Why Andrew Murray Called Intercession a Holy Privilege
⏱ 11 min read
You want to help the person you love but you don’t know how. The situation is too tangled for advice and too settled for a phone call to change. The diagnosis is not yours to give. The decision is not yours to make. You have already said the things you can say, and the saying has done what it can do, and what remains is the long stretch of a love that has nowhere to put itself except into a room where you are alone with God and the person you love is not present in the room with you.
Andrew Murray called that room the holy privilege of intercession. The Ministry of Intercession, published in 1898 toward the end of his long pastorate in Wellington, was written for the Christian who has reached the end of the practical and is standing at the door of the priestly — the woman who, having done what she could do for the person she loves, is now asked to do what only the praying soul can do. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries the daily form of that priestly work into a companion practice, if you would like a page on which to bring the person you love into the room with God. For now — let andrew murray intercession widen out from the technique into the privilege Murray called it.
The room where you are alone with God for someone else
Intercession is the part of prayer most depleted women avoid, because they think it is the part they are worst at. The petition for yourself is honest — you know what you need. The praise is honest — He is praiseworthy. The confession is honest — you know what you have done. But the intercession for someone else feels like reaching across a distance you cannot quite see, on behalf of a person whose interior you do not entirely know, to a God whose response you cannot predict, and the uncertainty of all three makes the praying feel thin.
Murray would tell you the thinness is the wrong diagnosis. Intercession is not the strenuous summoning of words on behalf of someone else. Intercession is the standing-in-the-room with God because of the person you love. The room is the work. The standing is the work. The being-there, on their behalf, is the priestly act Murray spent the last decade of his life writing about.
The first passage: the never-ceasing intercession
“Let us dwell there, where we have been placed of God. And let us bow our knees to the Father, that He would grant us to be mightily strengthened by His Spirit, that Christ as our Sanctification may dwell in our hearts, that the power of His death and His life may be revealed in us, and God’s will be done in us as it was in Him. I do bless Thee for this precious blessed word, for this precious blessed work of Thy beloved Son. In His never-ceasing intercession Thou ever hearest the wonderful prayer, ‘I sanctify myself for them, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.’ Blessed Father!”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The line at the centre of the passage is the one Murray builds the rest of his intercession theology on. In His never-ceasing intercession Thou ever hearest the wonderful prayer, ‘I sanctify myself for them, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.’ Murray is pointing at the High-Priestly prayer of John 17. Christ, before the cross, is already praying for the people He loves. The prayer is not the moment of crisis. The prayer is the never-ceasing — the continual standing of the Son before the Father on behalf of His own.
This is the line that re-frames intercession from technique to priesthood. The praying woman is not initiating something new when she intercedes. She is joining a prayer that is already happening. Christ is already at the Father’s side, sanctifying Himself for the ones He loves, and the praying woman who lifts the person she loves before God is stepping into the same room — the same eternal posture — that Christ has been holding for that same person all along.
The intercession is not yours alone. The intercession is Christ’s, and you are with Him in it.
Notice the verb at the beginning: Let us dwell there, where we have been placed of God. Dwell. Not visit. Not appear briefly. Dwell. Murray is not describing a transactional five-minute prayer for the friend in crisis. He is describing a settled inhabitation of the room where Christ is already interceding, into which you carry the person you love and leave them there. The dwelling is the work. The leaving them there is the privilege.
The second passage: the invitation
“Beloved Christian! come and give your whole heart and life to intercession, and you will know its blessedness and its power.”
— Andrew Murray, The Ministry of Intercession
This is the shortest line in the book and the heaviest. Read it twice.
Notice the verb. Come. Murray is not commanding. He is inviting. The intercession Murray was writing about is not a duty added to the list. It is a blessedness — the priestly joy of standing in the room of Christ’s never-ceasing prayer for the people you love. The invitation is to give your whole heart and life to it, because intercession at the level Murray means is not a five-minute slot at the end of the petition. It is a slow re-shaping of the entire praying life around the people God has placed in your love.
The blessedness and power are the two outcomes Murray names. The blessedness is what the intercessor feels: the quiet sense, after years, of being a person whose interior is shaped by the weight of others held before God, rather than a person whose interior is shaped only by her own concerns. The power is what God does through the praying — the slow movements in the lives of the people you have been carrying, in ways you usually only see in retrospect, often years after the praying began.
Neither the blessedness nor the power arrives in the first week. Murray is asking for the whole heart and life. The unit of measure is decades, not days. But the line is an invitation Murray issued because he believed it was the most under-claimed privilege of the praying Christian. The petition for yourself is widely practised. The intercession for others — at the level Murray means, sustained over years, with the people you love held in the room of Christ’s prayer — is the one most Christians never quite enter.
