The Prayer Andrew Murray Said Most Christians Never Pray
⏱ 10 min read
Your prayer life feels like a shopping list and you can sense it doesn’t sound like prayer. You bring God the day’s items — the worry about the child, the petition about the bill, the small intercession for the friend, the apology for the morning’s impatience — and the items are honest, and the list is real, and somewhere underneath it you suspect there is another kind of praying you have not yet learned, and that the other kind is what He has been waiting for.
Andrew Murray wrote a book about that other kind. With Christ in the School of Prayer, published in 1885 from his pulpit in Wellington, South Africa, is twelve lessons on the praying Jesus actually taught — and the first lesson, the one Murray puts before everything else, is that prayer is not primarily a request you send to God but an encounter you keep with Him. Most Christians, Murray believed, never enter the encounter. They send the list, and they leave. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women was built around the slow form of the encounter Murray spent his life describing, if you would like a companion practice for the reading. For now — let the line andrew murray prayer widen out from the lesson into the quieter thing underneath it.
The encounter, named
The shopping-list problem is older than the modern Christian woman’s prayer life. Murray was diagnosing it in the South African pulpit a hundred and forty years ago, and the diagnosis has only sharpened. The prayer-as-list pattern is comfortable because it is finite. There is a beginning. There is an end. The list closes itself. The encounter does not close itself. The encounter asks something of the soul that the list does not — that you stay, that you wait, that you listen, that you let Him be the one speaking.
Murray’s With Christ in the School of Prayer is the slow re-training of the praying soul out of the list and into the meeting. The lessons are not techniques. They are the patient walking-through of what prayer is, lesson by lesson, until the praying woman has been re-formed enough to recognise that she has been doing one small portion of prayer and calling it the whole.
The first passage: the heart as resting-place
“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.
Notice the inversion. Murray is not asking God to rest in the request. He is asking God to rest in him. May my heart be Thy resting-place. The grammar of the line turns the whole transactional shape of prayer inside-out. The shopping list assumes you are the one giving God the agenda. Murray’s line assumes God is the one who comes to rest — to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself — and the praying heart is the place He arrives at, not the place from which the items are dispatched.
This is what Murray meant by encounter. The prayer is not what you send. The prayer is the heart you keep available for His arrival. The praying woman is not the petitioner at the counter. The praying woman is the room. The list still has its place — Murray was not against petition, and With Christ in the School of Prayer spends whole lessons on asking — but the room is the larger thing, and the list belongs inside the room, not in front of it.
Notice also the phrase believing that Thou doest all in me. Murray will not let the praying soul keep the agency. The list-praying woman is the one doing the praying; the encountering woman is the one being prayed through. The work is His. The waiting is hers. The fellowship is the entire point.
The second passage: the hidden but real presence
“Like the air that surrounds me, like the light that shines on me, here is my Lord Jesus with me in His hidden but Divine and most real presence. My faith must in quiet rest and trust bow before the Father, of whom and by whose Mighty Grace I am in Christ: He will reveal it to me with ever-growing clearness and power. He does it as I believe, and in believing open my whole soul to receive what is implied in it.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read this one twice. The two images — the air that surrounds me, the light that shines on me — are doing the work of the passage.
The air is everywhere. You do not have to summon the air. You do not have to perform anything in order for the air to be there. The air is there because air is the medium you live in. Murray is saying that Christ is that to the praying soul — not a presence you have to call down by the right combination of words, but the medium you have been in the whole time, hidden but Divine and most real. The shopping-list praying treats God as if He has to be reached. Murray’s encountering treats God as already arrived, already surrounding, already the air the praying woman is breathing.
The shift is small in language and large in posture. The list-praying woman approaches God across a distance. The encountering woman opens her eyes inside His presence. The distance was never there. It was the assumption underneath the list, and the assumption dissolves the moment Murray puts the air-and-light image in front of you.
He does it as I believe. This is the second movement of the passage. Belief, for Murray, is not the strenuous summoning of confidence. It is the opening of the whole soul to receive what is implied in it — the quiet permission given to the always-present Christ to become consciously present. The praying woman’s job is not to make Him appear. Her job is to stop pretending He is not already there.
The somatic — the soul-as-room
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Let one hand rest in your lap, palm up. Notice the shoulders. The shopping-list praying tends to keep the shoulders up — there is a small held-ness in the body of the woman who is bringing God her items, a slight forward-leaning, a low-grade muscular effort. Let the shoulders drop by an inch. Not by trying to relax them — by stopping the small effort to hold them up.
