The Quiet Trust Andrew Murray Taught for the Anxious Christian
⏱ 11 min read
Your mind will not stop and your body is held in the tension. The thoughts run in low circles even when nothing in particular is happening — the prayer feels thin against the noise, the shoulders have been up by the ears for so long you cannot remember what dropped shoulders feel like, and the verse you read this morning slid across the surface of an interior that could not slow down enough to receive it. You are not the woman who has never trusted God. You are the woman whose nervous system has been carrying something for so long that being still has become the part of trust that feels furthest out of reach.
Andrew Murray, writing in Waiting on God and Abide in Christ, named a specific posture for the soul in exactly this stretch — a posture he called quiet trust. It is not the energetic trust the modern Christian woman has been taught to manufacture through stronger affirmations and bigger declarations. It is the slow, low, steadying trust of a soul that has settled — quietly, daily — at His feet, and has stopped trying to produce the trust through inward effort. The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety is the companion practice we built for the anxious Christian who needs the page to do less, more slowly, for longer. For now, read slowly. The article is the slow read of the posture itself.
The first thing to receive is that how to be still and trust god is not, in Murray’s reading, a willed achievement. It is a received one. The stillness is not produced by effort. The trust is not generated by intensity. The two together are what slowly happen to a soul that has been sitting, day by day, in the presence of the God who is Himself the Stillness and the Trustworthiness. The anxious Christian does not need a stronger inward push. She needs the chair, the daily small return, and the slow patience to let the stillness arrive on its own.
The first passage — quiet trust before Him
“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.’”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it once. Then read the middle phrase again, slowly.
Let us set ourselves in quiet trust before Him. Notice the verb. Set. The trust is set. It is positioned. It is the inward arrangement of a soul that has decided, on purpose, to take a posture in front of God — the posture of trust, kept quietly, before any verse has been read or any prayer prayed. The trust precedes the practice. It is the posture into which the practice is then done. The anxious Christian woman has, often, been doing the practice without first setting the posture, and the practice has then become another thing the anxious mind tries to perform. Murray is naming the order. First the quiet trust, then the meditation, then the listening.
Waiting to hear His holy voice — the still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks. This is the line Murray returns to across both books, because it names the inversion the anxious soul has to receive. The anxious mind is listening for the storm — the dramatic answer, the sudden lifting, the unmistakable sign. The voice God actually uses is, almost always, the still small one. The anxious soul that has not learned to be quiet enough will not hear it, because the anxious soul is still listening for thunder that is not coming. Quiet trust is the inward retuning of the ear. The still small voice is mightier than the storm — not because it is louder, but because it is the one that actually carries the weight of God’s address to the soul. The retuning takes time. The anxious mind cannot be talked out of listening for thunder. It can, slowly, by the daily small returning to the chair, be retuned.
A small thing for your body — the first one
Pause for a moment. The teaching about quiet trust will not enter the anxious soul unless the body is allowed to begin practising it now. Set whatever is in your hands down. Sit somewhere quiet.
Let both feet press flat against the floor. Notice the shoulders — they are almost certainly up. Let them lower by an inch. Not by trying to relax them. By stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. The body has been carrying the anxiety for longer than today, and the carrying is the part the body has been doing instead of the trusting.
Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale. Stay in the slow exhale for a few breaths. The anxious nervous system reads a slow exhale as the next thing is not happening yet. The reading is correct. How to be still and trust god begins, in the body, in the exhale that is allowed to be long. The next sentence is here when you are ready.
The second passage — hushed into calm and quiet
The second passage is from Waiting on God, and it is the line that names what quiet trust slowly does to the anxious interior:
“They that wait on the Lord shall inherit the land; the promised land and its blessing. The heirs must wait; they can afford to wait. ‘Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him.’ The margin gives for ‘Rest in the Lord,’ ‘Be silent to the Lord,’ or R.V., ‘Be still before the Lord.’ It is resting in the Lord, in His will, His promise, His faithfulness, and His love, that makes patience easy. And the resting in Him is nothing but being silent unto Him, still before Him. Having our thoughts and wishes, our fears and hopes, hushed into calm and quiet in that great peace of God which passeth all understanding. That peace keeps the heart and mind when we are anxious for anything, because we have made our request known to Him.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it twice. Slowly. Notice the verb in the middle.
Hushed. Murray does not say the thoughts and fears are silenced. He does not say they are defeated. He says they are hushed. The hushing is something done to them, by the great peace of God, when the soul has settled into quiet trust. The anxious Christian has, often, been trying to silence the anxious thoughts by force — pushing them down, arguing them out, replacing them with stronger ones. The thoughts do not silence under this pressure. They get louder. Hushing is the gentler verb the anxious soul has been needing. The thoughts are quieted by being held in the peace of God, not by being fought.
