The Difference Between Believing and Receiving According to Andrew Murray
⏱ 11 min read
You have believed the truths for years now. The Holy Spirit indwells you. Christ dwells in your heart. The love of God is shed abroad in you. You can say each sentence in the order it is meant to be said. The trouble — the quiet, long trouble — is that you have not, in any honest moment, felt the corresponding life. You have believed the facts and you have not received them. Andrew Murray, in The Two Covenants, wrote about this exact distance with more patience than almost any English-language teacher of the interior life, and the slow walk through three of his passages below is for the soul that has held the doctrines without the life and has begun to suspect there is a difference. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow doctrinal reading into a daily companion if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Murray was a Dutch Reformed minister in South Africa whose ministry stretched for more than half a century, and The Two Covenants was written late, when the long question of why so many Christians believe so much and receive so little had become the question he wanted to answer for the church before he died. His answer is the slow distinction this article walks. Believing is the assent of the mind to what God has said. Receiving is the inward opening of the soul to let what God has said actually live within. The two are not the same. The Christian woman whose interior has felt thin for years has not been failing at the believing. She has, very likely, been treating the believing as the whole act, and underneath the believing — where the receiving was meant to happen — the soul has stayed closed.
The first passage — the spiritual realities are actually within
Murray, very early in The Two Covenants, said the sentence that names the inward act believing alone cannot perform.
“When we read of ‘the love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit,’ of ‘Christ dwelling in the heart,’ of ‘a clean heart,’ of ‘loving each other with a clean heart fervently,’ of ‘God establishing our heart unblamable in holiness,’ we must, with the eye of faith, regard these spiritual realities as actually and in very deed existing within us.”
— Andrew Murray, The Two Covenants
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the verb Murray uses. Regard. Not believe. Not affirm. Regard — which in the older devotional English means to attend to, to look at, to hold with the inward eye as something present. The soul that only believes the love of God is shed abroad inside it is the soul that, on a hard Tuesday, would say the sentence is true without having any inward perception of the love actually being there. The soul that regards the same reality is the soul that, on the same Tuesday, turns the inward attention toward the love that has, in fact, been shed abroad — and, in turning, finds the love is there to be found.
This is the first piece of Murray’s working distinction. Believing fixes the mind on the truth of the sentence. Receiving turns the inward eye toward the reality the sentence names, and the reality, regarded, becomes present to the soul that regards it. What does it mean to receive the Holy Spirit in Murray’s reading? It means to stop holding the indwelling as a doctrine the mind has been told to affirm, and to begin holding it as a presence the soul has been invited to attend to. The shift is small in description. It is enormous in lived experience.
Actually and in very deed. Murray’s redoubling matters here. He is naming the fact that, in the ordinary Christian’s interior, the spiritual realities tend to live as theoretical, even though scripture names them as actual. The Spirit is not symbolically within you. The Spirit is actually within you. Christ does not figuratively dwell in your heart. Christ actually dwells in your heart. The eye of faith, Murray says, is the inward organ given for the regarding of the actual presence. The first move from believing to receiving is the daily, small re-orientation of that inward organ toward what is, in fact, already there.
The second passage — give the Spirit the place He has in God’s plan
A few pages later, Murray names what receiving looks like as a practice. (If the deeper-Christian-life context of this distinction would help, what Andrew Murray meant by the deeper Christian life walks the wider frame the receiving sits inside. And the covenant-side of the same teaching, the two covenants Andrew Murray distinguished, walks the old-versus-new interior reading that gives this passage its grammar.)
“To believe fully in the Holy Spirit, as the present and abiding and all-comprehending gift of the New Covenant, has been to many a one an entrance into its fulness of blessing. Begin at once, child of God, to give the Holy Spirit the place in thy religion He has in God’s plan. Be still before God, and believe that He is within thee, and ask the Father to work in thee through Him. Regard thyself, thy spirit as well as thy body, with holy reverence as His temple. Let the consciousness of His holy presence and working fill thee with holy calm and fear.”
— Andrew Murray, The Two Covenants
This is the practice in four verbs. Be still. Believe. Ask. Regard.
Be still. The receiving cannot happen at the speed the believing happens. Believing is fast — it is the assent of the mind, and the mind can assent to a true sentence in under a second. Receiving is slow — it is the opening of the inward space the Spirit was given to fill, and the inward space cannot be opened in a hurry. The stillness is not the prelude to the receiving. The stillness is the receiving’s first movement.
Believe that He is within thee. Not as a doctrine carried in the front of the mind, but as a presence acknowledged in the back of the body. Murray’s verb is small here. He does not ask you to experience the Spirit on a Tuesday afternoon. He asks you to believe He is within, and to let that believing settle low enough in you that the body begins to register what the mind has been holding alone.
Ask the Father to work in thee through Him. The receiving is not an act you complete; it is an asking you make. The Father is the worker. The Spirit is the means. You are the one who, having been still, having believed, asks — and the asking is the door receiving comes through.
