What Andrew Murray Promised the Waiting Soul
⏱ 8 min read
You are spiritually empty, and you do not know what refills the well. You have tried the louder remedies — the conference, the new study, the longer prayer time — and the well has stayed at the same low water mark. Andrew Murray, writing more than a hundred years ago in Waiting on God, knew that woman. He spent thirty-one short chapters on the one thing she most resists, because it does not look like a remedy at all — the slow, un-strained turning of the soul toward God, with nothing in her hands.
This is the question underneath what you are searching for. How does God renew the soul? Not how do you renew it. How does He. The grammar of the question matters, because Murray’s whole answer rests on the shift from the active verb to the receptive one. The renewal is not something you achieve by harder devotion. It is something He gives when the soul has, at last, stopped its work and waited.
The companion practice for the inside of this article is the Dry Season Devotional — a 140-day slow walk built for the woman whose well has gone low and who needs a daily page that does not demand more from her than she has. The article below is the short version of what the devotional walks for half a year.
Murray’s first promise — the well refills from above
In Day 13: The Path to More Grace, Murray writes about a renewal that comes not from a new effort of the will but from a posture the soul is invited to take and then keep. He returns again and again to the language of waiting. He does not mean delay. He means the quiet, conscious turning of the inner life toward God, with the willingness to stay there until He does what only He can do.
The passage that most fully holds the promise is this one — and it is worth reading slowly, twice, before you read what comes after it:
“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 the third sentence again. To restore more gloriously than ever what thou hadst lost. That is the promise. Murray is not offering you a return to the version of you that existed before the depletion. He is naming a restoration that is more than restoration — a refilling that comes not from your own striving but from the One who waits, with infinite tenderness, to be your life and your joy.
The verb that does the work in this passage is receive. Renewal, in Murray, is received. The well refills from above, not from a deeper digging of your own.
What the soul is actually being asked to do
Here is where most readers stumble. Waiting sounds passive, and the depleted woman is suspicious of anything that sounds passive because she has been told for years that the way out of dryness is more effort. Murray knew that suspicion. He spends a chapter dismantling it, and the dismantling lives in a single sentence in his earlier book Abide in Christ, which is worth holding alongside Waiting on God because they are companion volumes on the same posture:
“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
Notice what Murray does there. He does not separate the hearing from the receiving. 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. The hearing is the receiving. The waiting is not a wasted stretch before the renewal arrives; the waiting is the form the renewal takes while it is arriving.
This is the slow read Murray invites you into. The soul is not being asked to manufacture the well. The soul is being asked to sit where the well refills. There is a difference, and your whole spiritual exhaustion is hiding inside that difference.
A minute for the body
Before you read on, put both feet flat on the floor. Let the shoulders, which have been carrying the question of the empty well for a long time, lower by an inch. Let one slow inhale come in. Let one slow exhale go out. Do not try to feel anything in particular. Just notice that the body, when given a single minute of un-strained sitting, is already doing in the small what Murray is asking the soul to do in the large.
The body knows how to wait. The soul has forgotten, because the culture has trained it out. The minute is the practice.
Murray’s second promise — God Himself is the refilling
The harder turn in Murray comes in his treatment of what the renewal is. The depleted woman tends to want the well refilled with the same kinds of contents she had before — the felt presence, the easy prayer, the sense of nearness. Murray gently refuses to promise her exactly that. He promises something else, and the something else is larger.
“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.”
His actual divine Presence and Power. That is what fills the well in Murray’s vision. Not a return of the old felt sweetness, although that may come too. The renewal is God Himself, given within you, by His Son and Spirit, unceasingly. The dryness was the soul trying to live on the previous gift instead of the Giver. The renewal is the Giver Himself, taking up residence again as the daily contents of the inner life.
This is what makes the question how does God renew the soul answerable at all. The renewal is not a thing He gives. It is Him. The well refills with His own presence, given to a soul that has stopped trying to refill it on its own. (This is the same slow-quiet posture that the 31-day practice Andrew Murray built around one verse walks through in chapter-a-day form.)
The promise that holds when the feelings are gone
You may read all of this and still feel nothing tomorrow morning. Murray would not be surprised. He wrote Waiting on God in part because he himself walked stretches in which the felt sense of God had gone quiet, and the promise had to be held by the will rather than the heart. The promise is not, you will feel renewed by Friday. The promise is, the God who waits to be your life and your joy is at work in the silence, and the silence is not the absence of the renewal but the room the renewal needs in order to come.
The companion daily walk for this season is the Dry Season Devotional. It pre-prints the slow passages and gives you a quiet page each morning so the work of sitting where the well refills does not have to be invented by you on an evening you are tired. It carries the rhythm Murray is teaching, at the pace of one short page a day, for the woman who needs the rhythm held for her until her own inner rhythm has re-learned itself.
If the long silence underneath your dryness has been the harder weight, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence is the longer pastoral companion to the question Murray is answering, and the practice for the year God goes quiet is the slower-still version of the daily posture. For the question of whether waiting is delay or posture at all, Murray’s opening chapter on the same word holds the ground this article is standing on.
The Murray line to keep near the page
If you take only one line into the rest of the week, take this one:
Our God, in the infinite tenderness and omnipotence of His love, waits to be our Life and Joy.
That sentence is the answer to how God renews the soul, in eighteen words. He waits to be your life. The well refills from above. The renewal is His own self, given to a soul that has at last stopped trying to refill itself. The waiting is not the absence of the gift. The waiting is the gift, arriving in the only way it can arrive — quietly, slowly, into the hands that have stopped grasping.
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The 140-day form of this slow practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
We also intend, in time, to bring Waiting on God itself back into print under Everspring Press, so the chapters Murray wrote can sit beside the daily companion that walks the practice they hold.
The Everspring Dry Season Devotional walks the renewal of inner reserves at the pace of one short page per day, with the slow passages of Murray and the wider stream of waiting writers held for you when you are too tired to find them yourself. Built for the woman whose well has gone low and who is ready, slowly, to be refilled from above.
