What Andrew Murray Meant by the Deeper Christian Life
⏱ 11 min read
You are a Christian. You know it. You have known it for years — possibly for decades. The conversion is settled. The Sunday attendance is steady. The Bible is read most mornings. And underneath all of it, you also know — quietly, persistently, in the way the soul knows things it will not say aloud — that you have stopped at the surface. The believing is real. The depth has not arrived. There is a country inside Christianity you have heard described, in the older writers, that you have not yet entered. Andrew Murray, who titled an entire book The Deeper Christian Life and spent a ministry teaching toward it, gave the slow vocabulary for the country you have been standing on the edge of. What is the deeper Christian life, in Murray’s reading? It is the turn from believing about Christ to being inhabited by Him — the shift from surface assent to interior dependence, from the brain’s agreement to the heart’s resting. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow scriptural reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Murray opened The Deeper Christian Life with a chapter on the carnal Christian — the believer who is genuinely born again and yet living mostly out of the natural mind rather than the indwelling Spirit. The chapter is not an accusation. It is a recognition. Murray, after decades pastoring through the South African revivals of the 1860s and the Keswick conventions that followed, had watched faithful believers stall at the surface for years on end. The deeper life, in his vocabulary, was not a second tier of Christian elites. It was the ordinary inward turn the average believer kept missing because no one had named it.
The first passage — entering deep into dependence
Murray, in Waiting on God, gave the sentence that most precisely names what the deeper Christian life is, in the simplest available terms.
“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.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the repeated verb. Enter deep — and then enter deeper still. Murray uses the word enter twice because the deeper Christian life is not a state you arrive at by accident. It is a country you walk into, deliberately, with the small daily step of entering. And the entering happens at two depths. The first depth is dependence as creature on God — the small honest recognition that you are not the source of your own life, that every breath is given, that the strength you have been pretending to manufacture is, and has always been, received from Him every moment. The second depth is His covenant of redemption — the deeper country inside the first, where what you have lost is being restored, and the divine Presence is given within you unceasingly by the Son and the Spirit.
The surface Christian life lives mostly on the first depth, intermittently. I depend on God for big things — for healing, for guidance, for safety. The deeper Christian life lives, slowly, on both depths, continually. I receive my next breath from Him. I receive my next thought from Him. I receive my interior strength from Him. And underneath all of that, the divine Presence and Power is being unceasingly given within me, by His Son and Spirit, whether I notice it or not. The shift from the surface to the deep is the shift from intermittent dependence to continuous dependence — from the prayer-list dependence of crises to the breath-level dependence of every ordinary minute.
This is what makes the deeper Christian life deeper. Not more dramatic. Not more emotional. Not more visible to others. Continuous, where the surface life is intermittent. Inward, where the surface life is outward. Received, where the surface life is performed.
(For the way other contemplatives have walked the same inward turn, the bridge article what Brother Lawrence meant by practicing the presence of God is the kitchen-floor version of the same depth, and union with Christ — what Teresa of Ávila actually taught walks the same country in the Spanish Carmelite vocabulary.)
The somatic — for the body that has been living at the surface
Pause here. The surface life is not only a state of mind. It lives in the body. The breath has been working high in the chest — quick, shallow, mostly above the diaphragm. The mental life is busy. The body is keeping pace. The depth Murray is naming has a bodily counterpart, and the body knows how to find it when the mind is willing to let it.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat against the floor. Place one hand lightly on the upper belly, just below the breastbone, where the diaphragm sits. Take one slow inhale, not deep, only slow — and let the breath travel down past the hand, into the lower belly, until you feel the diaphragm release downward by a small amount under the hand. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale, until the next breath arrives on its own. Repeat once.
The slow lowering of the breath into the lower belly is the body’s literal version of entering deeper. The mental life has been at the surface because the breath has been at the surface. The breath, slowly lowered, teaches the soul that the deeper room is reachable — and that you have been built for it. Murray did not have the vocabulary of diaphragm and parasympathetic nervous system. He knew, in his pastoral language, that the body and the soul move together in this kind of turning, and the slow exhale is the soul’s small daily way of agreeing.
The second passage — the work of the heart, not the brain
Murray, in Absolute Surrender, named the exact location of the deeper Christian life with a precision the brain-trained modern Christian needs to hear.
“But the abiding work is the work of the heart, not of the brain, the work of the heart clinging to and resting in Jesus, a work in which the Holy Spirit links us to Christ Jesus. Oh, do believe that deeper down than the brain, deep down in the inner life, you can abide in Christ, so that every moment you are free the consciousness will come: ‘Blessed Jesus, I am still in Thee.’ If you will learn for a time to put aside other work and to get into this abiding contact with the heavenly Vine, you will find that fruit will come.”
