The 31-Day Practice Andrew Murray Built Around One Verse
⏱ 10 min read
You have tried ten devotional plans this year and none of them have stuck. The first three weeks went well — the kind of strong morning start that the inside cover of the journal almost expects of you — and then, somewhere around week four, the practice quietly thinned and the page stopped being opened. You are not the woman who lacks discipline. You are the woman whose discipline has been used to build the wrong kind of practice for the season of life she is actually in.
Andrew Murray, writing in 1895, built a thirty-one day reading scheme into Waiting on God — one short passage for each day of the month, returning, slowly, to a single verse: My soul, wait thou only upon God. The whole book is the slow unfolding of one line. Thirty-one days. Not thirty-one different verses. Thirty-one slow returns to the same one. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional is the companion practice we built to carry this kind of slow repetition into a daily page for the year God seems quiet. For now — read slowly. The article is the slow read of the method itself.
Murray’s design is the opposite of the modern devotional. The modern devotional moves the reader, briskly, through three hundred and sixty-five different verses across the year, on the theory that variety produces depth. Murray’s design assumes the opposite. Depth produces depth. The slow repetition of one verse, returned to from thirty-one slightly different angles over thirty-one slow mornings, is how the verse goes from being a sentence you have read to being a sentence that has worked itself into you. The two practices are not the same shape. The modern one builds breadth. Murray’s builds ground. The depleted Christian woman, in most seasons of the modern life, does not need more breadth. She needs ground.
What slow repetition actually does
The verse you read once does not become part of you. The verse you read on day one, and day two, and day three, and day eight, and day twenty-three — slightly slower each time, slightly more familiar each time, with the small accumulated weight of the previous mornings sitting underneath the current one — that verse becomes a kind of inner furniture. It is there when the difficult phone call comes at 3pm. It is there in the small spare moment in the supermarket queue. It is there in the bed at midnight when the worry has woken you up. The verse is no longer something you remember; it is something you carry. This is what slow repetition does that single-pass reading cannot.
Murray knew this. He had spent his own ministry watching Christians read the bible across decades and observing which kinds of practice actually built durable interior faith. Single intense moments did not. Slow steady returnings did. The thirty-one day design is a pastoral answer to a long observation. If the verse is going to do the work the verse is capable of doing in the soul, the verse has to be stayed with — not read past on the way to the next one. The thirty-one day cycle is the slow stay.
The first passage — let us day by day set ourselves at His feet
“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.’ 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.
Notice the phrase day by day. Not once and powerfully. Day by day. The whole practice Murray is naming runs on this phrase. The setting of yourself at His feet is not an event. It is a daily return. The fixed eye is not a special posture for a retreat weekend. It is the daily inward attention. The meditation is not the long Saturday-morning intensive that the over-functioning Christian woman tries to schedule and then cancels. It is the day by day — short, slow, returnable, ordinary.
Meditate on this word of His. Notice the singular. One word. Not ten. The meditation is on this word — the one verse the day is being slowly built around. The mind is being asked to stay with one thing, slowly, for long enough that the staying itself becomes the practice. This is the daily prayer practice Murray is teaching. Not breadth. Depth, by slow returning, on one short line, day by day.
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. This is the line that explains why the slow repetition matters. The hearing — the deep, inward, settled hearing — is what brings the power. The skimmed verse is read. The slowly-repeated verse is heard. The power to accept and hold the blessing is bound up with the hearing, not with the reading. Thirty-one days of slow returning to one verse is the practice by which a verse, slowly, becomes heard in this deep sense.
A small thing for your body
Pause for a moment. Notice the shoulders — they have probably crept up while you have been reading. Let them lower by an inch. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale.
Now let one short line arise inwardly. My soul, wait thou only upon God. Just the line. Read it once in your mind. Then once more, slowly. Do not analyse it. Do not connect it to a circumstance. Let it sit, for a few seconds, in the body — the way you would let a small warm cup sit in your hands without needing to drink from it immediately. The verse is doing something already, just by being present. The body is registering it. That registering, repeated daily over thirty-one days, is the practice. The next sentence is here when you are ready.
