What Andrew Murray Taught About the Christian’s Lost Strength
⏱ 11 min read
You are spiritually exhausted from trying harder. The verses no longer steady you the way they used to. The prayer time has become another item on the list you are failing at. Somewhere in the last year, the strength you used to be able to find — for the prayer, for the patience, for the slow holding of the long week — quietly went out of reach, and the only response you have been able to make is to push the effort a little higher and hope the strength returns.
Andrew Murray, in the small classic Absolute Surrender, would tell you that the strength is not lost. The strength is in the place it has always been; what has thinned is the soul’s contact with the place. Murray’s whole answer to the question of how to find strength in God is, slowly read, an answer about contact — not about effort. The Prayer Journal for Women is the 140-day companion this article is the opening pages of, and it walks the same posture across daily pages so that the contact can be re-built one quiet morning at a time.
What Murray names in Absolute Surrender, and what makes the book worth slowing down for, is the diagnosis that the exhausted Christian is almost never failing for lack of trying. She is failing because the trying itself is the wrong instrument. The lost strength is recovered by a different motion than the one she has been making. The motion is not more effort. The motion is the laying down of the effort, and the slow re-establishment of the abiding underneath it. Three passages from Murray will let you see the working answer in its full shape.
The first passage: the work of the heart, not of the brain
“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. Notice what Murray is doing with the word work.
He is not abolishing the word. He is relocating it. The abiding work exists; he is clear about that. But the work is of the heart, not of the brain. The modern Christian woman has been doing the brain-work for years — the study, the verses memorised, the books read, the careful theology — and the brain-work is good, but the brain-work is not the place strength comes from. Strength comes from the heart-work. The work of the heart clinging to and resting in Jesus. That is the abiding. That is the place. That is where the lost strength is waiting to be received.
Notice the strange compound verb Murray gives. Clinging to and resting in. Two verbs the modern mind keeps wanting to separate. Clinging sounds active, resting sounds passive, and the modern Christian wants one or the other depending on what mood she is in. Murray refuses the separation. The abiding is both at once. You cling, and you rest. You hold on, and you let go of the holding-up of yourself. The hand is on the Vine and the weight is on the Vine. The clinging is what the soul does. The resting is what the soul does. They are the same gesture.
This is the first relocation of where the lost strength lives. It does not live in the brain that has been studying harder. It does not live in the will that has been pushing harder. It lives in the heart that has stopped trying to manufacture its own contact with Christ and is, instead, clinging and resting — the small inward double-gesture that Murray, across the whole of Absolute Surrender, is patiently trying to get the reader to make.
If the dryness of recent months has felt like a failure of effort, Murray would gently disagree. The dryness has been the soul’s protest against the wrong instrument. The brain has been doing the work the heart was meant to do, and the heart, neglected, has stopped sending up the strength the brain has been trying to find by other means. Feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence is the slower companion piece to this paragraph, if the dryness has been the long shape of the year.
The second passage: the secret of holiness in the path of the Son
“Thou knowest how often I have looked upon the circumstances and the difficulties of this life as hindrances. Oh, let them all, in the light of Thy holy purpose to make us partakers of Thy Holiness, in the light of Thy Will and Thy Love, from this hour be helps. Let, above all, the path of Thy Blessed Son, proving how suffering is the discipline of a Father’s love, and surrender the secret of holiness, and sacrifice the entrance to the Holiest of all, be so revealed that in the power of His Spirit and His grace that path may become mine.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read it slowly. This is the second move. The first move was the relocation of the work; the second is the relocation of the circumstances.
The exhausted Christian woman is exhausted partly because the circumstances of the year — the difficult relationships, the unmet hopes, the slow chronic things she cannot fix — have been registering in her soul as hindrances. As obstacles to the strength she has been trying to find. The energy goes into resenting the obstacles, working around the obstacles, hoping the obstacles will lift so the strength can come back. Murray names the misreading. Looked upon the circumstances and the difficulties of this life as hindrances. That is the inward posture that has been quietly draining the strength.
The correction is severe and tender at the same time. Let them all, from this hour, be helps. The same circumstances. The same difficulties. The same slow weight of the year. Reframed — by the light of His purpose to make you a partaker of His holiness — as the very instruments through which the strength is being formed. The difficulty was not, in Murray’s reading, the thing keeping the strength away. The difficulty was, possibly, the thing through which the strength was meant to come.