That peace keeps the heart and mind when we are anxious for anything, because we have made our request known to Him. Notice the conditional. The peace keeps — meaning, guards, holds, surrounds — when the request has been made known. The making known is the small act. The keeping is what God does. The anxious soul does not have to defeat the anxiety. The anxious soul has to make the request known — slowly, daily, in the chair, in plain words, with no requirement that the request be eloquent or theologically polished — and the peace then does the keeping. This is the order Murray is giving. Make known, then be kept. Not be kept, then make known. The order matters for the anxious mind that has been trying to produce the peace before the request has even been spoken.
The journal companion built for exactly this slow daily making known — the small page that holds the request, the verse, and the room for the honest sentence — is the Devotionals on Anxiety. It was made for the anxious Christian who needs the page to do less, more slowly. The peace is His to give. The page is the small daily room in which the request is made known.
A small thing for your body — the second one
Pause again. The teaching has more than one body-step, because the anxious nervous system needs more than one re-anchoring before the quiet trust can begin to settle.
Sit, still. Let one hand rest lightly on the lap, palm up. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out.
Now let one short request arise inwardly — not eloquent, not arranged. Just the plain version. Lord, I am anxious. I am making it known. Once. Slowly. Notice that the making known is the whole thing. You are not required to produce the calm. You are required only to make the request known — and then to sit, quietly, while the peace does the keeping that you cannot do for yourself.
Stay there for a few more breaths. The anxious nervous system is, slowly, registering that the request has been received. The body, over weeks of repeated short returns to this posture, will begin to soften under the keeping. The softening is the slow inward sign that the quiet trust has begun to take root. The next sentence is here when you are ready.
The third passage — take heed and be quiet
The third passage is from earlier in Waiting on God, where Murray names the foundational quietness the whole posture is built on:
“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.’ How the very thought of God in His majesty and holiness should silence us, Scripture abundantly testifies. As long as the waiting on God is chiefly regarded as an end towards more effectual prayer, and the obtaining of our petitions, this spirit of perfect quietness will not be obtained. But when it is seen that the waiting on God is itself an unspeakable blessedness, one of the highest forms of fellowship with the Holy One, the adoration of Him in His glory will of necessity humble the soul into a holy stillness, making way for God to speak and reveal Himself.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it once. Then read the central phrase again, slowly.
In quietness shall be your strength. This is the line that, for the anxious Christian, has to be received slowly because it inverts the modern logic. The modern logic is that strength is built — through effort, through declaration, through the loud insistence of a faith that pushes back against the anxiety. Murray says, with scripture: strength is the quietness. The quietness is not the absence of strength. The quietness is the strength, in the form scripture itself names it. The anxious Christian who finally allows the quietness, daily, in the small page, in the slow chair-time — is, in the same act, allowing the actual strength. The two are not separable.
The adoration of Him in His glory will of necessity humble the soul into a holy stillness. Notice the inward mechanics Murray is describing. The stillness is not directly produced. The stillness is a by-product of adoration. When the soul, slowly, day by day, allows its attention to rest on God Himself — not on the anxiety, not on the outcome, not on the request — the inward stillness happens of necessity. The adoration is what produces it. The anxious soul that has been trying to produce stillness directly has been doing the harder work. The slower work, in Murray’s reading, is the more durable one: adore Him, and the stillness will follow.
How quiet trust slowly looks in the anxious life
Not the absence of anxiety. The anxiety may still arise. The mind may still circle. The body may still tighten. What changes, slowly, over months of the small daily practice, is the relationship the soul has with the arising. The anxious thought is met, not fought. The tightening is noticed, not panicked at. The mind is allowed to circle, while the soul — underneath the circling — is held in the quiet trust that has been slowly built by daily small returns to the chair.
The quiet trust is the floor. The anxiety can run across it. The floor holds. This is how to be still and trust god in the form Murray actually taught it — not the achievement of inward silence in the moment of crisis, but the slow steady building of an inward floor that holds the soul even when the surface noise has not yet quieted. The floor takes time. Day by day. The chair. The slow exhale. The making known. The adoration. The hushing that God does on top of all of it. By month six, the floor is there. By year two, the anxious Christian has begun to live on it.
(For the foundation reading, what Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God actually asks of you walks the posture. The 31-day practice Andrew Murray built around one verse is the slow daily method, and why Andrew Murray said God waits longer than we do is the line worth keeping near the chair on the days the silence weighs heaviest. If the anxiety has been mixed with dryness, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence is the bridge letter.)
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The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotionals on Anxiety.
Everspring is, in due course, planning a careful typeset reprint of Murray’s Waiting on God for the contemplative reader — the journal above is the daily companion for the anxious stretch, and the book itself, in time, will be the slow chair-time partner alongside it.
