Why Andrew Murray Said Abiding Is Not Effort
⏱ 11 min read
The harder you try to abide, the more it slips. You read the verse on Monday. You set the alarm earlier on Tuesday. You write the prayer plan on a fresh page on Wednesday. By Thursday evening you are exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the day’s work and everything to do with the small chronic strain of trying to do abiding well. Andrew Murray, in Abide in Christ — the small Dutch-Reformed book from 1882 that has stayed in print for nearly a century and a half — wrote the whole long answer to why this is happening to you. The answer, in the shortest form he ever gave it, is that abiding was never meant to be a work. It was meant to be a receiving. The question how do you abide in Christ has been quietly mistranslated, over years of Bible-study handouts, into how do you perform abiding correctly — and the mistranslation is the reason your effort has not worked. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries the slow daily version of the practice Murray is describing, if you would like a companion for the next stretch. For now — read slowly.
Murray was a pastor for forty years in the Cape Colony, in a household that carried more grief and chronic illness than most of his congregants knew. He wrote Abide in Christ not as a man who had mastered the practice but as a man who had finally learned to stop trying to. The three passages below are the spine of that learning.
The first passage — abiding is rest, not work
The sentence in Abide in Christ that the over-trying Christian needs to hear first is the one in which Murray, with great pastoral gentleness, takes the verb work out of the whole conversation.
“Let this truth, accepted under the teaching of the Spirit in faith, remove every vestige of fear, as if abiding in Christ were a burden and a work. In the light of His life in the Father, let it henceforth be to you a blessed rest in the union with Him, an overflowing fountain of joy and strength. 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 at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is every vestige of fear, as if abiding in Christ were a burden and a work. Murray is naming the exact misunderstanding you have been operating under. You have been treating the abiding as a project — one more discipline to be added to the daily list, one more place where you might be falling short, one more measurement against which your spiritual life is being weighed. Murray, very calmly, says: no. The abiding is not on the list. The abiding holds the list. It must be with us as with Him — that is, the way Christ abode in the Father — the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above.
Two motions. The spontaneous outflowing of a life from within — the slow, quiet sense of His presence in you that is not produced by your effort. The mighty inworking of the love from above — His ongoing work in you, which does not pause when you sleep, does not stop when you forget Him for a Tuesday, does not require your striving in order to continue. The abiding is not the production of either motion. The abiding is the not-resisting of both. You sit in the chair. The motions are already happening. You stop trying to be the engine of them. (For the wider thesis of this whole library, the sibling article what Andrew Murray meant by Abide in Christ walks the foundational reading. For the vine imagery underneath, the branch and the vine — Andrew Murray on John 15 is the companion passage.)
The somatic — for the body that has been trying
Pause here. The trying has not only been in your mind. It has been in your shoulders, in your jaw, in the small chronic tightness across the upper chest that arrives when you sit down to pray and lifts only when you stop. The body has been performing the abiding for you, faithfully, and the body is tired.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat on the floor. Let your hands rest, palms up, on your knees. Palms up is the small posture of receiving. The body knows the difference between palms up and palms down. Palms down is the posture of holding. Palms up is the posture of being held.
Take one slow inhale. Let the shoulders drop by half an inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale. Let the jaw soften. Let the chest lower.
One more slow inhale. One more longer exhale. Sit, palms up, for thirty seconds more.
The body has just rehearsed the whole of Murray’s first passage in two breaths. Palms up is the somatic translation of the spontaneous outflowing from within, and the mighty inworking from above. You did not produce the breath. The breath came. You did not produce the softening. The softening came when you stopped resisting it. This is what abiding feels like in the body. It is not strenuous. It is the small ongoing yes to what is already happening underneath your effort.
The second passage — the giving up of oneself
Murray, later in Abide in Christ, defines the practice itself in a single sentence that is, on first reading, almost too simple to take in.
“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 once. Then read it again, slowly.
Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led. Notice the verbs. Not the disciplining of oneself. Not the perfecting of oneself. Not the achieving of a higher Christian life. The verbs are passive — to be ruled, to be taught, to be led. The active part is one small thing. The giving up. The small daily handing of yourself over to the One who is already ruling, already teaching, already leading. You do not have to do the ruling. You do not have to do the teaching. You do not have to do the leading. You have to let yourself be the one ruled, taught, led.
This is why your effort has not worked. Your effort has been aimed at the wrong part of the sentence. You have been trying to do the ruling, the teaching, the leading — for yourself, of yourself, by yourself. The abiding is the slow undoing of that whole reflex. The hands open. The plan is set down. The grip on the next outcome loosens by a small amount. The arms of Everlasting Love do the catching that you had been trying to do, badly, on your own.
How do you abide in Christ? You give yourself up to be ruled and taught and led. The giving is daily. The giving is small. The giving is the chair, the verse, the longer exhale, the honest sentence at the end of the day. The blessed rest that follows is His to give. You do not generate it. You receive it. (If you would like to walk this practice inside a daily structure, the Prayer Journal for Women is built as the slow companion for exactly this — one small page a day, with room for the verse and room for the honest sentence and no pressure to perform.)
The third passage — the still small voice and the power to accept
Murray’s third passage, on hearing Christ speak the word abide, names the moment the practice finally takes hold — and the moment is not a moment of effort, but a moment of receiving.
“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 twice. Slowly.
Receives with the word the power to accept and to hold the blessing He offers. This is the sentence that ends the over-trying. You do not produce the power to abide. The power to abide is received with the word. He speaks the word abide, and inside the word He gives you what you need in order to do what He has just told you to do. The command and the enabling come in the same breath. Your job is to be near enough to hear it.
The image — the still small voice from Elijah’s mountain — matters. The wind tore the rocks; God was not in the wind. The earthquake came; God was not in the earthquake. The fire came; God was not in the fire. And then the still small voice — and God was in the voice. Your effort has been the wind, the earthquake, the fire. Loud. Forceful. Trying to break through to Him by the sheer volume of your trying. The voice has been there the whole time, quieter than your trying, waiting for you to stop long enough to hear it.
This is the third thing to say about how to abide in Christ. The abiding is the quiet in which the still small voice is the loudest thing in the room. The effort is the storm outside; you cannot will the storm to stop, but you can step inside the room. The room is the chair. The room is the slow morning ten minutes before the day starts. The room is the longer exhale. Inside the room, the word abide is given to you, and with the word the power to accept and to hold the blessing. The power is given. The accepting is the only verb that belongs to you, and even the accepting is not strenuous. It is the palms-up of the soul. (For the companion practice of listening to the still small voice in a different father’s voice, how to recognize God’s voice — Brother Lawrence’s quiet answer is the bridge essay, and why God whispers instead of shouts — Tozer on the still small voice walks the same image in Tozer’s vocabulary. If you would like to stay inside Murray for the next reading, Andrew Murray on Christ as the indwelling life is the next slow passage in this hub.)
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 do you abide in Christ be a slow companion for the rest of the year, what changes is not your effort but the location of your effort. The trying does not vanish; the trying simply moves. You stop trying to abide and start trying, in a much smaller way, to stop resisting the abiding that is already being done in you. The shift is quiet. From the outside, the page looks the same — same chair, same verse, same evening sentence. From the inside, the strain is gone. The day still has its weight. The abiding is no longer one more part of the weight. The abiding is the underneath that holds the weight.
This is why Murray said abiding is not effort. Not because the Christian life requires no participation, but because the participation Murray is naming is the small daily yes — the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led — and the giving is not strenuous. The strenuous part has been your attempt to do His work for Him. The slow part, the abiding part, is the laying down of that attempt, evening by evening, until the laying down becomes the new ordinary.
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A daily home for the slow practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, one short passage and a verse, with room for the honest sentence — a quiet daily place to let the abiding be receiving rather than work. Abide in Christ itself, the small Dutch-Reformed book 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 31-day cycle at the page.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — abiding as blessed rest, the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, the still small voice mightier than the storm — into a daily companion for the woman whose trying has not, yet, given her the abiding she has been reaching for.
