Obey and Abide

If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love. JOHN 15:10

Murray is often read as a teacher of the inner life — of rest, dependence, waiting and surrender — and so he was. But no one who reads him carefully could mistake him for a quietist. Running through all his books is an insistence on plain obedience: doing what Christ says, today, in the things we already know. The reading on John 15:10 in The True Vine is titled Obey and Abide, and those three words could stand over a great deal of his teaching.

The precept is a promise

Murray noticed that John 15:10 frightens some readers. Christ has just opened the door to His love — Continue ye in my love — and then seems to shut it again with a condition: If ye keep my commandments. Since we do not keep His commandments perfectly, does that mean we cannot abide in His love?

Murray’s answer was firmly no. The command to abide in His love, he said, could not be a command if it were not also a promise. “The precept is a promise.” The love that invites us to abide also reaches out its hand and enables us to obey. So we need not fear to give ourselves to the keeping of His commandments, trusting Him for the strength. And he summed it up beautifully: “Through His will, loved and done, lies the path to His love.”

For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous. 1 JOHN 5:3

What obedience means

Murray was careful to define what he meant, and the care is important. Obedience, he said in the same reading, refers to our doing all that we know to be God’s will. There may be doubtful things about which we are not yet sure. There may be sins of ignorance, and involuntary stirrings of the flesh that rise up before we can control them. God will deal with these in His own time, by searching and humbling, and will give larger deliverance than we expect. But they are not what Christ is speaking of here. He is speaking of the known command, and the honest will to do it.

This distinction brings great relief to the anxious. Obedience in Murray’s sense is not a perfection of performance. It is a settled disposition: whatever I know Christ wants, I will do, trusting Him for the power.

In With Christ in the School of Prayer he makes the same point. “The Lord does not demand of us a perfect fulfilment of the law; no, but only the childlike and whole-hearted surrender to live as a child with Him in obedience and truth.”

If ye love me, keep my commandments. JOHN 14:15

Obedience and knowing

One of Murray’s most useful insights concerns the relationship between obedience and understanding. In The Inner Chamber, answering a young Christian who wanted rules for Bible study, he begins not with methods but with motive. “If your aim is simply to know the Bible well,” he warns, “you will be disappointed.” Knowledge of Scripture can be a blessing, a burden or even a curse, depending on the spirit in which it is sought. The first requirement is a great hunger after righteousness, a great desire to do all God’s will.

If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself. JOHN 7:17

Murray took Jesus’ words here with full seriousness. Light comes to those who are willing to act on it. The person who reads the Bible to gain information will gain information. The person who reads it to obey will be given understanding. This is why Murray could say, in the same book, that the doer of the word is blessed in his deed. The blessing is not in the hearing but in the doing.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

Obedience and prayer

Murray also connected obedience directly to power in prayer. One of the lessons in With Christ in the School of Prayer is titled Obedience the Path to Power in Prayer. The promise is clear enough in the words of John: whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments. The child who finds no pleasure in the father’s presence and will, Murray observes, and yet expects to ask and obtain whatever he likes, will be disappointed.

And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight. 1 JOHN 3:22

This is not a mechanical bargain, as if obedience purchased answers. It is a relationship. The one who lives close to the Father’s will learns to ask according to it, and such asking is heard.

As He kept His Father’s commandments

Murray never forgot the second half of John 15:10: even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love. Christ Himself lived this way. His whole earthly life was one of obedience, and in that obedience He abode in the Father’s love. What He asks of us is not a burden He never bore, but a fellowship in His own way of life.

Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered. HEBREWS 5:8

A word of balance

There is a danger in any teaching that links obedience to the experience of love, and Murray’s readers should see it clearly. We do not earn God’s love by obeying. We are loved first, freely, in Christ, before we have done anything. What obedience affects is not God’s love for us but our abiding in the enjoyment of it. A child who disobeys is still a child and still loved; but he cannot enjoy the father’s company while he is in rebellion. Murray knew this — he insisted that the precept is a promise — but it is worth saying plainly, because the conscientious are quick to hear any condition as a threat.

We love him, because he first loved us. 1 JOHN 4:19

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name one thing you know Christ wants you to do that you have been postponing. Do it this week.

2. Separate in your mind the known commands you are resisting from the involuntary failings that trouble you. Bring the first to obedience and the second to God’s patient dealing.

3. Before you read Scripture tomorrow, ask not only What does this mean? but What will I do about it?

4. If your prayer life feels powerless, ask whether there is a point of known disobedience standing in the way.

5. If you tend to hear commands as threats, meditate on 1 John 4:19 before you meditate on John 15:10.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You kept Your Father’s commandments and abode in His love. Teach me to walk the same way.

I will do what I know You want. Give me the strength I do not have, for Your precept is Your promise.

Show me the thing I have been postponing, and make me willing to do it today.

And keep me always mindful that You loved me first, before I had obeyed at all. Amen.