A Voice from the Veld

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. JAMES 5:16

A praying household. Andrew Murray was born on the ninth of May, 1828, at Graaff-Reinet, a small town on the edge of the Karoo in the eastern Cape Colony. His father, also Andrew Murray, was a Scot who had come out to serve as minister of the Dutch Reformed congregation there; his mother, Maria Stegmann, was born at the Cape, of German and French Huguenot descent. The household was large, devout and disciplined. The elder Murray had known the revivals of Scotland, and it was his habit to read accounts of them aloud and to pray that God would pour out His Spirit upon South Africa. The boy grew up hearing that prayer. He could not have known that he would live to see it answered.

A boy sent across the sea. In 1838, when he was ten, Andrew and his elder brother John were sent to Scotland to be educated, and lodged with an uncle, a minister in Aberdeen. It was a long separation, and a hard thing for a family to do, though a common one for colonial families of that kind. Scotland was then alive with evangelical awakening, and the boys saw it at close quarters; the preaching of the revivalist William Chalmers Burns made a lasting impression on the younger brother. Both took their degrees at Marischal College, Aberdeen, in 1845, and went on to the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to study theology, since they were destined for the Dutch Reformed ministry at home.

Assurance at Utrecht. Utrecht gave him more than a training. He found there a circle of students touched by the Réveil, a movement of evangelical renewal in the Dutch churches, and it was during those years that his own faith came to settled assurance. He had grown up religious and had first thought of the ministry as a natural calling for a minister’s son. Now he wrote home to his parents that he had cast himself on Christ. In May 1848, on his twentieth birthday, he and John were ordained at The Hague, and they sailed for the Cape.

Beyond the Orange River. His first charge was vast. He was sent to Bloemfontein, the first settled minister of his church beyond the Orange River, responsible for the scattered farming communities of the trekkers across an enormous territory. He was barely twenty-one. He spent much of his life in the saddle, riding for days between farms to preach, baptise, catechise, marry and bury, among people who might not see a minister for a year. It was a hard school for a young man with a scholar’s training. It taught him endurance, and it taught him how little a minister can do in his own strength.

Emma. In 1856 he married Emma Rutherford of Cape Town. It was a long and deeply happy marriage, and she became his closest partner in the work; in later years, when writing was a burden to him, it was often she or one of their daughters who took down his books from dictation. They had eleven children, and most of them lived to serve the church in one way or another.

Worcester, 1860. In 1860 Murray accepted a call to Worcester, a town in the Breede River valley, and there his father’s prayers were answered. The revival that broke out that year did not begin with him. It grew out of prayer meetings held by ordinary believers, and when it came it came with a force that alarmed him. The story is told that at one meeting the people broke out all together in prayer for mercy, and the young minister, anxious for good order, tried to quiet them, until he was warned that it was God who was at work. Murray learned the lesson. He did not manufacture the revival and he did not quench it. He shepherded it, and he spent the rest of his ministry caring for the kind of believers it produced: people newly awakened, earnest, and in danger of cooling into formality.

Abide in Christ. Out of that pastoral care came the books. The first of the famous ones, Abide in Christ, was written for young believers who had begun well and wondered how to continue; it appeared in Dutch and then in English, and it was followed by a steady stream of others. In 1864 he moved to the Groote Kerk in Cape Town, the mother church of his denomination, at a time of sharp controversy over liberal theology in the Dutch Reformed Church, and he stood firmly on the side of the older faith. In 1871 he accepted a call to Wellington, a small town in the wine country, and stayed for thirty-five years.

Wellington. It was at Wellington that Murray’s life widened. In 1874, inspired by the example of Mary Lyon’s seminary at Mount Holyoke in America, he founded the Huguenot Seminary for the education of girls and young women, and brought teachers from America to staff it. A training institute for mission workers followed. He served his church as moderator of its synod several times, and few men did more to turn it outward in mission, both to the African peoples of South Africa and northward beyond its borders. In 1889 he helped to found what became the South Africa General Mission. He spoke at conventions across the colony, and increasingly abroad — in Britain, at Keswick in 1895, and in America the same year, where the addresses later gathered as Absolute Surrender were first given.

The silent years. His own health was often poor, and in 1879 his voice failed. For about two years he could not preach. He was a preacher who could not preach, and he felt it. It was during this time that he began to seek the teaching on divine healing then spreading among evangelicals, and in 1882 he went to a healing home in London. He returned restored and convinced that healing belonged within the provision of Christ’s redemption, and his book Divine Healing followed. In 1895, while in England, he wrote a short note for his own comfort that has comforted thousands since, under the heading In time of trouble say. It sets out four things: that God brought him into the strait place, that God would keep him there in His love, that God would make the trial a blessing, and that in His own time God could bring him out again. A carriage accident in 1893 had left him with a permanent injury to his back, and in old age he often preached seated.

The war years. The Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902 tore through the country he loved and divided people he had served all his life. His sympathies lay with the Afrikaner people among whom he had ministered since his youth, and he grieved over the war and its suffering. He was by then an old man. His books from these years are full of the call to intercession and to a deeper dependence on God.

The last years. He retired from the Wellington pulpit in 1906 but did not stop writing; some of his most searching books on prayer, including The Prayer Life, came after that. He died at Wellington on the eighteenth of January, 1917, in his eighty-ninth year. He left no great fortune and wanted no monument. He left schools, missions, a church far more missionary than the one he had been ordained into, and a shelf of small books that have taught believers in every part of the world to abide in Christ, to take the low place, and to pray.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Murray’s father prayed for years for a revival he did not live to lead. Name one thing you have stopped praying for because the answer was slow, and take it up again.

2. The Worcester revival began in the prayers of ordinary believers. Ask whether you are waiting for someone more gifted to pray what God has laid on you.

3. Murray learned not to quench a work of God because it was untidy. Where might your love of order be resisting God?

4. In his silent years he could not do the work he was trained for. If you are in a strait place, read the four sentences of In time of trouble say and apply them honestly.

5. Choose one of Murray’s own books in the Ochorus library and read its first chapter this week.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You heard a father’s prayers in a frontier town and answered them in his son. Teach me to pray long and not lose heart.

You brought Your servant through loneliness, hard journeys, silence and pain, and You were faithful in them all.

If You have brought me into a strait place, keep me there in Your love, teach me what You mean to teach, and bring me out in Your own time.

Make me a branch that bears fruit I shall never see. Amen.