What It Means to Bear Fruit According to Andrew Murray
⏱ 11 min read
You have been trying, for some time now, to produce spiritual fruit by force of will. Patience that you do not feel. Kindness, given through teeth. Joy, performed at coffee with a friend you used to be glad to see. Self-control that has become a daily small flogging of the parts of you that keep slipping the leash. And you are tired in a way that the world’s tiredness does not quite explain — the specific exhaustion of a Christian woman who has been treating the fruit of the Spirit as if it were a list of behaviours she has to produce on demand, and who has been, in private, slowly running dry. Andrew Murray, in The True Vine — his small companion volume to Abide in Christ, written as a 31-day meditation on John 15 — wrote the patient extended treatment of why this approach was never going to work, and what fruit actually is in the gospel’s own vocabulary. The question how to bear spiritual fruit is, in Murray’s hands, less a question of effort and more a question of what is allowed to flow through you, and the difference between those two framings is the difference between a tired Christian and a quiet one. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries a slow daily form of this practice, if you would like a companion for the next stretch. For now — read slowly.
Murray was preaching to people he loved who were tired in the same way. He did not scold the trying. He moved the trying to a different place in the sentence. The three passages below are the spine of that move.
The first passage — the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within
The sentence in Abide in Christ that names the whole shift Murray is asking for is one that the over-trying Christian needs to read twice slowly before it lands.
“To abide in His love, His mighty, saving, keeping, satisfying love, even as He abode in the Father’s love — surely the very greatness of our calling teaches us that it never can be a work we have to perform; it must be with us as with Him, the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within. Notice what Murray has done. The fruit is not produced. The fruit is outflowed. The verb is wrong on purpose. Outflowed is what water does from a spring. The spring does not strain to produce the water; the water rises because the spring is connected to a source the spring did not create. The fruit of the Spirit, in Murray’s reading of John 15, is of this kind. It is not a behaviour you generate. It is what flows from a life that has been allowed to be connected, daily, to the One whose life it is.
This is the part the tired Christian has had backwards for years. You have been treating the fruit as the task. Murray treats the fruit as the evidence. The task is the connection. The fruit is what happens at the end of the connection, when the connection has been allowed to hold. It must be with us as with Him, Murray says — meaning, as Christ abode in the Father, you abide in Christ. He did not produce His love for the Father by effort. He lived inside it. The love flowed because He was in the Father, and the fruit of the love flowed because the love was His medium. The same pattern applies to you. The fruit does not come out of you by force. The fruit comes out of you because He is in you, and the fruit is His to grow in the soil of your daily abiding.
The relief in this is enormous, and the relief is the first piece of fruit. Your part is the connection — the chair, the verse, the longer exhale, the slow daily yes. His part is the fruit. You did not generate the spring. The spring is His placing inside of you. The fruit rises when the connection holds, and the connection holds because He is the one keeping it. (For the foundational reading on the receiving posture this fruit lives inside of, why Andrew Murray said abiding is not effort walks the slow companion essay. For the vine imagery itself, the branch and the vine — Andrew Murray on John 15 is the sibling reading. For the source Christ within, Andrew Murray on Christ as the indwelling life is the next slow passage in this hub.)
The somatic — for the body that has been producing on demand
Pause here. The trying has not only been in your spirit. It has been in your body. The shoulders are up. The jaw is set. The hands are subtly clenched even when there is nothing in them. The body has been producing the fruit on your behalf — squeezing patience out of a clenched chest, manufacturing kindness from a tight jaw — and the body is, like the spirit, tired.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat on the floor. Let your hands rest on your knees. Then — this is the small somatic — unfold your fingers slowly until the palms face upward. Notice the difference.
Take one slow inhale. Let the shoulders drop by half an inch. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale.
Now ask the body the small question: can the fruit come from somewhere other than the squeezing? You do not have to answer in words. The body answers in the small softening of the chest under the breath, in the unclenching of the hand on the knee, in the quiet recognition that the fruit, when it comes, will not be produced by the holding. It will rise, in its own time, from the source underneath.
One more slow inhale. One more longer exhale. Then go on with the day.
The body has just rehearsed Murray’s whole first passage. Palms up. Hands soft. Breath slow. The spontaneous outflowing of a life from within is, in the body, the difference between a fist and an open hand. The fist produces nothing. The open hand receives, and from the open hand whatever has been given can also pour. The fruit lives inside the open posture, not inside the clenched one.
The second passage — Thou doest all in me
Murray, in Holy in Christ, says the sentence that the tired Christian needs in order to put down the project of self-produced sanctification altogether.
