Introduction

I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. JOHN 15:5

Andrew Murray spent almost his whole life at the southern end of Africa, in a church that most of the Christian world had never heard of, preaching in Dutch to farmers and villagers. And yet for more than a century his small books have been read on every continent. He wrote something like two hundred and forty books and tracts, and the best of them are still in print, still being translated, and still doing their quiet work in people who have no idea where Wellington is.

One word beneath all the others

The reason is not his style; he circles a truth again and again, like a man walking round a building. The reason is that he had grasped one thing with unusual clarity, and he spent sixty years saying it. The thing is dependence.

A creature, Murray taught, has nothing in itself. It does not merely owe its beginning to God; it owes every moment of its continuance to Him. What is true of the body is true of the soul. The Christian life is not a stock of grace handed over at conversion and then managed by the believer. It is a life received moment by moment from Christ, as a branch receives its sap from the vine. Everything else he wrote follows from this. Humility is simply the creature taking its true place. Surrender is consenting to be what we already are. Waiting on God is dependence made into a habit. Prayer is dependence speaking. Holiness is the life of the Holy One flowing into an emptied vessel. Abiding is the whole of it gathered into a single word from the lips of Christ.

For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen. ROMANS 11:36

That is the thread running through every chapter of this book, and it is the question to keep asking as you read: am I living as a branch, or as a tree of my own planting?

Why he still matters

Murray is worth reading for at least three reasons. The first is that he takes the words of Christ at their plain meaning. When Jesus says, Without me ye can do nothing, Murray does not reach for a qualification. He asks what would happen if a believer actually believed it.

The second is that he wrote about prayer as a man who prayed. His books on it read like letters from someone who has come out of the room and is urging you to go in.

The third is that he is profoundly Christ-centred. For all his talk of surrender and waiting and consecration, his real subject is never the believer. It is Jesus Himself, the Vine, the Intercessor, the Holy One of God, who does in us what we cannot do.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, sixteen short chapters set out his teaching. They begin with abiding in Christ, the true Vine, move through dependence, humility, surrender, the Spirit, holiness, obedience, love and healing, and end with the five themes nearest his heart: waiting on God, the inner chamber and the school of prayer, believing prayer, the sin of prayerlessness, and intercession for the world.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Murray would have wanted it so. Nearly every chapter he ever wrote ends in a prayer, and during the years when he could not speak he dictated his meditations and prayed their closing lines aloud before they were written down. He did not think truth had done its work until it had driven the reader to his knees. Read a chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and it is better to say plainly at the start where Murray must be weighed rather than simply received.

His book Divine Healing, which grew out of his own recovery in 1882, teaches that healing belongs to the redemption Christ purchased and presents healing without medical means as the higher way of faith. The same book gives thanks for doctors and allows that God often blesses remedies, and Murray never used his teaching as a stick to beat the sick. But parts of it go further than Scripture warrants, and chapter thirteen sets out what he taught and where it must be qualified. Please read that chapter with its cautions rather than without them.

Second, Murray preached for decisive surrender, and some of his addresses call for a single crisis in which everything is given up and a new kind of life begins. For many people that call has been the doorway to real freedom. For others — often the most conscientious — it has become a burden: an endless inspection of whether the surrender was absolute enough. His framework of carnal and spiritual Christians is also disputed by careful readers of the same passages. This book presents these teachings as he gave them, draws out what is true in them, and says where they need a gentler hand.

Third, Murray lived and worked in colonial South Africa, as a minister of a settler church, and on questions of race and empire he did not stand outside the assumptions of his time and place. It would be dishonest to make him either a prophet against the injustices of that society or their architect. He should be read as the man he was.

Why read him, then? Because on the central matter he was right. We are branches. We can do nothing without Christ, and with Him we can bear much fruit. The counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Where Murray is faithful — on abiding, on humility, on prayer, on the all-sufficiency of Christ — receive it gladly and act on it. Where he presses beyond what is written, set it aside and lose nothing.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before going further, ask honestly whether you live more like a branch drawing its life from the Vine or like a tree trying to grow on its own roots.

2. Choose a pace for this book — a chapter a day or a chapter a week — and decide now when you will read it.

3. Write down one area of your life in which you are relying on your own strength and calling it faithfulness.

4. Resolve to test everything in these pages against Scripture, keeping what is true and setting aside what is not.

5. Ask God to use this book to send you not to Murray but to Christ, and to your knees.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You are the true Vine, and I am a branch. Without You I can do nothing, though I have often lived as if I could do a great deal.

Teach me what Your servant Andrew Murray learned: to depend on You moment by moment, to take the lowest place, and to pray.

Keep me from admiring a teacher and missing his Master. Where he is faithful to Your Word, let me receive it; where he is not, give me discernment.

And let every page I read end where he wished his pages to end, in fellowship with You. Amen.