The second passage — truly my soul waits upon God
The second passage is from the closing chapter of Waiting on God, the day-thirty-one reading the whole book has been building toward. Murray is, by this point, no longer arguing for the practice. He is praying it:
“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. ‘My soul, wait thou only upon God.’ No words can tell, no heart conceive, the riches of the glory of this mystery of the Father and of Christ. Our God, in the infinite tenderness and omnipotence of His love, waits to be our Life and Joy. Oh, my soul! let it be no longer needed that I repeat the words, ‘Wait upon God,’ but let all that is in me rise and sing: ‘Truly my soul waits upon God.’”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it slowly. Notice the small inward shift at the end.
Let it be no longer needed that I repeat the words, ‘Wait upon God,’ but let all that is in me rise and sing: ‘Truly my soul waits upon God.’ This is the goal of the thirty-one days. Not that you will have memorised the verse — though you will. Not that you will be able to quote it under pressure — though you will. The goal is the inward shift from the verse being a command you repeat to a fact you can describe. Wait upon God is the imperative. Truly my soul waits upon God is the description. The slow repetition is the bridge between the two.
The reason the modern devotional plans do not stick is that they are built around the imperative side only. They keep telling the soul what it should do. They do not stay with one verse long enough for the imperative to become a description. Murray’s thirty-one days are built precisely to make this bridging possible. By day fifteen, the verse is no longer a thing you read. By day twenty-five, the verse is no longer a thing you repeat. By day thirty-one — for the soul that has slowly walked the practice — the verse is a description of the soul’s actual inward state. Truly my soul waits upon God. Not because you have made it do so. Because thirty-one slow returnings have taught it to.
The journal companion built to carry this slow repetition for the long stretch — when one month becomes a season and the verse needs to keep being returned to past day thirty-one — is the Dry Season Devotional. The 140-day form is the longer cycle. The principle is the same: one slow verse per page, room for the honest sentence, no demand for breakthrough. The slow repetition is allowed to do its work without being interrupted.
How to begin the thirty-one days
You do not need an elaborate setup. The whole point of the design is that it works for the woman whose previous ten plans did not stick.
Pick one verse. Not a chapter. One short line. The verse Murray returned to — My soul, wait thou only upon God — is one option. Be still and know that I am God is another. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want is another. One line. Written on a small piece of paper. Put somewhere the morning will find it — by the kettle, beside the toothbrush, on the dashboard of the car.
Read it once a day, slowly. Out loud if you can. Twice, if the slowness invites it. Then close the page and let the day carry the verse forward. You are not required to think about it for the rest of the day. The verse will find the day on its own.
Do this for thirty-one days. Not for a week. Not for ten days. Thirty-one. The thirty-one is part of the design. The slow returning over a full month is what builds the inward ground. By day twenty, the verse will feel different in the body than it did on day one. By day thirty-one, the verse will have entered you in a way the single-pass reading could not have produced.
Then, on day thirty-two, decide. Either pick the next verse and walk the next thirty-one days with it. Or stay with the same verse for another month. Both are valid. The practice is not about breadth. The practice is about depth, by slow returning.
(For the rest of the slow Murray library, what Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God actually asks of you is the foundation read, and why Andrew Murray said God waits longer than we do and the quiet trust Andrew Murray taught for the anxious Christian are the next two pieces. If the dryness is what has made the previous plans not stick, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence is the bridge.)
Why this daily prayer practice will hold when the others did not
The previous plans did not hold because they were built for a reader who was supposed to keep up. Murray’s plan is built for a reader who is supposed to slow down. The first asks you to add to a life that is already overrun. The second asks you to do less, more slowly, for longer. The depleted Christian woman cannot sustain the first. She can sustain the second — and the second is, in any case, the one that actually builds the ground the spiritual life is meant to grow in.
One verse. Thirty-one slow mornings. Three minutes at most. The whole practice on the days when you have nothing. That is the daily prayer practice the modern devotional has, slowly, unlearned. Murray, writing in 1895, remembered it. The book you are about to walk is the slow reminder.
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The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
Everspring is, in the coming years, planning a careful typeset reprint of Murray’s Waiting on God so the thirty-one day cycle can be sat with in its original short-reading form alongside the journal above.