— Andrew Murray, Absolute Surrender
Read it twice. Slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is deeper down than the brain, deep down in the inner life, you can abide in Christ. This is, in one sentence, what Murray meant by the deeper Christian life. Not a different doctrine. Not a more advanced theology. A different location of the believing. The surface Christian life lives in the brain — in the doctrines understood, the verses memorised, the apologetics studied, the sermon notes taken. The deeper Christian life lives deeper down than the brain — in the inner life, where the heart clings to and rests in Jesus, and where the Holy Spirit links you to Christ, without your having to manage the link.
This is the part the surface Christian most resists, because it cannot be earned by more study. The deeper life is not the reward of more reading. It is the consequence of learning, for a time, to put aside other work and to get into this abiding contact. The other work — even good work, even devotional work — has been keeping you in the brain. The deeper life requires the small daily putting-down of that work, and the small daily entering of the heart-room where the abiding actually happens.
Every moment you are free the consciousness will come: ‘Blessed Jesus, I am still in Thee.’ This is Murray’s portrait of the deeper Christian life lived in the ordinary day. Not the constant active thought of God — the body cannot sustain that, and the deeper life does not require it. The deeper life is a consciousness that comes when you are free — at the kettle, at the red light, in the half-minute between meetings, at the kitchen sink. The consciousness has a sentence to it: I am still in Thee. The sentence is short because the deeper life is not articulate. It is present. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow scriptural inhabiting — one page, one passage, a small daily room in which the inner life is permitted to come up to the surface long enough to be noticed.
(The sibling articles in this deeper-life cluster sit at the two covenants Andrew Murray distinguished, why Andrew Murray said the Holy Spirit is the Christian’s secret, and Andrew Murray on the inner chamber and the outer life.)
The third passage — the shop window and the plate glass
Murray, in Like Christ, told a small story that explains, more honestly than any abstract argument, why the deeper Christian life feels visible and unreachable at the same time.
“In an address I lately heard, the speaker said that the blessings of the higher Christian life were often like the objects exposed in a shop window — one could see them clearly and yet could not reach them. If told to stretch out his hand and take, a man would answer, I cannot; there is a thick pane of plate-glass between me and them.”
— Andrew Murray, Like Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The image is exact. You have seen the deeper Christian life. You have read the older writers. You have heard the testimonies. You have sat in the room where another believer was clearly living from a depth you have not yet entered. The objects are in the window. The hand has been outstretched. The plate glass has been there.
Murray’s whole pastoral project was the slow naming of the plate glass — and the slow describing of the door beside it. The plate glass is the self-managed Christian life. The believer who has been running her own walk by effort and will is, in Murray’s vocabulary, separated from the deeper life by the pane she herself has been holding up. The door, when she finds it, is the giving-up of the self-management. Enter deep into thy relation of dependence as creature on God. That is the door. It is not glamorous. It is not visible from the street. It is small, and unmarked, and located not in the will but in the surrender. The deeper life is on the other side of the door, and the door has been there the whole time you have been pressed up against the glass.
What is the deeper Christian life, then, in Murray’s reading? It is the country on the other side of the plate glass — entered not by harder effort, but by the small daily lowering of the self-management that has been keeping the glass in place. It is the heart-room, deeper than the brain, where the Spirit links you to Christ and the consciousness Blessed Jesus, I am still in Thee becomes the quiet underneath your ordinary day. It is dependence as creature on God, continuous rather than intermittent. It is, finally, the life Christ has been offering all along, that the surface Christian has been seeing and not yet entering.
What the slow practice will do over a year
If you walk the question what is the deeper Christian life with Murray’s three passages as your quiet companion for the next year, what changes is not the doctrine. The doctrine has been right the whole time. What changes is the location of the believing. The believing moves from the brain to the heart. The deeper life is not announced. It does not arrive on a Tuesday in a thunderclap. It seeps in, slowly, through the small daily entering — the lowered breath, the put-down brain-work, the heart-room briefly inhabited at the kettle, the door beside the plate glass quietly used. By the end of a year of slow walking, the country you have been seeing through the window will have, quietly, become the room you are standing in.
Murray would say — and The Deeper Christian Life says, in its closing chapters — that the entering does not end. The deeper goes on getting deeper, for the whole of a life. The slow walk is the practice. The depth is His to give.
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A daily home for the inward turn
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each evening, a short scriptural passage and room for the honest sentence — a small daily room in which the brain-work is permitted to quiet, and the heart-room Murray named is permitted, slowly, to become the place the believing is done from.
We plan, in time, to reprint The Deeper Christian Life through Everspring Press in a slow modern edition for the believer who has, finally, stopped accepting the surface as the whole country.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — entering deep into dependence, the heart-room deeper than the brain, the shop window and the door beside it — into a daily companion for the believer who has known she was a Christian for years, and is ready, slowly, to enter the deeper country Murray has been quietly pointing at the whole time.
