Why Andrew Murray Said Surrender Is Not Strength
⏱ 11 min read
Every time you have tried to surrender by sheer willpower, it has lasted three days. The Sunday-night decision was real. By Wednesday afternoon, the small managing self was back at the wheel, and by Friday you were carrying the same things you had laid down at the altar four days earlier. You are not, you suspect, in defiance. You are in something more confusing — a woman who genuinely wants to surrender and cannot, by any motion of her will, make it stick.
Andrew Murray, in Absolute Surrender, would tell you that the three-day pattern is not your failure. It is the predictable outcome of the wrong instrument. You have been trying to surrender by adding more strength to the giving-up, and surrender, in Murray’s plain reading, is not a strength-act. It is a weakness-act. The door into true surrender is not located on the strong side of the soul. It is located on the weak side — the side you have been embarrassed about, hiding, working around. The Prayer Journal for Women is the 140-day companion this article is the opening pages of, and it walks the slow daily entry through that door in short, scripture-anchored pages.
The book Absolute Surrender is, properly read, an extended argument that the question how to truly surrender to God has been answered wrongly in most modern devotional teaching. The modern teaching has assumed that surrender is the summit of the spiritual life — the high act of the strongest Christians, the thing the mature soul finally does. Murray, gently and persistently, places it elsewhere. Surrender is the door, not the summit. And the key that unlocks the door is not strength. The key is the soul’s acknowledged weakness in front of the Vine that has been waiting, the whole time, to do the abiding through her.
The first passage: the abiding is a work of the heart, not of the brain
“But the abiding work is the work of the heart, not of the brain, the work of the heart clinging to and resting in Jesus, a work in which the Holy Spirit links us to Christ Jesus. Oh, do believe that deeper down than the brain, deep down in the inner life, you can abide in Christ, so that every moment you are free the consciousness will come: ‘Blessed Jesus, I am still in Thee.’ If you will learn for a time to put aside other work and to get into this abiding contact with the heavenly Vine, you will find that fruit will come. What is the application to our life of this abiding communion? It means close fellowship with Christ in secret prayer. I am sure there are Christians who do long for the higher life, and who sometimes have got a great blessing, and have at times found a great inflow of heavenly joy and a great outflow of heavenly gladness; and yet after a time it has passed away.”
— Andrew Murray, Absolute Surrender
Read it twice. Slowly. Notice the last sentence — Murray has seen the three-day pattern in his own century.
A great inflow of heavenly joy and a great outflow of heavenly gladness; and yet after a time it has passed away. He is naming exactly the soul you are. The weekend conference. The retreat afternoon. The Sunday night when the surrender felt real. And then, after a time, the passing-away. The chronic gap between the real moment of yielding and the daily life that does not seem to carry the yielding through. Murray is not surprised by this pattern. He has watched it in others; he has felt it in himself. The diagnosis he gives is precise.
The blessing passes away because the surrender was located in the brain — in the willed decision, the doctrinal commitment, the resolved direction — and the brain cannot hold the abiding for very long. The brain can decide. The brain cannot stay. The abiding work is the work of the heart, not of the brain. The willpower-surrender is a brain-surrender, and the brain is not the organ that abides. The heart is. And the heart’s surrender is not produced by more brain-effort. The heart’s surrender is produced by something quieter and more difficult — close fellowship with Christ in secret prayer. The slow daily contact. The small repeated returning. The kind of inward life that does not happen on the weekend retreat because it is not the kind of life that operates at retreat-speed.
This is the first turn in Murray’s answer to how to truly surrender to God. The surrender is not a single act of willpower. The surrender is the slow inward shift from brain-effort to heart-contact, and the shift happens in the secret-prayer room, not in the conference hall. The three-day pattern is the soul’s honest reporting that the brain-event has not penetrated to the heart yet. The fix is not a bigger brain-event. The fix is the heart-contact that the secret-prayer life slowly builds. (If the brain-side has been doing too much of the work for too long, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence walks the slow protest of the heart that has been outrun by the brain for years.)
The second passage: the difficulties as the school of holiness
“Through each Thou drawest to Thyself, that they may taste how, in accepting Thy Will of Love, there is blessing and deliverance. Thou knowest how often I have looked upon the circumstances and the difficulties of this life as hindrances. Oh, let them all, in the light of Thy holy purpose to make us partakers of Thy Holiness, in the light of Thy Will and Thy Love, from this hour be helps. Let, above all, the path of Thy Blessed Son, proving how suffering is the discipline of a Father’s love, and surrender the secret of holiness, and sacrifice the entrance to the Holiest of all, be so revealed that in the power of His Spirit and His grace that path may become mine. Let even chastening, even the least, be from Thine own hand, making me partaker of Thy Holiness.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Slow down here. This is the part of Murray that names why the willpower-surrender keeps failing, and what the soul has been missing.
The willpower-surrender assumes that the surrender is happening despite the circumstances — that the difficulty of the week is the obstacle being overcome by the surrender. Murray quietly reverses the picture. Through each Thou drawest to Thyself. The difficulty is not the obstacle to the surrender. The difficulty is the instrument by which He is drawing the soul toward the place where surrender can be made. The willpower-soul has been treating the circumstance as the enemy of surrender; Murray names the circumstance as the teacher of it.