Regard thyself with holy reverence as His temple. This is the daily reorientation. You are not asked to feel reverent. You are asked to regard — to look at your own body, your own spirit, your own ordinary Tuesday self, as the place He has chosen to live. The regarding, repeated, slowly becomes the receiving. The temple, looked at as a temple, behaves as a temple. The soul, looked at as His dwelling, becomes inwardly hospitable to the One who is already there.
This is what Andrew Murray meant by receiving as distinct from believing. Receiving is not a one-time crisis event. It is the daily slow practice of being still, believing, asking, and regarding — until the Spirit who was always within begins to be inwardly recognised, and the fulness of blessing Murray names becomes the actual atmosphere of the inward life. (The third article in this short Murray triptych on the Spirit, why Andrew Murray said the Holy Spirit is the Christian’s secret, is the natural next slow read once this practice has begun.)
A small somatic, here
Set the article down for a moment. Place one hand low on the ribs, where the breath turns over. Take one slow inhale. Let the exhale be longer than the inhale. Acknowledge, in that one quiet breath, that the One you have believed in for years is in fact within the body now exhaling. You are not asked to feel anything. You are asked, once, to regard the indwelling as actual. The regarding, repeated across small moments, is the practice receiving is built of. The body learns the receiving before the mind does. That is by design.
The third passage — the grace the Spirit maintains within you every moment
The third passage names what is at stake. Murray, in the chapters on the new covenant, returned again and again to the same thought — that what the Spirit receives is not a gift you collect once but a grace He maintains within you every moment for the rest of your life.
“The exceeding abundance of grace is equally seen in the work which the Holy Spirit every moment maintains within us. We have found that the central blessing of the New Covenant, flowing from Christ’s redemption and the pardon of our sins, is the new heart in which God’s law and fear and love have been put. It is in the fulfilment of this promise, in the maintenance of the heart in a state of meetness for God’s indwelling, that the glory of grace is specially seen.”
— Andrew Murray, The Two Covenants
The hinge word is maintains. The Christian woman who has been believing and not receiving has often been operating as if any inward life she has must be manufactured by her own continual effort. Murray is saying the opposite. The Spirit maintains. The maintenance is His. The new heart — the heart in which God’s law and fear and love have been put — is not a heart you are constructing through your own discipline. It is a heart already given, and the Spirit’s continuous work is to keep it in a state of meetness for God’s indwelling. Your part is the daily small receiving. His part is the moment-by-moment maintenance.
This is what makes the difference between believing and receiving so quietly important for the woman whose interior life has felt thin for years. The thinness has not been because the indwelling failed. The thinness has been because the soul has been operating from believing only, and the believing-only soul does not open itself to the maintenance the Spirit is already performing. Receiving is the daily small opening that lets the maintenance through. The grace is being given every moment. The receiving is the inward act that lets you live inside the grace that is, in fact, always being given.
If the slow practice of be still, believe, ask, regard has begun to take shape in you while reading, the same slow walk has its companion form in Bible Study Workbook for Women, where the daily page sets a verse, a Murray-shaped reading, and the small space for the inward regarding to be practised by hand at the edge of the morning. (The contemplative tradition has walked this same inward distinction in different vocabularies. If the Spirit-side of Murray opens to the wider stream, what Brother Lawrence meant by practicing the presence of God is the kitchen-table cousin of Murray’s regard, and union with Christ — what Teresa of Ávila actually taught walks the union-side of the same indwelling.)
What the slow walk does over a year
What changes, if you sit with Murray’s three passages for a slow month each and let the practice of be still, believe, ask, regard become the daily small act underneath your ordinary Christian life, is not a sudden interior brightness. The change is quieter than that. The believing you have done for years stops being the whole act, and the receiving — the inward opening to the One who has been within all along — slowly becomes the second daily act the believing has been waiting for. The doctrines you have held in the mind begin, one by one, to be regarded by the inward eye as actually and in very deed existing within. The Spirit who has been there the whole time becomes inwardly recognised in small ordinary moments — at the kettle, in the car, on the slow exhale before sleep.
Murray’s vocabulary is not flashy. He does not promise sudden experiences. What he promises, across the three passages, is that the soul that learns the practice of receiving — alongside the believing the church has already taught it — will, slowly, come into the fulness of blessing the New Covenant was always meant to be lived from. What does it mean to receive the Holy Spirit? In Murray’s reading, it means to stop holding the indwelling as a fact and to start holding the indwelling as a presence — daily, in stillness, with the inward eye turned toward the One who is already there. (We hope, in time, to bring The Two Covenants back into print through Everspring Press, so the slow reading has a clean, contemplative edition to live inside.)
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A daily home for the slow receiving
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — be still, believe, ask, regard — into a daily companion for the woman who has believed the truths for years and is ready, in small daily evenings, to let the receiving begin.
