Why Andrew Murray Said Holiness Is the Christian’s Inheritance
⏱ 11 min read
You do not actually believe holiness is for you — only for the great saints, the ones in the dust-jacket photos, the cloistered women, the long-married pastors’ wives who already had a quiet temperament to begin with. Somewhere in the back of your mind, holiness has become a word that belongs to other people, and the small daily question that has not been said aloud — is holiness possible for me? — has been answered, quietly and without permission, no.
Andrew Murray wrote Holy in Christ for that exact woman. Published in 1887 from his Wellington pulpit, the book was Murray’s pastoral confrontation with the Christian habit of treating holiness as the rare attainment of the unusually gifted soul, when scripture treats it as the standard inheritance of every child in the family. Murray’s whole case, gentle but immovable, is that holiness is not aspiration but birthright — that the question is holiness possible has already been answered by God in the giving of His Son, and the woman who is still asking the question has only to receive what has already been deeded to her. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women was built for the woman who is ready to study scripture with this assumption underneath it — that she is the heir, not the visitor. For now, the Murray text.
The disqualification, named
The pattern is older than your reading. Murray was watching it in the South African church of his own decade — the small, ingrained assumption that the holiness texts of scripture were addressed to a category of Christian the present reader did not belong to, and that the present reader’s job was to admire those texts from a respectful distance. The assumption is rarely stated aloud. It sits underneath the reading, quietly disqualifying the woman from the very passages that were meant to form her.
Murray’s Holy in Christ is a long, patient dismantling of that disqualification. His method is not exhortation. He does not tell the woman to try harder to be holy. His method is theological re-grounding — he shows her, passage by passage, that the holiness in question was never hers to manufacture, that it has always been in Christ, and that the only question for her is whether she will abide in the inheritance she has already received. The disqualification dissolves the moment the woman sees that the holiness was not a height she was failing to reach but a room she was failing to enter.
The first passage: the resting-place
“It is where Thou enterest to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself, that Thou makest holy. O my God! may my heart be Thy resting-place. I would, in the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. Let such fellowship with Thee, and Thy love, and Thy will be to me the secret of a life of holiness.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the small inversion in the first sentence. It is where Thou enterest to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself, that Thou makest holy. The holy-making is not the woman’s project. The holy-making is what He does in the room He has been welcomed into. The verb is His. The room is hers. The grammar of the sentence makes the woman a host, not a climber, and the disqualification she has been carrying — I am not the kind of woman who could be holy — is undone by the grammar before any argument is made.
The great saints in the dust-jacket photos were not a different kind of woman. They were women who had stopped trying to climb the holiness and had started keeping the room available for His arrival. The room can be kept by anyone with a body and a chair and five unhurried minutes. The qualification for holiness is not the temperament, not the upbringing, not the natural quietness, not the lack of family chaos. The qualification is the woman’s willingness to let her heart be His resting-place.
Believing that Thou doest all in me. This is the line that completes the dismantling. The woman who has been answering the is holiness possible question with no has been answering it because she was measuring her own capacity. Murray takes the capacity off the table. The capacity is His. The believing is hers. He does all in me is the sentence the woman is being asked to live inside of.
The second passage: the air and the light
“Like the air that surrounds me, like the light that shines on me, here is my Lord Jesus with me in His hidden but Divine and most real presence. My faith must in quiet rest and trust bow before the Father, of whom and by whose Mighty Grace I am in Christ: He will reveal it to me with ever-growing clearness and power. He does it as I believe, and in believing open my whole soul to receive what is implied in it: the sense of sinfulness and unholiness must become the strength of my trust and dependence. In such faith I abide in Christ. But because it is of faith, therefore it is of the Holy Spirit. Of God are ye in Christ.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read this one twice. The closing sentence — Of God are ye in Christ — is the doctrinal hinge.
The disqualified woman has been treating her in Christ status as something she must earn into, when scripture treats it as something she was placed into. Of God are ye in Christ — the agency is His, the placing is His, the inheritance is His doing. The woman did not arrive at the in Christ by climbing. She was put there. And once she is there, the holiness that belongs to Christ belongs to the room she has been put into.
Notice the second movement — the sense of sinfulness and unholiness must become the strength of my trust and dependence. This is the line that releases the disqualified woman. The very recognition that she is not naturally holy is not the disqualification; it is the opening for the dependence the holiness actually grows in. The great saints were not less aware of their unholiness than you are. They were more aware. The difference is that they let the awareness drive them deeper into dependence on the Christ in whom the holiness lives, rather than further into the self-judgement that disqualifies the woman from approaching at all.
He does it as I believe. The is-holiness-possible question is answered in the believing. Not in the performing. Not in the temperament. Not in the absence of family chaos. In the daily small believing that Of God are ye in Christ is true of you — as much as of the dust-jacket saints, as much as of the cloistered women, as much as of the long-married pastors’ wives. The inheritance is the same. The receiving is the only variable.
