Why Andrew Murray Said God Waits Longer Than We Do
⏱ 9 min read
You feel forgotten by God in the waiting. The prayer has been in the air for months — longer, if you are honest — and the silence that has answered it has stretched into a small steady ache underneath the rest of your life. You have not stopped believing. You have begun to suspect that He has stopped listening, and the suspicion itself is the part that is hardest to admit, because the woman you used to be would not have permitted it.
Andrew Murray, in the closing chapter of Waiting on God, wrote one short line that has, for more than a century, slowly turned this kind of grief inside out for the women who have stayed with it long enough to receive it: Our God, in the infinite tenderness and omnipotence of His love, waits to be our Life and Joy. God waits. Not just for you — toward you. The waiting is mutual. He has been holding the same posture toward you, the entire time you have been holding it toward Him, and the answer to the quiet question does god wait for us is yes — and longer, and more patiently, and with more tenderness, than the soul in the silence is currently able to imagine. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional is the companion practice for exactly this stretch — the long quiet where the mutual waiting is the part the soul needs to slowly receive. For now, read slowly. The article is the slow read of the line itself.
The first thing to say is that Murray is not being sentimental. He is reading scripture carefully, and the scripture itself is what produces this conclusion. Isaiah 30:18 — the Lord waits to be gracious to you. Romans 8:26 — the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, while we are still in the silence and have not yet found our own. The God of the gospel is not the impatient deity the silence half-suggests He is. He is the One whose waiting toward us, in scripture’s own description, is longer and more patient than the waiting we are managing toward Him. Murray’s line is not Murray’s invention. It is Murray reading carefully what the bible has been saying.
The first passage — waits to be our Life and Joy
“Enter deep into thy relation of dependence as creature on God, to receive from Him every moment what He gives. Enter deeper still into His covenant of redemption, with His promise to restore more gloriously than ever what thou hadst lost, and by His Son and Spirit to give within you unceasingly, His actual divine Presence and Power. And thus wait upon your God continually and only. ‘My soul, wait thou only upon God.’ No words can tell, no heart conceive, the riches of the glory of this mystery of the Father and of Christ. Our God, in the infinite tenderness and omnipotence of His love, waits to be our Life and Joy.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it once. Then read the final line again, slowly.
Our God, in the infinite tenderness and omnipotence of His love, waits to be our Life and Joy. Notice the two adjectives Murray pairs. Infinite tenderness. Omnipotence. These two are usually held apart in the modern Christian imagination — the tenderness is felt, the omnipotence is feared, and the two halves of God’s character end up sitting in different rooms in the soul. Murray refuses the separation. The tenderness and the omnipotence are the same love, in their full form. The God who can do anything is the God who waits tenderly toward you. The omnipotence is not the opposite of the tenderness. The omnipotence is what makes the tenderness trustable. A tender God who cannot act is a comfort but not a Saviour. An omnipotent God who is not tender is a Saviour but not a refuge. Murray is naming the One who is both — and the waiting, the toward you waiting, is the form His full love is taking inside the silence you are currently inhabiting.
Waits to be our Life and Joy. He is already the Life and the Joy of the soul that has been brought into the bosom of God. The waiting, in this line, is the waiting to be received as such. He is not waiting to become your Life and Joy. He is waiting to be allowed in, by the slow inward turning of the soul, to the place He has already prepared. The waiting is not on His side of the relationship. It is toward you, with the small patient steadiness of the One who knows the slow rate at which the human soul, especially the depleted human soul, can turn inward toward Him.
This is the first thing to receive. Does god wait for us — yes. Waits to be our Life and Joy. The verb is in the present tense. He is waiting now. He has been waiting through every month of the silence. The silence is not absence. It is a different texture of the same waiting He has been holding the whole time.
A small thing for your body
Pause for a moment. The line you have just read is meant to be received in the body, not just understood by the mind. Let whatever is in your hands rest. Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat against the floor.
Put one hand, lightly, on the chest, just below the collarbone. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale. Now let the sentence arise, inwardly: He has been waiting toward me the whole time. Just the sentence. Once.
