Conclusion

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

Sixteen chapters can make it look as though Andrew Murray taught a great many things. He taught one thing, and everything else is that one thing applied. The one thing is this: a creature lives by receiving, and the Christian life is Christ’s own life received moment by moment through faith.

Follow it through and the whole shape appears. Abiding is the branch receiving the life of the Vine. The Husbandman’s pruning makes room for more of that life. Humility is the creature consenting to its true place, and pride is the refusal of it. Surrender is giving up to God what already belongs to Him, and trusting Him to work what we cannot. The impossible becomes possible because God does it. The Spirit is Christ’s life within us; holiness is the presence of the Holy One; obedience is the path by which His love is enjoyed; love is the first fruit of it all. Waiting on God is dependence made into a habit. The inner chamber is where the link for the day is fastened. Prayer is dependence speaking, and intercession is dependence reaching out for others. One idea, one Person, one life.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, you are in some danger, and Murray would have named it first. The peculiar risk of teaching about the deeper life is that it can produce exactly the condition it was meant to cure. A reader sees the heights — absolute surrender, unbroken abiding, the prayer of faith, the Spirit-filled life — and sets out to reach them by effort. He makes a resolution, has a good week, falls back, and tries again. The teaching that was meant to lead him out from under law has become a new law.

Murray knew this danger well. It is why he told the anxious man who came to him that he was living under law and not under grace. It is why he taught that God claims our surrender, works it, and accepts it. It is why he prayed, and taught others to pray, that God would make them willing. The deeper life is not a summit to be climbed. It is a gift to be received, and it is received the way everything else is received from God: by coming empty.

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

So the plainest counsel this book can give is the same as in its companion volumes. Go back to the chapter that made you least comfortable, not the one you found most interesting. Take its application points and work them slowly over months. Then take the next.

Two things to carry

First, stay a branch. Whatever else you forget from these pages, remember that you can do nothing without Christ, and that you are not asked to. You are asked to abide, to keep coming, to receive. When you fail, return at once. The Vine has not moved.

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

Second, pray. Murray would not be satisfied with any reader who finished this book admiring his teaching on prayer and praying no more than before. Find your inner chamber. Wait before you speak. Pray definitely. Persevere. Intercede for others by name. The Teacher still keeps His school open, and the only way to learn is to enrol.

A last word about the man

We have been honest about his limits. His book on divine healing goes beyond what Scripture warrants in treating healing without medical means as the higher way and in its handling of sickness and the will of God, and it must be read with the corrections set out in chapter thirteen. His call to absolute surrender, and his scheme of carnal and spiritual Christians, have freed many and burdened some, and the conscientious need to hear the grace that he himself preached alongside them. His boldest words about prayer need Scripture’s own balance. And he was a minister of a settler church in a colonial society, who did not rise above all the assumptions of his time and place.

None of this has been said to diminish him. It has been said because his own teaching requires it. A man whose whole message was that the creature has nothing in itself and everything in God cannot be honoured by pretending that he was an exception. He would have been the first to say that whatever was good in him was received.

Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truth’s sake. PSALM 115:1

He died at Wellington in January 1917, in his eighty-ninth year, while the world was at war. He had lived to see the revival his father prayed for, to watch his church turn outward in mission, and to hear from readers across the world who had learned from his little books to abide and to pray. He left schools, missions and a shelf of books, and he left behind a prayer he had written for himself in a hard season: that God had brought him to the strait place, would keep him in it, would teach him in it, and would bring him out in His own time. It is not a bad prayer to end with.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Return to the chapter of this book that made you least comfortable. Read it again, and choose one application point to work on for a month.

2. Ask whether anything in these pages has become a new law to you. If so, bring it to God and receive it again as grace.

3. Establish one daily practice of dependence — a morning hour, a pause before work, a prayer at night — and keep it for thirty days.

4. Begin a list of people and places to pray for by name, and keep it where you will see it.

5. Choose one of Murray’s own books from the Reader’s Guide that follows, and begin it this week.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have read about abiding, surrender, humility and prayer, and I am capable of turning all of it into one more burden. Keep me from that.

I am a branch. Let me simply receive Your life, day by day and moment by moment.

Teach me to pray. Take me into Your school, and do not let me leave it.

And as You were faithful to Your servant Andrew Murray in every strait place, be faithful to me, until I see You face to face. Amen.