What Is the Peace of God? — Murray on the Peace That Passes
⏱ 14 min read
You have read the line. The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. You have read it in Philippians 4, in the small green Bible by the bed, on the verse card stuck to the bathroom mirror by a friend, on the front of the funeral programme three Septembers ago. And the line has done you good. It has, for short stretches, settled something in you.
And it has, on the long Tuesday afternoons of a year that has not been easy, slipped away again. The mind starts up. The chest tightens. The thoughts return to the place they always return to — the financial worry, the family worry, the bodily worry, the worry-shaped worry that has no name. The verse comes back to you, and the verse is true, and the verse will not land. Something keeps slipping.
The question what is the peace of God is the question of a woman who has had this peace in flickers and has not yet been taught the slow practice the line was actually pointing at. The slipping is not a sign of failed faith. The slipping is what the peace of God does for a soul that has not yet been still long enough to receive it as something other than a momentary feeling.
This is the slow version of the answer. Andrew Murray, the South African pastor who wrote Abide in Christ in 1882 and spent the rest of his ministry teaching congregations how to settle into the kind of quiet that the Philippians verse describes, will be our older voice. Three passages, slowly read. The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
The thing the peace of God is not
It is not the absence of difficulty. That is the first thing to settle.
The modern Christian woman, especially the one who has tried to think her way into peace, often runs aground on a small mistaken expectation: that if the peace of God were truly hers, the worry would stop. The worry has not stopped. The thoughts still start at three in the morning. The chest still tightens at the unexpected email. Therefore — the small private reasoning runs — I must not have the peace yet.
Murray’s whole pastoral life was built around quietly correcting this. The peace of God is not the absence of the storm. The peace of God is, in the language of the line itself, that which passeth all understanding — meaning it is not a peace the mind generates by sorting the worries out into manageable shapes. The mind cannot generate this peace. The mind is, in fact, the place the peace transcends. Passeth in the older English is the verb of stepping past, going beyond. The peace of God goes beyond the mind. It does not arrive in the mind. It arrives underneath it — in the place Murray spent decades teaching congregations to find — and the mind, for a while, gets to rest because something beneath it is now holding it up.
This is the part that takes most Christian women years to understand. You have been trying to think your way into peace. The peace was never going to come through the thinking. The peace comes when the thinking is allowed to set down its work for a few minutes and rest on something it is not in charge of holding.
If anxiety has been the long shape of the last year — if the mind has been the loudest room in the house — prayer for anxiety and overthinking (calm your mind with scripture) is the practical companion to this slower article, and Christian journal prompts for anxiety walks thirty quieting entries one evening at a time. If the night-time mind has been the worst of it, prayer for protection tonight carries ten scriptures for the hour before sleep.
The first passage: the soul made still unto God
“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.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the breadth of what Murray is naming as the obstacle. It is not only the obvious things — the worries, the fears, the small idolatries of comfort. It is everything that is not God — including the things that make you glad. Murray is not anti-gladness. He is, with the precision of a long pastoral life, noticing that even the gladnesses can become the static that prevents the deeper quiet.
The Christian woman who has been trying to make peace by stacking small gladnesses on top of a hard week — the candle, the playlist, the bath, the verse on the mirror — will recognise the diagnosis. The small gladnesses are not bad. They are simply, by themselves, incapable of producing the peace Murray is describing. They sit on the surface of the day. The peace he is teaching arrives underneath the surface.
The peace that passeth understanding requires a turning of the whole heart away from the creature — meaning away from every created thing as the source of the settling — and toward God Himself as the source. The creature includes the mind, with its plans and assessments. The creature includes the body, with its small comforts. The creature includes other people, with their love and approval. None of these are wrong. None of these can be the source. The peace has only one source, and Murray’s whole pastoral aim is to teach the soul to find it.
Take heed and be quiet. In quietness shall be your strength. It is good that a man should quietly wait. The verses Murray gathers in this passage are not poetic flourishes. They are the practice. The peace of God is, on Murray’s account, the fruit of a soul that has been made quiet before Him — quiet for long enough that the quietness has become the soul’s resting place, not just a Sunday morning experience.
What quietness actually looks like in a real week
It does not look like a long retreat. Most Christian women cannot take a long retreat. It looks like this:
The five minutes before the children wake, in the chair by the window, with no phone in the hand. The reading of one verse, slowly. The not-saying of any prayer for two of the five minutes. The simply being there with Him, without producing anything. That is the practice. It is small. It is shorter than the time it takes to make tea. It is also, over months, what Murray was teaching when he taught waiting on God.
The peace does not arrive in the five minutes. The peace arrives, slowly, in the week the five minutes are part of. You will not feel it the first Tuesday. You may not feel it the third Tuesday. By the eighth Tuesday, you will notice that something underneath the noise of the day has begun to hold differently. The thoughts still start. The chest still tightens. And something underneath the thoughts and underneath the chest is now there, holding them both up, in a way that was not there in March.
That underlying holding is what Murray calls the peace of God. It is built by the patient daily showing-up. It is not built by the trying-harder.
The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety is, in its quiet way, built to give the five minutes a home. Each evening, a short passage from one of the old contemplatives, room for the honest sentence, a verse pre-printed. Not a system. A small daily place to be made quiet before Him, so the quietness, over a year, builds into the peace the Philippians line was always pointing at.
The second passage: a blessed rest in the union
“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 sentence holds the whole teaching.
Notice the verbs Murray gives to abiding. To be ruled. To be taught. To be led. Three passive verbs in a row. The Christian woman who has been trying to manufacture the peace through effort — the right prayer, the right discipline, the right amount of trying — will feel the small relief of the grammar. The verbs are not to rule. to teach. to lead. Murray is not asking you to do those things. He is asking you to be the one those things are done to.
