Why Andrew Murray Said Abiding Is the Whole Christian Life
⏱ 11 min read
You have a list. The morning quiet time. The intercessory prayer. The Bible reading plan. The fasting day. The accountability call. The small group. The journal. The verse memorisation. The gratitude practice. The Sabbath rhythm. The serving rota. And underneath the list, the chronic question of which of these things actually matters, and whether you are doing any of them in the way that would make the rest of them stop feeling like a quiet, well-intentioned burden you cannot quite carry. Andrew Murray, writing the thirty-day devotional that became Abide in Christ, gave the answer that closes the question: the foundation of the Christian life is one practice — abiding — and every other practice you have been trying to keep is either a fruit of it, or a substitute for it. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around this kind of slow daily abiding, if you would like a daily place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Murray spent forty years pastoring in the South African Dutch Reformed Church, and the thirty-day Abide in Christ is the distilled fruit of three decades of watching faithful Christians exhaust themselves on the spiritual-discipline list while missing the single practice the list was trying to point at. Day Thirty — The Glorified One — is the closing meditation of the book, and in it Murray draws the threads together. Abiding contains every other practice. Prayer is abiding-as-speech. Scripture-reading is abiding-as-listening. Obedience is abiding-as-the-natural-outflow. The disciplines are not thirty doors into thirty rooms; they are thirty windows into one room, and Murray spent the whole book asking you to sit down inside the one room rather than running between the windows.
The first passage — abiding is rest, not work
Murray, in the chapter that contains the heart of Abide in Christ, said the sentence that the overwhelmed Christian most needs to hear, because the overwhelmed Christian has been turning even abiding into one more thing to add to the list.
“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. 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. This is the overwhelmed Christian’s exact mistake. She has read the discipline lists. She has tried the methods. She has added abiding to the bottom of the list as one more practice to fail at — and she has been failing at it, because abiding is not a discipline to be performed. Murray, gently, removes the verb you have been using. Abiding is not a work we have to perform. Abiding is the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above. The two motions — your small daily settling into Him, and His ongoing love working from above — are not two different things. They are one motion, and you are not the engine of either.
This is what makes abiding the answer to what is the foundation of the Christian life. Every other discipline assumes you are the engine. Prayer assumes you can speak. Reading assumes you can attend. Fasting assumes you can choose. Service assumes you can give. The list, considered as a list, exhausts you because the list is asking you to be the source. Abiding reverses the direction. The source is Him. Your part is the not-leaving-the-room. The disciplines, lived from inside abiding, become outflowings of His life through you — not productions of your effort upward.
(For the wider context, the sibling article what Andrew Murray meant by abide in Christ walks the daily continuance of the practice, and the branch and the vine — Andrew Murray on John 15 sits with the image Murray’s whole vocabulary is built on. If the practice has been getting tangled with the language of trying harder, why Andrew Murray said abiding is not effort is the companion piece.)
The somatic — for the body that has been carrying the list
Pause here. The list has not only lived in your mind. It has been carried in the body for years. The shoulders have been the carriers of the should. The jaw has been set against the next thing on the list. The chest has been bracing forward, mid-morning, as though the day’s spiritual outputs were a deadline.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders lower by a small amount — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small effort of holding them up. Let the jaw release. Take one slow inhale, not deep, only slow. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out — slower than the inhale, until the next breath arrives on its own.
That sixty seconds is not in addition to the list. That sixty seconds is abiding, in its most ordinary bodily form — the body’s small willingness to stop generating, and to be held instead. The body knows how to be held. It has forgotten because the list has been asking it to be the source. The exhale is the beginning of the reversal. He is the source. You can lower the shoulders. The room is being held by Him.
The second passage — the still small voice you have been running past
Murray, in the chapter on listening for Christ to speak the word abide, gave the sentence that names what the over-listed Christian has been missing under the noise of her own activity.
“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.
The image is Elijah’s, on the mountain. 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, a still small voice — and God was in the voice. Murray takes the whole scene and lays it across the over-active Christian’s interior. The list is the wind. The methods are the earthquake. The disciplines are the fire. He is not, mostly, in those. He is in the still small voice that arrives after the list has gone quiet enough to be overheard.