For the slow scriptural study this re-grounding needs, the Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women walks the passages of inheritance — Ephesians 1, Colossians 3, Romans 8, 1 Peter 1 — with the assumption underneath them that the reader is the heir the texts are addressed to. Not a programme. A page per passage, a slow week per chapter.
The somatic — the unclenched hand
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Hold your dominant hand out, palm down, on your lap. Notice the small held-ness in the hand. The disqualified woman tends to keep her hands subtly clenched — a low-grade muscular gripping against the holiness she has been told is not for her, a small physiological holding back.
Turn the hand over. Let the palm face up. Let the fingers open — not by stretching them, but by stopping the small effort to close them. Of God are ye in Christ. The open palm is the smallest physiological version of the receiving posture. You are not earning the inheritance. You are letting the hand stop refusing it.
Stay there for thirty seconds. Then continue reading.
The unclenched hand is the body’s version of the believing Murray is asking for. The clenched hand cannot receive; it is too occupied holding itself against what it has been told is not for it. The open hand can. The inheritance is given into open hands. The woman who has been asking is holiness possible with a closed fist has been asking the right question with the wrong posture, and the posture is what changes first.
The third passage: enter deep into dependence
“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.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
The third passage names the lived form of receiving the inheritance. Enter deep into thy relation of dependence as creature on God, to receive from Him every moment what He gives. The unit is the moment. The holiness is not a single grand reception — it is the every moment receiving from the One in whom the holiness lives.
Notice the small word creature. Murray is grounding the dependence not in the woman’s sinfulness — though that is real — but in her creatureliness. Even an unfallen creature would be a receiver of God’s life every moment, because that is what it is to be a creature. The is-holiness-possible question is mis-grounded when it is grounded in the woman’s failing. It is rightly grounded in the woman’s creatureliness, which has always been a receiver-creatureliness, designed to live in moment-by-moment dependence on the God whose own holiness fills her room as the air fills the lungs.
His promise to restore more gloriously than ever what thou hadst lost. This is the line for the disqualified woman. The post-Fall woman is not in a worse position than the unfallen creature for the purposes of the inheritance. She is in a more gloriously restored position, because the same God who originally meant her to receive moment-by-moment has now given her His Son and Spirit to give within you unceasingly, His actual divine Presence and Power. The inheritance is not smaller after the Fall. It is more glorious.
This is why Murray could be so quietly insistent that holiness is the Christian’s inheritance. Not because he was unaware of the soul’s chronic sinfulness — he was acutely aware, and he wrote about it pastorally for forty years — but because he had seen, in scripture, that the chronic sinfulness was the soil the more-gloriously-restored inheritance grew in. The disqualified woman is not the woman who is too sinful for holiness. She is the woman who has not yet let her sinfulness drive her deeper into the dependence the inheritance is received through.
Three small returns
If you take nothing else from Holy in Christ, these three returns are the spine of the holiness-as-inheritance posture:
The first return is the resting-place sentence — beginning the day with one quiet line: May my heart be Thy resting-place. One sentence. Before the woman starts proving herself qualified.
The second return is the open-hand recognition — pausing, in the small middle of the day, to physically open the palm and acknowledge that the inheritance is given, not earned. Of God are ye in Christ. One slow breath.
The third return is the dependence-as-creature posture — five unhurried evening minutes in which the soul receives the day back from the One whose holiness has been quietly filling the room the whole time, more gloriously than was lost.
(For the sibling readings in the holiness cluster: what Andrew Murray meant by holiness walks the foundational concept of holiness as Christ’s, given to you, Andrew Murray on working for God without striving walks the strength-not-strain question that sits alongside, and Andrew Murray on the Christian’s whole life as service walks the all-of-life posture the inheritance opens into. If the underlying theology has been the question, what is sanctification and how does it actually happen and the difference between justification and sanctification walk the doctrinal grounds.)
What changes, slowly
The disqualification does not lift in a week. The habit of treating holiness as someone else’s category has been forming for years, and the re-grounding is a posture, not a single recognition. What changes first is the small daily question. Is holiness possible stops being a question the woman is asking from outside the room and becomes a question she is answering from inside it — Of God are ye in Christ — said quietly, in the chair, at the start of the day.
By month three, the dust-jacket saints have stopped being a different species. The woman has begun to recognise that they were heirs who received what was given, and that the receiving is available to her in the same form, at the same pace, in the same chair. Holiness is the Christian’s inheritance. It always was. The disqualified woman has only to let her hand open and stop refusing it.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women.
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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 writings on the inner life, with the matched journal at the centre of the practice. Everspring is preparing reprints of Murray’s corpus, including Holy in Christ, for the woman who is ready, slowly, to let the disqualification go.
