What Does It Mean to Walk in the Spirit? — Murray’s Plain Answer
⏱ 13 min read
You have heard the phrase a thousand times. Walk in the Spirit. It is in the sermon. It is in the small-group study. It is in the verse the women’s-conference speaker reaches for when she wants to gesture at the higher Christian life. And somewhere between the second and the two-hundredth hearing of it, the phrase emptied out for you — became a thing other Christians seemed to do, a thing you would do too if you only knew how, a thing that perhaps required a feeling you had not had since you were nineteen at the youth retreat.
This is the slow version of the answer. Not a five-step formula. Not a chart of fleshly versus spiritual. A quiet read of Andrew Murray, who wrote more carefully than almost anyone about what walking in the Spirit actually means, and who used a vocabulary that has gone quiet in modern Christian publishing — abiding, resting, waiting, stillness, holy quiet. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women walks his vocabulary at the pace of one passage per day across 140 days, if you would like a place to take this practice once you have read this article. For now — read slowly.
The reason the phrase emptied out for you is that the dominant modern usage of walk in the Spirit has bent it toward feeling. To walk in the Spirit, the implied teaching goes, is to feel led, to feel close, to feel filled, to feel the prompting. And on the days you do not feel any of those things — which, if you are honest, is most days — you conclude that you are not walking in the Spirit. The conclusion is wrong. The wrongness is not your fault. The vocabulary you were taught was thin.
Murray’s vocabulary is not thin. Walking in the Spirit, in his usage, is a posture — a settled, deliberate position of the soul before God — not a feeling that visits sometimes. The posture is available to you on the morning your coffee tastes like ash. The posture is available to you in the hour your faith is at its lowest ebb. The posture is what Murray means by abiding. And the posture, once understood, changes what you are looking for when you sit down with God in the morning.
The first thing walking in the Spirit is not
It is not a higher emotional weather. It is not the warm sensation in the chest at the worship song you like. It is not the conviction that arrives during the sermon. It is not the goosebumps. It is not the tears.
Those experiences are real. They are sometimes given. But they are not what walking in the Spirit means, and Murray spends much of The Spirit of Christ gently dismantling the equation between Spirit-filled life and felt experience. He does it not to denigrate feeling — he was not anti-experience — but to relocate the centre of gravity. The centre is not in your nervous system. The centre is in your posture before God.
Here is the first passage. Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly, as if you had never seen the words before.
“It is where Thou enterest to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself, that Thou makest holy. O my God! may my heart be Thy resting-place. I would, in the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. Let such fellowship with Thee, and Thy love, and Thy will be to me the secret of a life of holiness.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Notice what Murray is asking for. He is not asking to feel God’s presence. He is asking to be God’s resting-place. The reversal is the whole sermon in one sentence. The walking-in-the-Spirit life, in Murray’s reading, is not the life that successfully feels God. It is the life in which God is at rest in the soul — which means the soul has stopped striving, stopped performing, stopped trying to be its own holy-maker, and has sat down in a faith that allows God to do His own work in it.
Believing that Thou doest all in me. That is the centre of the passage. The believing is the work. The doing is His. The soul that walks in the Spirit is not the soul that achieves the most spiritual exertion. It is the soul that has settled into a restful faith — a deliberate, quiet, daily-renewed conviction that the holy life is His business, not yours, and that your business is the staying-with.
This is harder than it sounds. The performing self does not want to hear it. The performing self has been earning approval — from parents, from teachers, from God-it-imagines — for forty years, and the news that the holy life is received rather than produced lands as a kind of bewildered relief, then a quiet panic, then, slowly, a settling. The settling is the walking-in-the-Spirit posture beginning to take.
(If the morning rhythm has been the part you keep trying to get right, how to start your day with God walks the smallest version of this restful-faith opening for the woman whose mornings have been frantic.)
The second thing walking in the Spirit is
It is a posture of trust that does not depend on feeling, because the trust is the substance and the feeling is the weather. Murray makes this explicit in the second passage. Read it slowly.
“Like the air that surrounds me, like the light that shines on me, here is my Lord Jesus with me in His hidden but Divine and most real presence. My faith must in quiet rest and trust bow before the Father, of whom and by whose Mighty Grace I am in Christ: He will reveal it to me with ever-growing clearness and power. He does it as I believe, and in believing open my whole soul to receive what is implied in it: the sense of sinfulness and unholiness must become the strength of my trust and dependence. In such faith I abide in Christ. But because it is of faith, therefore it is of the Holy Spirit.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Like the air that surrounds me. That is the figure to hold. Air is not something you feel most of the time. You feel air when the wind picks up or when you exert yourself climbing stairs. The rest of the hours of your life, air is the medium you move in without sensation — and air is no less present in the unsensed hours than in the windy ones. Murray’s analogy is doing real theological work. The Spirit’s presence is the air you are walking in. The presence does not require your sensation to be true. You walk in it whether or not the wind picks up.
This re-orients everything. The Christian woman who has spent years asking am I walking in the Spirit? — and answering no on the basis of an absence of felt presence — has been using the wrong instrument to measure. The instrument she has been using is her own nervous system. Murray would say: try a different instrument. Try the posture. Try the quiet rest and trust that bows before the Father whether or not the air feels charged.