“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
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Believing that Thou doest all in me. This is the sentence. Five words again, and they carry the weight of the whole question of how to bear spiritual fruit. Thou — meaning God. Doest — meaning the work, the actual changing, the actual growing. All — meaning everything, not a partnership in which He does some and you do the rest. In me — meaning the location of the doing is not somewhere out there but inside the chest where the trying has been happening.
If Thou doest all in me, then the project of producing fruit by force of will was never assigned to you. The project belongs to Him. Your part is much smaller and much quieter. The stillness. The confidence. The restful faith. The believing. The fellowship, which is just Murray’s softer word for the slow daily nearness that has been the practice all along. The fruit is the secret of a life of holiness, and the secret is not your striving. The secret is the Thou doest all in me, daily believed, daily relaxed into, until the fruit begins to come from a place underneath your effort that the effort had been blocking.
The over-trying Christian, on first reading this, has a small inward objection: but I still have to do things. Yes. You still have to act. The acting, however, looks different when it flows from Thou doest all in me than when it flows from I must produce this. The same patience, in the moment, looks identical from the outside. From the inside, one is squeezed out through clenched teeth and one is given, easily, from a source that is not yours. The first leaves you tireder than you started. The second leaves you, oddly, more steady. The first is force of will. The second is fruit. Murray is asking you to learn the second by slow daily abiding, until the difference becomes felt and the squeezing becomes unnecessary. (The Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around exactly this slow shift — one short passage each evening, with room for the verse and room for the honest sentence about which fruit you have been squeezing today and which one might be allowed, slowly, to flow.)
The third passage — the giving up of oneself
Murray, late in Abide in Christ, gives a sentence that finishes the picture by naming the small daily action that lets the fruit rise.
“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.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it twice. Slowly.
Blessed rest! the fruit and the foretaste and the fellowship of God’s own rest. Notice what Murray has done. The rest is itself named fruit. The first fruit is not patience or kindness or self-control. The first fruit is rest. The blessed rest in the arms of Everlasting Love is what grows first, when the giving up of oneself becomes the daily practice, and from the rest the other fruits rise in their own time.
This is why the order has been backwards in your trying. You have been chasing the visible fruit — the patience, the kindness, the self-control — without first allowing the invisible fruit, the rest, to settle. The visible fruit cannot grow without the rest. The rest is the soil. You cannot squeeze patience out of a chest that is not resting. You can only fake it, briefly, and the faking is what has been exhausting you. The order Murray gives is: the giving up of oneself comes first; the rest follows the giving up; the visible fruit follows the rest. The squeezing is replaced by a much quieter sequence in which the first thing to be received is the rest, and the patience and the kindness and the rest of the fruit rise, from the rest, when the rest has had time to settle.
This is the answer to the question of how to bear spiritual fruit. You stop trying to produce it. You give yourself up to be ruled and taught and led. You rest in the arms of Everlasting Love. The rest, given, becomes the soil. The fruit, in its own time, rises from the soil. None of the rising is on your shoulders. All of the giving-up is yours to do, daily, in small increments, until the giving-up becomes the new ordinary. (For the slow companion practice on what it means to be in Christ daily, the daily Word Andrew Murray spoke to his soul is the next reading in this hub. For a bridge essay on the quiet voice that speaks the fruit into being, why God whispers instead of shouts — Tozer on the still small voice is the companion in a different father’s vocabulary.)
What the slow reading will do over a year
If you sit with Murray’s three passages — one a month for three months — and let the question how to bear spiritual fruit be a slow companion for the rest of the year, what shifts is not the look of your life from the outside but the source of the kindness in it. The patience starts coming from somewhere underneath your effort. The kindness arrives, on a Tuesday afternoon, before you had thought to manufacture it. The self-control becomes the easier verb in the sentence rather than the hardest. None of it is dramatic. The fruit rises slowly, the way fruit always rises — quietly, on a vine that has been allowed to stay connected. Your part remains the connection. The fruit is His. And the tiredness that has been with you for years lifts, not because the life has become easier, but because the producing has been handed back to the One whose work it was the whole time.
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A daily home for the slow practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each evening, one short passage and a verse, with room for the honest sentence — a small daily place to let the fruit rise from a source underneath your effort, instead of being squeezed from a chest that has been holding too long. The True Vine, the small 31-day companion to Abide in Christ this article reads from, is on our list to reprint through Everspring Press in the coming year, for the readers who would like to walk Murray’s whole meditation on John 15 at the page.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — fruit as the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, the ‘Thou doest all in me’ that lifts the project off your shoulders, the rest that is itself the first fruit — into a daily companion for the woman who has been producing spiritual fruit by force of will for too long.