The voice, when it speaks, speaks one word — abide. Not do more. Not try harder. Not add this discipline to the list. Just abide. Stay near Me. Sit in the chair. Let your soul, slowly, settle on Me rather than on the next practice. The word is the medicine. The hearing of the word is itself the foundation the list has been hiding from you.
The power to accept and to hold the blessing He offers. This is the line to underline. The blessing is not earned by the list. The blessing is offered, and the soul that hears the word abide receives, with the word, the power to accept and to hold what is being offered. The receiving is itself the foundation of the Christian life. Everything else flows from the receiving. The disciplines you have been trying to perform are the natural outworking of a soul that has, first, sat still long enough to receive. This is the Everspring Prayer Journal for Women in one sentence: a small daily room in which the soul is permitted to sit, to hear the word abide, and to receive — before any other practice is asked of it.
(For the way other contemplatives have named the same hearing, the bridge article how to recognise God’s voice — Brother Lawrence’s quiet answer walks an ordinary kitchen practice, and why God whispers instead of shouts — Tozer on the still small voice is the companion meditation on the smallness of the voice that holds everything.)
The third passage — the giving-up that is the whole life
Murray, in Abide in Christ, defined the foundation of the Christian life in a single sentence, late in the book, in language that the over-listed Christian needs to write down and keep near the page.
“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 at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led. This is the foundation, in one phrase. Notice the word nothing. Abiding is nothing but — not a complicated programme, not a curated list, not a system. The whole Christian life rests on one practice, and the practice is the giving up of oneself. The list you have been trying to keep is — at its honest core — a quiet effort to retain the management of yourself. Abiding is the daily handing-back of that management. Rule me. Teach me. Lead me. The three verbs are not three more things to do. They are three things you are letting Him do. The discipline is the small daily letting.
And then — so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. The rest is the consequence of the giving-up. It is not a rest you produce by trying harder to rest. It is the rest that comes when the small daily handing-back is done in good faith, and the arms of Everlasting Love are felt — not as feeling, but as a quiet underneath the day — to be the actual carrier of your life. The foundation of the Christian life is not a list of disciplines. It is the daily inhabiting of those arms. The disciplines, lived from inside that inhabiting, become joys. The disciplines, lived outside it, become burdens.
This is why Murray said abiding is the whole Christian life. Not because he wanted to dismiss the other practices. Day Thirty of Abide in Christ is full of high regard for prayer, for scripture, for obedience, for the church. Murray said abiding is the whole because abiding is the root — and every other practice, severed from the root, becomes performance. Grafted into the root, every practice becomes fruit. The peace of God, the great calm of the eternal world, that passeth all understanding, and that keeps the heart and mind. The peace keeps you. The verb is a guard. The peace garrisons the interior, so the disciplines stop being defended by your effort and start being held by His.
What the slow practice will do over a year
If you walk the question what is the foundation of the Christian life with Murray’s three passages as your quiet companion for the next year, what changes is not the list. The list will still be there. The morning quiet time, the intercessory prayer, the Bible reading plan, the small group — all of it is still there. What changes is the direction of the practices. They stop being things you are doing upward to God. They become things He is doing through you, while you sit in the chair. The disciplines become smaller, slower, more receptive. The exhaustion underneath them lifts. The list, lived from inside abiding, becomes the natural shape of a day spent near Him rather than the chronic measurement of a day spent trying to reach Him.
You will not finish the year having mastered abiding. Murray himself said the practice is the slow work of decades. You will finish the year having loosened the grip of the list. The foundation will have, quietly, become solid underneath you — not as a thing you constructed, but as the arms of Everlasting Love that were there the whole time, and into which the small daily giving-up has gently lowered you.
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A daily home for the one practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — a small daily room in which the list is allowed to quiet, and the foundation Murray named is allowed, slowly, to become the chair you sit down in.
We plan, in time, to reprint Abide in Christ through Everspring Press in a slow modern edition for the woman whose list has, finally, become too heavy.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — abiding as rest not work, the still small voice mightier than the storm, the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led — into a daily companion for the woman whose spiritual list has stopped being able to hold her, and whose soul is ready, slowly, to be held instead.