Notice also the sentence that does the most work theologically: the sense of sinfulness and unholiness must become the strength of my trust and dependence. In the modern Christian self-help vocabulary, the sense of sinfulness is something to be argued away, replaced with self-acceptance affirmations. Murray refuses the move. The sense of sinfulness, in his usage, is not the obstacle to walking in the Spirit; it is the fuel for trust, because trust is most necessary precisely where self-sufficiency has run out. The woman who feels unholy in the morning is not disqualified from walking in the Spirit that day. She is in the better starting position for it, if she will let the unholiness drive her toward dependence rather than into despair.
(For the kind of trust the night-time version of this struggle needs — the asks that feel too small or too embarrassing for prayer — a daily prayer journal that holds the asks you’re embarrassed to pray is the practical companion. And for the wider scriptural ground under the practice of rest itself — the part that feels unearned and therefore suspect — what the Bible says about self-care walks the verses.)
The somatic that goes with the posture
Pause here, before the third passage. The posture Murray is describing has a body to it. The body cannot walk in the Spirit while it is bracing for impact.
Sit somewhere quiet. Put both feet flat on the floor. Let the shoulders drop by an inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let the jaw release. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, say silently the line you just read — like the air that surrounds me, like the light that shines on me. Stay in the un-bracing for thirty seconds. Then read on.
The posture in the body and the posture in the soul are not separate. The performing self carries itself in a body that is constantly bracing. The trusting self, in Murray’s sense, carries itself in a body that has remembered it does not have to hold itself up. Walking in the Spirit is, among other things, a way of being inside a body that has stopped bracing.
This is not a side note. The reason most modern Christians cannot sustain the contemplative posture is that the body never gets to stop. The phone is on. The calendar is full. The shoulders never come down. Murray wrote in an era in which the body still had hours of quiet in a normal day. You do not. The five-minute un-bracing — once a day, on purpose — is the small practical bridge between his vocabulary and your nervous system. Without it, the words abide and rest will keep sliding off, because the body does not believe them.
The third thing walking in the Spirit is
It is the listening posture — a deliberate stillness in which the still small voice has room to be heard. The third passage is from Murray’s writing on stillness, and it is the one I keep returning to.
“If we are to have our whole heart turned towards God, we must have it turned away from the creature, from all that occupies and interests, whether of joy or sorrow. God is a being of such infinite greatness and glory, and our nature has become so estranged from Him, that it needs our whole heart and desires set upon Him, even in some little measure to know and receive Him. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. 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.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
This is the hardest of the three to receive in a modern week, because it asks for something the modern week is structured to prevent. Take heed and be quiet. The quiet is not the absence of sound. It is the deliberate turning of the heart away from the running commentary — the news, the worries, the future planning, the past-rehearsing — long enough that God can be the largest thing in the inner room again.
Walking in the Spirit, in Murray’s reading, is not a high-energy mystical state. It is a quiet. And the quiet has to be made — not found. The modern Christian woman is not going to stumble accidentally into the quiet between school drop-off and the work meeting. She has to make a small space and walk into it. Five minutes. Ten. A chair. A window. A closed door. The making of the space is the practice.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women was built for exactly this kind of small daily quiet. Each page holds a short passage, a guided slow read, and room for the one honest sentence that comes up when the heart has been quiet long enough to know what it is actually feeling. It is the 140-day form of the practice Murray is describing. Not because the workbook is magic — because the daily small structure protects the quiet from being colonised by the rest of the day.
What walking in the Spirit will not look like
It will not look impressive. It will look — from the outside — like a quiet woman, with a Bible open at her kitchen table, sitting longer than she used to before standing up. The walking-in-the-Spirit life is not visible to the people watching. It is visible only in its slow fruits — the patience that did not used to be there, the un-anxious response to the email that would have triggered you last year, the kindness in the conversation you would have rushed through. Murray says the fruits grow because the soul has been at rest in Him. You will not see the rest. You will see the fruit.
It will also not look like constant felt closeness. There will be weeks when the chair time feels dry. There will be mornings when the verse reads like newsprint. Murray does not promise the felt closeness. He promises something steadier — He doeth all in me — which is a substance underneath the felt weather.
(If the dry weeks are where you are right now, the Christian-mom version of the small daily return is walked in Christian mom devotional — 7-day mini study for busy moms, and the sibling article on the wider doctrinal ground is what is sanctification and how does it actually happen, which sits next to this one in the Father Analysis series. The companion piece on how this doctrine relates to its near-neighbour is the difference between justification and sanctification.)
The small daily form of the posture
The practical practice is simple, and Murray would approve of how plain it is.
Sit down. Put both feet on the floor. Let the body un-brace. Read one short passage — the one above, or the one your workbook gives you. Read it twice. The first time at speed. The second time slowly, with the pen down. Then sit for two minutes. No agenda. No prayer list. No outcome. Just the posture — here I am, like the air around me, You are with me, I am bowing in quiet rest, You do the doing.
Do it again tomorrow. And the morning after. Do not measure. Do not journal whether it worked. The two minutes are not for outcomes. They are for the posture to learn itself in your body until the posture is the default position of your soul through the day, and not just at the kitchen table at seven in the morning.
This is what walking in the Spirit means in Murray’s vocabulary. It is the slow taking-up of the posture, daily, until the posture is who you are. The walking is not a high mystical state. It is the cumulative shape of a woman who has spent enough mornings in quiet rest and trust that her ordinary hours are conducted from inside that posture rather than against it.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. One passage a day, room for the honest sentence, language that does not perform. Built for the woman who is ready to walk in Murray’s vocabulary without having to invent the structure from scratch every morning.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — abide, rest, wait, quiet — into a daily companion that does not ask more of you than a depleted morning can bring.