Notice what the chest does. If it tightens — that is the part of the soul that has been carrying the silence as evidence of His absence. If it softens — that is the part of the soul that is beginning to receive the truer fact. Either way, the body’s response is honest data. The waiting is mutual. The body, slowly, learns to register it as such. The next sentence is here when you are ready.
The second passage — resting in His love makes patience easy
The second passage is from earlier in Waiting on God, where Murray names the inward inversion that begins to happen when the soul receives the truth that God is also waiting:
“They that wait on the Lord shall inherit the land; the promised land and its blessing. The heirs must wait; they can afford to wait. ‘Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him.’ The margin gives for ‘Rest in the Lord,’ ‘Be silent to the Lord,’ or R.V., ‘Be still before the Lord.’ It is resting in the Lord, in His will, His promise, His faithfulness, and His love, that makes patience easy. And the resting in Him is nothing but being silent unto Him, still before Him. Having our thoughts and wishes, our fears and hopes, hushed into calm and quiet in that great peace of God which passeth all understanding.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it twice. Slowly.
The heirs must wait; they can afford to wait. Notice the inward economics Murray is naming. The waiting is not deprivation. The waiting is the posture of an heir — someone whose inheritance is already secured, who is waiting only for the right time of its full receiving. The waiting toward an uncertain outcome is exhausting. The waiting toward a certain one is patient. The Christian, in Murray’s reading, is in the second kind. The silence you are in is not the silence of an outcome that may not come. It is the silence of an outcome that is already being held, by the One who is waiting toward you, and is being given to you slowly at the rate the soul can actually receive it.
It is resting in the Lord, in His will, His promise, His faithfulness, and His love, that makes patience easy. The patience is not produced by gritting the teeth. The patience is produced by resting in His love. This is the line that reverses the modern Christian assumption that waiting is hard work. Murray says: the resting makes the patience easy. When you are inwardly settled in His love — in the toward you waiting that He is holding — the patience follows almost as a by-product. The hardness of waiting is, almost always, the hardness of trying to wait without the resting. Murray is naming the order: first rest, then patience. The reverse does not work.
Having our thoughts and wishes, our fears and hopes, hushed into calm and quiet. Notice the verb. Hushed. The hushing is what He does for the soul that has begun to rest in His love. The thoughts and wishes — the fears and hopes — are not silenced by your effort. They are hushed by His presence. The mutual waiting is the room in which this hushing happens. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional is the journal built for the slow daily return to this kind of resting — the small page in the morning that does not demand a feeling, that holds the soul still long enough for the hushing to slowly begin.
Why the mutual waiting changes the silence
The silence is the same. Murray is not telling you the silence will lift. He is telling you what the silence is. Once you know that God is also waiting — that the silence is the mutual posture, not the divine absence — the silence stops being the proof of being forgotten and becomes, instead, the room in which the slow steady tender omnipotent love is being received in the only way the human soul can actually receive it: slowly, daily, in stillness, with the hushing happening underneath.
This is why Murray said God waits longer than we do. Not as a metaphor. As a pastoral observation. The soul that has finally learned to wait at His feet, day after day, year after year, is a soul that has been outwaited by the One who has been holding the same posture toward her the entire time. Does god wait for us? Yes. And the discovery that He does is, often, the inward turn the silence has been quietly preparing the soul to make. The forgotten feeling is real. The forgotten fact is not. He has not stopped. He has been waiting.
(For the foundation reading on the waiting posture itself, what Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God actually asks of you walks the ground. The 31-day practice Andrew Murray built around one verse is the slow daily method, and the quiet trust Andrew Murray taught for the anxious Christian is the close cousin for the anxious form of the same silence. If the dryness has been part of what made you feel forgotten, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence is the bridge letter for the inside of it.)
What the line gives the soul that has been waiting too long
A small reorientation. Not a lifting of the silence. A re-naming of it. The silence is not the proof of being forgotten. It is the room in which the mutual waiting is being slowly received. He waits toward you in infinite tenderness. He waits toward you with omnipotence. He waits to be your Life and Joy — and the waiting is not impatience. It is the slow steady tenderness of the One who knows the rate at which the soul, especially the depleted soul, can actually receive Him. The line is the line worth keeping near the page through the rest of the silence: Our God, in the infinite tenderness and omnipotence of His love, waits to be our Life and Joy.
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