This is why surrender is not strength. The strong soul can muscle past circumstances. The strong soul can decide. The strong soul can perform the gesture of giving-up at the front of the room. What the strong soul cannot do, by any motion of her will, is let the difficulty itself become the door. That requires a kind of yielding the will cannot manufacture. It requires the soul to stop fighting the difficulty as the enemy of her surrender and start receiving the difficulty as the means of it. In accepting Thy Will of Love, there is blessing and deliverance. The blessing is in the acceptance, not in the rescue from what is being accepted.
The three-day pattern is, in this light, the soul’s quiet protest that she has not yet been able to let the difficulty become the door. By Wednesday, the difficulty has returned. The willpower-surrender lasted as long as the difficulty stayed at a distance. The moment the difficulty came back into the centre of the week, the surrender broke down — because the surrender had been avoiding the difficulty rather than being made through it. Murray’s reframe is the only thing that breaks the pattern. The difficulty does not get in the way of the surrender. The difficulty is the place the surrender is meant to happen.
A small bodily pause. Sit upright for a moment. Let the shoulders drop by a small amount — not by forcing them down, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let one breath go out slowly. Notice the difficulty that has been recurring in your week — the one that keeps undoing your surrender. Do not solve it. Inwardly, name the small Murray phrase: let this, from this hour, be a help, not a hindrance. Stay there for thirty seconds. The body has been bracing against the difficulty for weeks; the bracing is part of why the surrender has not stuck. The releasing of the brace, even by a small amount, is the body’s first piece of the door opening.
The Prayer Journal for Women holds this reframe across its 140 days — a slow place to name the difficulty honestly each morning, and to receive it, page by page, as the school His grace is currently working in, rather than the obstacle the surrender must overcome before it can hold.
The third passage: the rest that is given, not produced
“In the rest of a faith that trusts Thee for all, in the power of a surrender that would have no will but Thine, in a love that would lose itself to be wholly Thine, Blessed Jesus, we do abide in Thee.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
This is the line that finally names what true surrender looks like from the inside. Read it slowly. Notice the structure.
The rest of a faith that trusts Thee for all. Not the rest of a will that has decided well. The rest of a faith. Faith is not a strength of the will; faith is the soul’s quiet receiving of what God has said. The surrender that holds is built on faith, not on willed resolution. The power of a surrender that would have no will but Thine. The surrender’s power is not its own strength. The surrender’s power is the absence of competing will — the soul having quietly let go of the will-to-something-other, so that only His will is left running through her. A love that would lose itself to be wholly Thine. The love is the giving-up of the self-protective instinct, the small inward holding-back, the corner the soul has been keeping for herself in case He fails her.
Three things — faith, surrender, love — and all three are received, not produced. The willpower-surrender tries to produce the trusting, the yielding, the losing-of-self. Murray, with extraordinary patience, says that none of these three is produced. All three are received. The soul that has been trying to manufacture them by strength of will has been working with the wrong currency. The currency is not strength. The currency is the acknowledged weakness in which the receiving becomes possible. Surrender is not strength. Surrender is the soul finally weak enough to receive what He has been waiting to give.
This is why Murray says surrender is not strength. The strong soul cannot truly surrender because the strong soul keeps producing. The surrendered soul has stopped producing and started receiving. The three-day pattern breaks not because the soul tries harder on day four, but because the soul has stopped trying altogether and has, in the quiet of the morning page, let the abiding be done in her by the One who has been the Vine the whole time. (For the diagnostic side of what the self-will has been doing instead, why andrew murray said self-will is the root of all sin walks the same ground from the opposite angle.)
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take one sentence of Murray’s into the week ahead, take this one:
“The abiding work is the work of the heart, not of the brain.”
Write it small. Put it where you will see it on the day the willpower-reflex is strongest — the morning of the difficult resolution, the evening of the broken commitment, the hour the three-day pattern has just collapsed again. The line is the corrective. The surrender that holds is not produced by more willpower. It is grown by the slow heart-contact in the secret place.
You will still break the surrender on day three. Murray would expect that. What changes is that you no longer respond to the break by trying harder on day four. You respond by going back to the secret prayer, the heart-contact, the slow daily abiding — and you let the surrender be rebuilt in you, not by you. The repetition is the practice. The slow heart-shift is the work. The strength has nothing to do with it. (For the cluster sibling on the all-or-nothing question, what andrew murray meant by absolute surrender walks the slower full meaning of the phrase, and andrew murray on the surrendered will walks the will-side of the same diagnosis.)
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A 140-day home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. One short page each day. Scripture pre-printed. Space for the small honest sentence of the corner being received again today. Built for the woman whose three-day surrenders keep collapsing and who is ready, slowly, to let the heart-contact do the work the willpower could not.
It is the format of this article made into a daily companion, so the page you sit down at tomorrow already has a shape and you do not have to invent one from scratch on the evening you finally have five minutes.
Everspring Press plans, in time, to reprint Andrew Murray’s Absolute Surrender under our quiet contemplative imprint. Until then, the Prayer Journal for Women is the daily companion that carries Murray’s posture into the contemporary woman’s morning page.