The somatic — the open palms
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Bring both hands to your lap, palms up, fingers loose.
Notice the chest. The intercessor’s chest is often tight, because the love for the person you cannot help has been held there as a small constriction for weeks or months. Let one slow inhale come in. On the exhale, let the chest soften — not by trying, but by stopping the small effort of holding.
Now bring to mind the person you love but do not know how to help. One person. Not a list. Picture them as they are. Then, with your palms open in your lap, say the silent sentence: I lift them into the room where Christ is already praying for them. Let the palms stay open for thirty seconds. You are not asking for anything specific. You are joining the intercession Christ has been holding for that person the whole time.
Then close your hands gently, return them to your lap, and continue reading.
The open palms are the bodily form of the intercession Murray describes. The chest softening is the body’s permission for the love to be held by Someone larger. The person you love is not in the room with you, but the room is large enough to hold them in the Son’s prayer, and your palms have been the small physical signal to the soul that you are no longer the one carrying them alone. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built with a small daily intercession page — one name, one sentence, one offering — because the priestly work needs a daily home that does not collapse under the weight of the names being carried.
The third passage: the indwelling
“Holy Spirit! with deep reverence I thank Thee for Thy work in me. It is through Thee I am lifted up into a share in the intercourse between the Son and the Father, and enter so into the fellowship of the life and love of the Holy Trinity. Spirit of God! perfect Thy work in me; bring me into perfect union with Christ my Intercessor. Let Thine unceasing indwelling make my life one of unceasing intercession. And let so my life become one that is unceasingly to the glory of the Father and to the blessing of those around me.”
— Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer
This is the line that finishes the doctrine. Read it slowly.
Murray names the mechanism. It is through Thee I am lifted up into a share in the intercourse between the Son and the Father. The intercession is not the praying woman’s effort. The intercession is the Spirit’s lifting of the praying woman into a conversation that has been going on in the Trinity from before time, and which now includes her, on behalf of the people she loves.
The phrase intercourse between the Son and the Father is doing the work. Murray means the eternal communion — the ongoing love and conversation that have always been between the Persons of the Godhead — and he is saying that the praying woman who intercedes is, by the Spirit, made a participant in that communion. Not an observer. A participant. The person she loves is being held inside a love that the praying woman has been graciously included in.
This is what Murray meant by holy privilege. The praying woman is not standing outside the divine love asking for it to be extended to her friend. She is standing inside the divine love, by the Spirit’s lifting, and naming her friend from within it. The intercession is a participation, not a transaction. The privilege is that she has been included at all.
Let Thine unceasing indwelling make my life one of unceasing intercession. This is the line that re-defines the intercessor’s identity. The praying woman is not someone who prays for others occasionally. She is someone whose life, by the Spirit’s indwelling, has become one of unceasing intercession — a person whose interior carries the names of those she loves into the divine communion as a continuous undercurrent of her days. The list is still made. The slots are still kept. But the unceasing is the deeper reality, and the slots are the surfacing of a continual interior holding.
(For the sibling readings: the prayer Andrew Murray said most Christians never pray walks the encounter Murray placed beneath all prayer, what Andrew Murray taught about praying without ceasing walks the continuous-interior posture this passage names, and the secret of effectual prayer according to Andrew Murray walks the access by which the intercession is offered. If the practical home for the intercession has been the question, how to start a prayer journal in 10 minutes a day and how to set up a prayer journal — the 6-section system walk the format the names can sit inside.)
What the person you love will not see
The intercession Murray describes is largely invisible to the person it is offered for. They will not know, most days, that you have been carrying them. They will not see the open palms in your lap on the Tuesday morning. They will not know that the room of Christ’s prayer has held their name through years of your praying.
This is part of the holy privilege. The intercession is offered for their good, not for your recognition. The praying woman does not need the person she loves to know she is praying. The praying woman is in the room with Christ on their behalf, and the room is enough. The movements that come — slowly, often years later, sometimes never visibly in this life — are God’s. The standing-in-the-room is yours.
Andrew murray intercession, as Murray meant it, is the slow re-shaping of the praying woman into a person whose love for others has found its proper home — not in the strenuous trying to fix what cannot be fixed, but in the priestly carrying of the loved one into the prayer Christ is already praying for them.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, a short passage and a page for the names you are carrying — the small daily intercession bench where the priestly work Murray spent his last decade describing has a place to settle, one name at a time, held inside the prayer Christ has been praying all along.
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This article is part of an Andrew Murray reading library on Everspring Press — slow readings of the South African pastor’s prayer writings, with the matched journal at the centre of the practice. Everspring is preparing reprints of Murray’s prayer corpus, including The Ministry of Intercession, for the woman whose love for others is ready to find its priestly home.
