The Secret of Effectual Prayer According to Andrew Murray
⏱ 12 min read
The Secret of Effectual Prayer According to Andrew Murray
Your prayers feel unanswered and you’ve stopped expecting anything. The petitions still go out — the morning words, the slot before bed — but the inner expectation has thinned over years, and the woman praying is no longer the one who believes the asking changes the outcome. She is the one who prays because she has always prayed, and the praying has become more habit than hope.
Andrew Murray spent the fifth lesson of With Christ in the School of Prayer on what he called the all-prevailing plea — the in Jesus’ name that the New Testament places at the centre of effectual prayer. Most modern Christians have heard the phrase. Few have heard what Murray said it meant. The mainstream reading is that in Jesus’ name is a verbal formula appended to the end of a petition. Murray would tell you that the formula is the surface, and the secret of how to pray effectively lives in what the phrase actually points at: an entire interior position, an access granted by union, a praying-from-within-Christ rather than a praying-toward-Him. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries the daily form of this in-Christ praying into a companion practice, if you would like a page on which to enter the access Murray spent his life describing. For now — let the question of how to pray effectively widen out from the formula into the union it depends on.
What the formula is and is not
In Jesus’ name. The phrase has been worn smooth by use. Most Christians say it at the end of the prayer the way they say sincerely at the end of a letter — a closing convention, not a load-bearing claim. Murray would say that the smooth-worn formula is the saddest part of the modern prayer life, because the phrase is, in fact, the entire secret of effectual prayer, and the saying-of-it-without-the-substance has produced a generation of Christians who have the formula and not the access.
The substance is this: prayer in Jesus’ name is prayer offered from inside the union. The praying woman who is in Christ has access to the Father by virtue of being where the Son is. The asking that is heard is the asking that rises from within that union. The asking that drifts is the asking offered from outside it, with the formula tacked on as a hopeful seal.
Murray was not legalistic about this. He did not believe God ignored prayers that lacked the right interior posture. But he was clear that the effectual prayer — the one the New Testament promises will be answered — is the prayer of the woman who is abiding in the One whose name she is using. The abiding is the access. The name is the surfacing of the abiding into the spoken request.
The first passage: the soul still unto God
“Let this truth, accepted under the teaching of the Spirit in faith, remove every vestige of fear, as if abiding in Christ were a burden and a work. 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
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The line that does the load-bearing is as He abode in the Father’s love. Murray is saying the praying woman’s relationship to Christ is meant to mirror Christ’s own relationship to the Father — the same abiding, the same union, the same continual love-soaked dependence. Christ prayed effectively because He prayed from inside the Father’s love. The praying woman prays effectively because she prays from inside Christ’s love. The access is the same. The mechanism is the same. The union is the same shape, scaled to the human soul.
This is the line that lifts the burden from the modern praying woman. It never can be a work we have to perform. The abiding is not a feat. The abiding is the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, paired with the mighty inworking of the love from above. The praying woman does not generate the access. She receives it. The job is the small daily being still unto God, gazing upon that life of Christ in the Father until the light from heaven falls on it — and then the praying that follows from the gazing is the praying that has access, because the praying is being offered from inside the union the gazing has restored.
The reason your prayers have felt unanswered may not be that God has stopped hearing. It may be that the praying has been offered from outside the union — habitually, dutifully, with the formula attached but the abiding thinned — and the effectual prayer Murray names lives only inside the abiding. The recovery is not louder praying. The recovery is the soul still unto God, returned to the gazing, until the praying that surfaces is the praying that is in fact in His name.
The second passage: the blessed rest
“‘At Thy bidding I take Thy yoke; I undertake the duty without delay; I abide in Thee.’ Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command, and teach us to listen more earnestly than ever till the Spirit again give us to hear the voice of Jesus saying, with a love and authority that inspire both hope and obedience, ‘Child, abide in me.’ That word, listened to as coming from Himself, will be an end of all doubting — a divine promise of what shall surely be granted. And with ever-increasing simplicity its meaning will be interpreted. Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Blessed rest! the fruit and the foretaste and the fellowship of God’s own rest! found of them who thus come to Jesus to abide in Him. It is the peace of God, the great calm of the eternal world, that passeth all understanding, and that keeps the heart and mind.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it twice. The definition of abiding is at the centre.
Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. This is Murray’s plainest sentence on what the abiding actually consists of. It is not mystical absorption. It is not an emotional state. It is the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led — the daily surrender of the praying woman’s agenda to the One whose name she is using, and the corresponding rest that comes from no longer carrying what was never hers to carry.