This is the part of Murray that the wellness-Christian voice resists, because it asks the soul to do the hardest thing it can be asked to do — to release the demand that the conditions be different before the strength returns. The lost strength, Murray says, is not waiting in the easier life on the other side of the difficulty. The lost strength is waiting in the yielded reception of the difficulty as the place He is currently shaping you. Surrender the secret of holiness, and sacrifice the entrance to the Holiest of all. The path the Son walked is the path the soul is being given. Not as punishment. As the way the strength forms.
A small pause. Sit upright for a moment. Let the hands open, palms up, on the legs. Notice, without judgement, the difficulty that has been most heavily present in your week — the one your mind keeps returning to. Do not try to solve it. Simply name it inwardly. Then, slowly, let one breath go out, and on the inward breath name the small reorientation Murray is offering: let this, from this hour, be a help. Stay there for thirty seconds. The body has been bracing against the difficulty; the bracing is part of why the strength has felt out of reach. The releasing of the brace is the body’s first piece of the abiding.
The Prayer Journal for Women holds this particular reframe across its 140 days — a page each morning to name the difficulty honestly, and a slow place to receive it as the soil His grace is currently working in, rather than the obstacle to be wished away before the strength can be found.
The third passage: the rest of faith and the everything He will be
“I cannot tell all, but I can tell you this: if you will come to Christ Jesus and surrender all, the blessing of God will be on all that you have. There will be a blessing for your own soul. ‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.’ Try that; trust Jesus for everything, and trust everything to Him, and the blessing of God will come upon you — the sweet rest, the rest of faith. It is all in the hands of Jesus; He will guide you; He will teach you; He will work in you; He will keep you; He will be everything to you.”
— Andrew Murray, The Master’s Indwelling
This is the third move, and it is the one that finally names where the lost strength is recovered. Read the last sentence slowly. He will guide you; He will teach you; He will work in you; He will keep you; He will be everything to you.
Five verbs. All of them His. The list is the whole answer to how to find strength in God in Murray’s hand. The strength is not a thing the soul produces by harder effort. The strength is a thing the soul receives as the natural consequence of having surrendered the trying to the One who has volunteered to do the five verbs Himself. Guide, teach, work, keep, be everything. The Christian woman who has been guiding herself, teaching herself, working in herself, keeping herself, and trying to be everything to herself, has been doing five jobs Christ was waiting to do. The exhaustion is the predictable result of five vacancies the wrong person has been filling.
Murray’s answer to how to find strength in God is, finally, this: by stopping the doing of the five jobs that were never yours. The strength returns when the jobs are returned. He will be everything to you is not a soft devotional sentence; it is a structural promise. He fills the five vacancies. The soul, no longer doing them, receives back its own native energy plus the inflow He has been waiting to give. The sweet rest, the rest of faith.
If the slow work of returning these jobs sounds like the practice you have not been able to begin alone, the Let It Go Mom Journal — 30 prompts for the things you’re done carrying is the lighter companion piece — a place to name, on the page, the specific jobs you have been doing that were never yours.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take one sentence of Murray’s into the week ahead, take this one:
“He will guide you; He will teach you; He will work in you; He will keep you; He will be everything to you.”
Write it small. Put it where you will see it on the day the trying-harder reflex is strongest — the morning of the heavy meeting, the evening of the long worry, the hour the strength feels most absent. The line is the corrective. The lost strength does not come back through more effort. It comes back through the slow surrender of the five jobs that exhausted you. The strength was never produced. It was always received. Murray’s whole project is to let you re-learn the receiving.
You will keep taking the jobs back. Murray would expect that. The point is not that you surrender perfectly. The point is that, having seen where the strength actually lives, you can, the next time you notice yourself white-knuckling, lower the knuckles and let the abiding return. Ten thousand small returnings, across a year, is how the lost strength is recovered. Slowly. Untheatrically. By the soul that has stopped working at strength and started, instead, clinging and resting in the One whose strength was never far.
For the sibling-essays in this Murray cluster, what Andrew Murray meant by absolute surrender walks the all-or-nothing question this article assumes, and why Andrew Murray said self-will is the root of all sin walks the diagnostic side of why the five jobs felt so important to keep doing.
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A 140-day home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. One short page each day. Scripture pre-printed. Space for the small honest sentence of the job being handed back today. Built for the woman who has been white-knuckling and is ready, slowly, to let the lost strength be received again.
It is the format of this article made into a daily companion, so the page you sit down at tomorrow already has a shape and you do not have to invent one from scratch on the evening you finally have five minutes.
Everspring Press plans, in time, to reprint Andrew Murray’s Absolute Surrender under our quiet contemplative imprint. Until then, the Prayer Journal for Women is the daily companion that carries Murray’s posture into the contemporary woman’s morning page.
