What the Old Saints Knew About God’s Silence — Murray on Waiting
⏱ 12 min read
The wait has been going on long enough now that you are no longer sure what you are waiting for. The thing you were waiting for in the spring — the answer, the door, the change — has shifted into something less specific. Now you are waiting for Him to speak. Or to move. Or to confirm. Or to comfort. Or simply to make Himself felt in the room again, the way He used to be.
The waiting has done something to you that you did not expect. It has thinned the easy answers. The friends who used to remind you that His timing is perfect have stopped saying it as often, because they can see the wait has gone longer than the easy phrase can carry. The sermons have stopped landing. The verses about waiting feel exhausted — read too many times, by too tired a soul, in too long a silence.
You are looking now for older voices. Voices that have been in their own long waits and have something more durable to say than the encouragement of the morning podcast. This is a slow walk through Andrew Murray — a nineteenth-century South African pastor whose small book Waiting on God sits in the contemplative tradition’s quietest shelf, written for exactly the woman you are now. Murray’s whole thesis is the one the old saints knew and the modern church has half-forgotten: the silence is the school, not the punishment. The daily form of that school is what we built into the Dry Season Devotional — a 140-day companion for the wait that has gone longer than a season.
What Murray says about the silence is not what you have been hearing. It is not what the bright theology of immediate answers will tell you. It is older, slower, and far closer to what scripture itself says when you read it carefully.
What Andrew Murray actually said
Murray wrote Waiting on God late in his life, after decades of pastoring people through exactly the kind of long waits the modern church often pretends do not happen. He had buried congregants. He had walked friends through silent years. He had been in his own deep silences. He knew the question. He was not writing from theory.
Here is the line that holds the whole book:
“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
Read it twice. Slowly. Notice what he is doing.
He is not saying the wait is a delay before the answer. He is saying the wait is, itself, the turning of the whole heart toward God. The silence is not the gap between you and Him. The silence is what makes the turning possible.
This is the part most teaching about waiting on God leaves out. The teaching treats the silence as the obstacle and the answer as the goal. Murray reverses the order. The silence is the goal — not because God wants you to suffer, but because the silence is where the heart slowly turns away from everything that is not God and toward God Himself. The answer, when it comes, will be quieter than you expect, because the woman it comes to will have become quieter through the wait.
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. This is the hard sentence. Read it again. He is not saying joy is bad. He is saying that all the small interior weather you have been carrying — the fears, the hopes, the gladnesses, the efforts — sit in the same inner space the waiting is trying to clear. The wait is the clearing. The clearing makes room for the deeper meeting. (If the silence has been the whole season — months, not weeks — When You Feel Spiritually Dry: The Practice for the Year God Goes Quiet walks the daily companion to this same teaching.)
How this lands today
You did not pick the long wait. The long wait picked you. You have been showing up to the practice anyway — the chair, the verse, the prayer — and the showing up has felt, more and more, like work without reward.
This is exactly where Murray’s teaching becomes useful in a way the brighter theology is not. Murray does not promise that the wait will end soon. He does not promise that you will get an answer this month. What he promises is that the wait is doing something in you that nothing else could do, and that the something is more valuable than the answer you have been waiting for.
That is a hard promise to receive. Most of us would prefer the answer. The contemplative tradition keeps saying, gently, that what God is making of the woman through the wait is the thing she will be most glad of in twenty years — and that the answer, when it comes, will land on a woman deeper and stronger and quieter than the woman who first started waiting. The wait is not delay. The wait is formation.
The practical implication is small but heavy. You can stop trying to get out of the wait. You can begin, slowly, to be in the wait. The being-in is the practice. The being-in is the school. The being-in is what Murray means by waiting on God, and it is utterly different from the impatient waiting for God to do something most of us were taught.
You begin the being-in by lowering the small ongoing protest. The protest is the part of you that has been asking how much longer every day for months. Murray does not ask you to stop the protest in one move. He asks you, slowly, to let the protest become quieter beside the practice. The protest can be in the room. The practice continues alongside it. Over months, the protest gets thinner. The practice gets deeper. That is the slow work the wait is doing.
Pause for a moment
The chest. Where is it. The long wait is the season the chest is the tightest, because the soul has been holding the how much longer in the breath.
Let the chest soften by an inch. Not by trying. By stopping the small ongoing effort to brace against the silence. Let one slow exhale, longer than the inhale. Let the shoulders lower by their own weight. The wait is happening anyway. The bracing is not making it shorter. The lowering does not end the wait — but it does change the body the wait is happening in, and a lowered body can stay in a wait far longer than a braced one can.
Thirty seconds, with the chest soft. The wait will still be there in thirty seconds. The body will, however, be lower. The practice can continue from a lower body. The lower body is, quietly, the first form of the quietness Murray is teaching the soul to learn.
The deeper texture of the waiting
There is a second line from Murray that goes further into the inside of the practice. It is not from Waiting on God directly — it is from his companion book Abide in Christ, which sits beside it on the same shelf, doing the same slow work:
“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
Read it slowly. Notice the verbs. Set. Wait. Hear. Breathe. Receive. Accept. Hold. All slow. All from below. None of them are achievements. All of them are postures.