This is, for many Christian women, the hardest part of the practice. You have spent decades being the one who does the ruling, the teaching, the leading. The household, the work, the family, the church ministry — all of it has trained you to be the one in charge. The peace of God arrives in a soul that is, for five minutes a day, no longer in charge. The soul that is willing to set down the rulership of its own day, for five minutes, and let Him be the one doing the holding.
The giving up of oneself. That is the price. It is not large. It is not dramatic. It is the small daily admission, in the chair by the window, that you are not the one keeping the world together — that He is — and that for five minutes you will let yourself rest in the arms of the One who actually is.
The reason the modern Christian woman finds this difficult is that the giving-up feels, the first few weeks, like a kind of failure. The mind is loud about it. I should be doing something. I should be praying for the children. I should be making a list. I should at least be reading. The mind is doing what the mind has been trained for decades to do — to fill every quiet with productive activity. The peace of God arrives, Murray says, when the soul has been still long enough that the being ruled, being taught, being led has become the resting place, rather than the productive activity.
The peace of God, the great calm of the eternal world. That phrase is the line worth keeping near the page. The peace is not generated inside time. It is the calm of the eternal world — the steady stillness of the place where God is — drifting into the soul through the small door the abiding has opened. The eternal world has always been calm. The five minutes a day is the soul learning to lean against that calm long enough to let some of it through.
A small somatic note on the peace that passes
Pause here. Murray’s teaching has a body to it, and the body is where the practice becomes most translatable to your Tuesday.
Sit somewhere quiet. Close your eyes if you can. Let your hands rest, palms up, on your lap — the small physiological signal of not holding. Take one slow inhale through the nose. On the exhale, let the breath go out through slightly parted lips, slower than the inhale. The slow exhale is the body’s signal to the nervous system that the threat is past, that the soul is allowed to lower itself.
Repeat once. Then notice — without trying to make it happen — whether anything in the chest, or the jaw, or the small muscles around the eyes, has loosened by a small degree. That small loosening is the body’s translation of being ruled, being taught, being led. The body has been holding itself together with the same effort the mind has. The five minutes is permission for both to set the holding down.
Then continue reading.
The third passage: still unto God, gazing on the life
“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. Soul, be still and listen; let every thought be hushed until the word has entered your heart too: ‘Child!’”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it slowly. Twice.
This is Murray’s final word on what the practice of peace actually involves. It is not a long list of disciplines. It is two things, in sequence. Gazing. And being still until the word lands.
The gazing is the slow looking at the life of Christ in scripture — not the speed-reading of a chapter, not the underlining of a study Bible, but the contemplative resting of the eye on a single passage until the passage begins to give up its quieter meanings. Murray was a slow reader. He read a paragraph the way a woman might read a long letter from someone she loved — line by line, with pauses, returning to the phrases that mattered, letting the rhythms of the language do their slow work in her.
The stillness is the second half. Soul, be still and listen. The stillness is not the production of silence. It is the hushing of every thought — the small interior practice of letting the loud commentary of the mind go quiet enough that a single word, Child, can be heard. Child. The whole pastoral letter is in that one word. Murray ends the passage with it because he has spent the whole previous sentence preparing the soul to be able to hear it.
For the Christian woman who has spent her decades being many things — the manager, the mother, the wife, the worker, the friend, the carer — Child is the word the peace of God actually arrives on. The peace lands when the soul, having quieted long enough, hears that the One who is the calm of the eternal world is calling her Child. The hearing is the peace. The hearing of Child is, in Murray’s whole teaching, what the Philippians verse meant by the peace that keeps the heart and mind.
You cannot manufacture the hearing. You can show up to the gazing. You can practise the being-still. The hearing of Child, when it comes, will come at His timing, in His way, in a small moment you were not expecting — at the kitchen sink, in the car at a red light, in the chair by the window at six in the morning. The peace lands inside the hearing. The hearing lands inside a soul that has been made still by the slow practice of months. (The companion read for the year-long version of this is 100 days of faith over fear: the slow practice that actually holds, which walks the daily structure the peace grows inside.)
What is the peace of God, by the end of Murray
It is the calm of the eternal world drifting into a soul that has been made still long enough to receive it.
It is the fruit of abiding — of being ruled, taught and led by Him for five minutes a day, until the being-ruled becomes the resting place rather than the activity.
It is what arrives when the gazing on Christ has been slow enough, and the soul still enough, that the word Child can finally land.
It is not the absence of worry. It is the underlying steadiness in a soul that has, for some months, been turning its whole heart toward Him in small daily ways, until the heart is, by His grace, kept.
The verse in Philippians becomes precise again, after Murray. The peace of God, which passeth all understanding — yes, because it is not generated by the mind, it transcends the mind, it arrives underneath the mind and holds the mind up. Shall keep your hearts and minds — yes, because the peace, once it has begun to take root in the abiding, becomes the guard, the steady held-ness that the worry can break against without breaking through. Through Christ Jesus — yes, because the source has only ever been Him. (The sibling reads in this contemplative-fathers series sit at what is biblical joy — Edwards on the joy that holds and what is the joy of the Lord — Spurgeon on strength through joy.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotionals on Anxiety. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds an anxious soul in proximity to the One whose peace, slowly, will come.
The Everspring Devotionals on Anxiety carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — abiding, being still, the great calm of the eternal world — into a daily companion built for the Christian woman whose mind will not quiet, and who is ready, slowly, to let the peace that passes find her at the kitchen table.
