be sourced from.
This is the part of how to fight spiritual warfare that will not preach as a sermon clip. It is too slow. The instruction is take heed and be quiet. The prescription is quietly wait. The doctrine is in quietness shall be your strength. The modern soul wants the urgent instruction — the seven-step prayer, the declaration sequence, the named enemy — and Murray, gently, hands her a single sentence: Take heed and be quiet. The taking-heed is the vigilance. The being-quiet is the strength. The two together are the fight.
For the modern Christian woman whose internal experience of spiritual warfare has been a kind of low-grade urgency for years — the sense that if I just pray harder, longer, louder, something will shift — Murray’s second passage is the older tradition’s quiet correction. The shift will not come from louder prayer. The shift will come from quieter waiting. The strength you have been trying to produce by effort is the strength He intends to give you in stillness. The fight is being fought on a different scale than the manual suggests, and the standing firm of Ephesians 6 is the slow daily refusal to be recruited into the urgent version, while remaining inside the quiet one.
(This is the practice the 100 Days of Faith Over Fear: The Slow Practice That Actually Holds walks at the daily level, and a faith journal for the anxious Christian woman is the page-based companion for the soul learning to write inside the quietness rather than the urgency.)
A short word on the modern striving
The reason the modern spiritual warfare manual leaves the soul exhausted is that it has located the believer’s strength in the wrong source. The modern manual sources the strength in the believer’s intensity — the volume of the prayer, the duration of the fast, the precision of the declaration, the persistence of the intercession. The older Reformed tradition sources the strength in Christ’s finished work — the believer’s abiding in Him being the entire substance of the standing-firm. The modern manual asks you to manufacture the strength you stand on. The older tradition asks you to receive it.
You have been manufacturing for years. The receiving is the slow remedy. The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety is built on the receiving, not the manufacturing. Each evening, a short page, a slow verse, the small daily quieting of the soul into the Saviour whose finished work is the only thing the believer ever actually stands on. The fight is His. The standing is His-in-you. The manual you have been working from has been over-asking. Murray’s older tradition is the under-asking that finally lets the soul exhale.
The third passage: the soul still unto God
“In the light of His life in the Father, let it henceforth be to you a blessed rest in the union with Him, an overflowing fountain of joy and strength. To abide in His love, His mighty, saving, keeping, satisfying love, even as He abode in the Father’s love — surely the very greatness of our calling teaches us that it never can be a work we have to perform; it must be with us as with Him, the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above. What we only need is this: to take time and study the divine image of this life of love set before us in Christ. We need to have our souls still unto God, gazing upon that life of Christ in the Father until the light from heaven falls on it, and we hear the living voice of our Beloved whispering gently to us personally the teaching He gave to the disciples.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
This is the passage that resolves the question, and it should be read twice — once for the doctrine, once for the gentleness.
Murray is naming the final structure of how to fight spiritual warfare in the older Reformed tradition. The abiding never can be a work we have to perform. It is the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above. The standing-firm of Ephesians 6, in Murray’s reading, is two simultaneous movements: a life flowing out from within (because Christ is in you), and a love working in from above (because the Father is over you), and the believer is the middle place where those two movements meet. The believer’s job is not to perform the meeting. The believer’s job is to be still enough for the meeting to happen.
Notice the prescription that closes the passage. We need to have our souls still unto God, gazing upon that life of Christ in the Father until the light from heaven falls on it. The whole spiritual warfare practice, in Murray’s last sentence, is a gazing. The soul still unto God, gazing upon Christ-in-the-Father, until the light from heaven falls on the gaze, until the living voice of the Beloved whispers personally, Child, abide in Me. That is the standing-firm. That is the armor. That is the fight. The gazing is the warfare. The stillness is the strength. The voice is the victory.
For the modern Christian woman who has been wondering, after years of striving, whether her quiet undramatic walk is enough spiritual warfare to count — Murray’s third passage is the gentlest possible confirmation. Yes. It is enough. More than enough. The quiet daily gazing — the morning chair time, the verse in the back pocket, the slow honest sentence at evening, the small unphotogenic faithfulness of a soul that has not stopped showing up — is the spiritual warfare. The older saints would say it is the only kind that ever wins. The standing-firm is the gazing. The gazing is the fight. The fight is fought, all day, in a soul still unto God, by a voice whispering personally inside her, Child, abide in Me.
That whisper is the war. The war is being won. You have been standing firm, in Murray’s older sense of the word, the whole time you thought you were failing at the modern version of it. The slow practice will hold.
(The sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers cluster sit at What Is Spiritual Warfare? — Bunyan on the Christian’s Real Fight and What Is the Armor of God? — Owen on Ephesians 6, if the slow read wants to keep going.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotionals on Anxiety. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the daily small gazing the older saints called the actual content of the fight, for the soul learning, slowly, to stand still inside the One who has already won.
The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — the resting in Thee, the quiet wait, the soul still unto God — into a daily companion built for the woman whose spiritual warfare has been louder than her soul could carry, and who is ready, at last, to learn how the older saints actually stood firm.