Quiet trust before Him. That is the posture the wait is teaching. Not the trust that has been argued into. Not the trust that has been pep-talked into. The trust that has been slowly grown by spending long enough in the silence with Him that the silence becomes a kind of company.
This is what the old saints knew about God’s silence that the modern church has half-forgotten. The silence becomes company, after long enough. The silence stops being absence and becomes a different kind of presence — the kind that does not need words to be company, the way a long marriage does not need words to be company in the room.
You will not feel this in the first month of waiting. You may not feel it in the first year. By the second year of the practice — the chair kept, the verse read, the quiet sitting maintained even when nothing felt like it was happening — you will start to notice that the silence has a quality. It is not the same silence it was. It has become, somehow, populated. You are no longer alone in it. You may not be able to say He has spoken. You will be able to say He is there. (For the longer view of where this practice sits inside the whole contemplative life, the sibling articles walk the same wait from two other angles — How to Recognize God’s Voice — Brother Lawrence’s Quiet Answer walks Lawrence on the presence that does not need words, and What to Do When God Is Silent — The Dark Night Tradition walks John of the Cross for the year He goes quiet entirely.)
The journal that walks the daily practice of being-in the wait is the Dry Season Devotional. One short page per day. A verse pre-printed. Space for the small honest sentence about what the silence felt like today. Built for the woman in a long wait who needs a daily seat steady enough to keep coming back to.
What this means for your daily practice
The practice has four small habits, all of which Murray would recognise as the daily shape of waiting on God rather than waiting for an answer.
The first is the daily quiet sitting. Five minutes, at the same time each day, in the chair. No agenda. No expected outcome. You are not sitting to hear anything. You are sitting to be in the room with Him. The sitting itself is the practice. The being-in is the formation. (If the days the page is blank are the hardest, A Devotional for Spiritual Dryness (for the Christian Man Who Won’t Talk About It) walks the same posture in the language of the silent man, in case the silence is in the house too.)
The second is the slow verse. One verse from the waiting psalms, read slowly, twice, each day. Psalm 27. Psalm 37. Psalm 40. Psalm 62. Psalm 130. The same five or six psalms the saints have been waiting inside for centuries. Pick one. Stay with it for a week. The verse does not need to land. The reading is the practice. The slow steady contact with the language of waiting is what makes the wait, over months, a thing you are doing with the company of those who have waited before you.
The third is the honest sentence at the end of the day. One line. The actual one. Today the silence had a small quality. Today I was tired of the wait. Today He felt near at four. Today nothing. The honesty is the practice. The recording is the long memory. By month three, the sentences will, when you read them back, begin to show you what the wait has been quietly making. (For the evening shape of this, What Is Evening Devotion (and Why It’s the Quiet-Time Sweet Spot) walks the slow end-of-day version.)
The fourth is the small act of trust before sleep. One sentence, said in the dark. I am keeping the practice. I do not know when You will speak. I trust You while You are quiet. I am being made into the woman who can receive what You will say when You say it. That sentence, said in the bed, is the prayer the long wait is for. (And if the wait has worn down the energy for the practice itself — if it is the kind of season the very showing-up has gotten hard — A Women’s Devotional for the Mom Who Has Tried and Stopped walks the slow re-entry for the woman whose practice has gone quiet alongside the silence.)
What Murray said about where the wait ends
There is one more line from the wider tradition Murray stood inside. Daily Strength for Daily Needs — the small Victorian devotional that sat on most contemplative women’s bedside tables in his century — carried a prayer that holds the whole wait in one sentence:
“Lord, I know not what I ought to ask of Thee; Thou only knowest what I need; Thou lovest me better than I know how to love myself. O Father! give to Thy child that which he himself knows not how to ask. I dare not ask either for crosses or consolations; I simply present myself before Thee; I open my heart to Thee. Behold my needs which I know not myself; see, and do according to Thy tender mercy.”
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs, the tradition Murray stood inside
I dare not ask either for crosses or consolations. That is the deep heart of waiting on God. The woman who has been in a long wait stops asking for either the relief or the trial. She stops trying to arrange the wait. She simply presents herself before Him. The presenting is the prayer. The opening of the heart is the prayer. The see, and do according to Thy tender mercy is the prayer.
This is what the old saints knew. The wait ends when the woman has stopped trying to end it. Not because God is waiting for her to give up. Because the wait is, itself, the slow turning of her heart from what I want from Him to Him. The wait is over when the turning has gotten deep enough that she no longer needs the answer the way she once did, because she has been given Him, which was what the answer was always pointing toward.
You may not be at that turning yet. Most of us are not. The practice is the slow walk toward it, kept faithfully across months that look like nothing, with the older saints walking beside you in the small lines they wrote for exactly this season.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
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The Everspring Dry Season Devotional walks Andrew Murray’s practice of waiting on God across 140 days with scripture pre-printed and space for the honest sentence on the day the silence is still there. Built for the woman in a long wait who needs a steady daily seat to return to.