This is the secret of effectual prayer in one line. The praying woman who has surrendered the ruling, the teaching, and the leading to Christ is the praying woman whose petitions are now arising from within His will, because she has stopped insisting that the petitions follow her own. The asking is shaped by the abiding. The abiding has been shaped by the surrender. The petitions that come from inside this layered yielding are, by definition, the ones that are in His name — because they are arising from within the union the name describes.
Notice what Murray does with failure. Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command. The praying woman whose prayers have felt unanswered is not asked to flagellate herself. She is asked to let the failure send her back into the listening — to hear, again, the voice that says Child, abide in me. The recovery is always the same recovery: return to the abiding. The fruit of the abiding is the blessed rest, and out of the rest comes the praying that is effectual because it is no longer the woman’s anxious work but the fellowship of God’s own rest speaking through her into the Father’s ear.
This is how to pray effectively in Murray’s plainest grammar. Not by mastering the technique. By returning, daily, to the abiding from which the asking becomes the asking-from-within. The petitions you make from the blessed rest are not heard differently because they are louder. They are heard differently because they are now Christ’s prayer through you, and that prayer always has access.
The somatic — the still soul
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet.
Let your back rest against the chair. Let both feet press flat against the floor. Let one hand rest in your lap, palm up.
Notice the jaw. The praying woman whose petitions have felt unanswered carries a small set in the jaw — the low-grade muscular insistence of a soul that has been arguing, quietly, with God’s slowness. Let the jaw release. Let the back teeth come apart by a millimetre.
Now notice the chest. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, say silently the sentence Murray heard: Child, abide in me. Inhale: Child. Exhale: abide in me. Three slow breaths.
Then notice the shoulders. Let them drop. Not by trying. By stopping the small effort of holding them up.
Stay there for thirty seconds. Let the soul be still unto God. You are not asking for anything in this thirty seconds. You are restoring the access. The petitions that come after this thirty seconds will rise from inside the union the stillness has re-opened. The blessed rest is what the body has just stepped into. The praying from inside it is what Murray meant by effectual.
Then continue reading.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around the daily small return to this stillness — a short passage, a quiet sentence, a page that does not require the depleted woman to bring more than she has — because the in-Christ praying Murray named needs a daily home where the stillness can be re-established, again and again, before the petitions are made.
The third passage: waiting only
“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 this slowly. It is the closing line of the doctrine.
Wait upon your God continually and only. The two adverbs are doing the work. Continually is the temporal claim — the abiding does not have an off-season. Only is the exclusivity claim — the soul that is waiting upon God is not also waiting upon outcomes, or upon other people’s behaviour, or upon the answer the soul has decided in advance is the right one. The waiting that is only upon God is the waiting that has been emptied of the alternative objects the unanswered-prayer woman has been quietly waiting on alongside Him.
This is the deepest layer of the effectual-prayer secret. The praying woman whose prayers have felt unanswered has often been waiting on both God and the specific shape of the answer she expected. The waiting is divided. The divided waiting is the part that goes thin over years. Murray’s wait only upon God re-collects the soul’s expectation into the single right object — Him — and lets the answers come in the shape He chooses, on the timeline He chooses, in the way that serves the union rather than the agenda.
The praying that arises from waiting only upon God is the praying that is in Christ’s name in the full sense. The praying woman has yielded the shape of the answer. She has yielded the timeline. She has yielded the alternative objects of her waiting. What remains is the soul still unto God, asking from inside the union, content with the access whether or not the answer arrives in the form she imagined.
The effectual prayer Murray describes is not a prayer that always gets the asked-for outcome. The effectual prayer is the prayer that has access — that is heard at the right ear, that is offered from inside the right union, that is shaped by the abiding rather than the agenda — and the outcomes of such praying, over decades, are the outcomes God intends for the praying woman and the people she loves, which is the only outcome that was ever worth praying for.
(For the sibling readings: the prayer Andrew Murray said most Christians never pray walks the encounter that sits beneath the asking, why Andrew Murray called intercession a holy privilege walks the priestly form of the in-Christ asking for others, and what Andrew Murray taught about praying without ceasing walks the abiding from which the effectual asking continually arises. If the daily home for the abiding has been the question, 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.)
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 abiding-bench where the in-Christ praying Murray called the all-prevailing plea has a place to be re-established, until the asking that arises from it is the asking that has access.
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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 praying has thinned and is ready to be re-anchored in the union that grants it access.