Then notice the jaw. The list-praying jaw is set. Let it unset. Let the back teeth come apart by a millimetre.
Then notice the chest. Take one slow inhale and let the exhale go all the way out — longer than the inhale, until the next breath arrives on its own. May my heart be Thy resting-place. The body is the first room He arrives at. The dropped shoulder, the released jaw, the long exhale — these are the small physiological openings that signal to the soul that the encounter is allowed to be larger than the list.
Stay there for thirty seconds. Then continue reading.
The body knows what the praying mind has forgotten. The list is dispatched at speed. The encounter is held at rest. The body holds the encounter or it does not, and the unhurried shoulders are where the encountering actually begins. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built to hold the daily small version of this slowing — one page, one passage, room for the honest sentence, no demand to perform — because Murray’s encountering soul needs a daily home that asks for less, not more.
The third passage: the still small voice
“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
This is the line that names what most Christians never pray. Waiting to hear His holy voice. Not asking. Not requesting. Waiting to hear. The encounter Murray is describing is fundamentally a listening, and the list-praying woman almost never listens, because the list is the speaking and the time runs out at the end of the list and the next thing on the calendar starts.
Murray is not asking for hours. Day by day. The unit is the small daily setting-of-the-self at His feet, the few minutes in which the speaking stops and the listening becomes the larger part. The still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks — Murray is borrowing Elijah’s vocabulary, but he is making a point about scale. The voice will not arrive at the volume of the storm. It will arrive at the volume of the still small thing. The praying woman who is dispatching the list at speed will not hear it. The praying woman who has set herself at His feet, in quiet, with an eye fixed on Him alone, will.
This is the second prayer most Christians never pray. The first is the encounter itself. The second is the listening that sits at the centre of the encounter — the deliberate withholding of the soul’s speaking long enough for the still small voice to arrive in it.
The andrew murray prayer tradition has always pointed at this twofold practice: stop dispatching the list long enough to be in the room, and stop speaking long enough to hear. The list still has its place. Murray loved petition. But the list inside the encounter, the list inside the listening, is a different kind of praying from the list dispatched alone. It is the praying Jesus actually taught.
Three small returns
If you take nothing else from Murray’s twelve lessons, these three returns are the spine:
The first return is the resting-place posture — beginning the prayer not with the items but with the offering of the heart as the room He arrives at. May my heart be Thy resting-place. One sentence. Before the list.
The second return is the air-and-light recognition — pausing, before the petitions begin, to acknowledge that He is already in the room. Not summoned. Already there. Hidden but Divine and most real. One slow breath.
The third return is the still small voice listening — closing the prayer not with Amen but with sixty seconds of waiting. No speaking. No items. Just the listening Murray spent his life describing.
(For the sibling readings in the Murray cluster: why Andrew Murray called intercession a holy privilege walks the second of his great prayer concepts, what Andrew Murray taught about praying without ceasing walks the continuous-interior version of the same encounter, and the secret of effectual prayer according to Andrew Murray walks the in Jesus’ name lesson that completes the school. If the practical form has been the question — how the encounter actually sits on a page, day by day — how to start a prayer journal in 10 minutes a day and how to set up a prayer journal — the 6-section system walk the format.)
What changes, slowly
The shopping list does not disappear. Murray would not have asked you to abandon petition. What changes is the room the list sits inside. The list inside the encounter is held by the One who has already arrived. The list inside the listening is shaped by the still small voice that mightier than the storm. The list inside the resting-place posture is offered by a heart that is no longer the petitioner at the counter but the room in which He has come to rest.
This is the slow reformation Murray was after. Andrew murray prayer is not a technique you add to the list. It is the larger thing the list belongs inside. The shift takes months. It takes a daily small practice, sustained over enough Tuesday evenings to become a habit the soul recognises. The shift is what changes the praying woman from a petitioner to a fellowship-keeper.
A daily home for the 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 — the small daily resting-place where the encounter Murray spent his life describing has a page on which to settle, until the list and the listening have both found their right size.
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This article is part of an Andrew Murray reading library on Everspring Press — slow readings of the South African pastor’s prayer writings, with the matched journal at the centre of the practice. Everspring is preparing reprints of Murray’s prayer corpus, beginning with With Christ in the School of Prayer, for the woman whose prayer life is ready to widen out from the list into the encounter.
