Andrew Murray — The Shepherd Who Taught the Church to Pray

Who He Was Andrew Murray was born on May 9, 1828, in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, the son of a Scottish- born Dutch Reformed minister whose faith was as rugged and sincere as the Cape frontier.

Educated in Aberdeen and Utrecht, Murray returned to South Africa in 1848 and entered a ministry spanning six remarkable decades — first as a circuit minister covering territory the size of England, then as a leader of the great Cape revival of 1860, and finally as a writer whose 240 books were translated into dozens of languages and read by millions. He died in 1917 at eighty- eight, still writing. The revival he witnessed and helped lead at Worcester in 1860 convinced him for life that all genuine spiritual awakening was born in prayer, and he devoted the rest of his ministry to teaching the church what it means to pray with depth, persistence, and humility.

His Core Teaching on Prayer Murray’s theological starting point was as radical as it was simple: Jesus is not only the object of our prayers but our Teacher in prayer. The disciples did not ask Jesus to explain the mechanics of prayer; they asked Him to teach them — “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1, NIV). They had watched Him pray, they had seen what His prayer produced, and they understood that what He did in prayer was not the performance of a special divine prerogative but the expression of a relationship into which He was inviting them. Murray built his masterpiece “With Christ in the School of Prayer” on this foundation: the believer does not merely learn about prayer — he is apprenticed to the Son of God in the very act of prayer.

The key to entering this school, Murray taught, was abiding. Jesus had made the connection explicit and unconditional: “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7, NIV). This was not a formula to manipulate God; it was a description of a relationship. The branch that abides in the vine does not ask for things foreign to the vine’s nature — it draws up what is already flowing through the vine and bears fruit that the vine itself desired to produce. Murray taught that unanswered prayer was almost always, at its root, a problem of abiding.

When the Word of Christ dwells richly in the believer, the believer’s requests increasingly reflect the heart of Christ — and those requests, Murray wrote, “cannot go unanswered.”

Murray’s burden for intercessory prayer was inseparable from his theology of the church’s responsibility to the world. He believed the church had been placed by God in the gap between a holy God and a needy world, empowered by the Spirit to intercede on behalf of those who could not or would not pray for themselves. He drew on Isaiah 62:6–7 — “You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem” — as a picture of the intercessor’s calling: not to mention needs to God and then move on, but to press with holy persistence until something breaks in the unseen realm. Murray himself would pray for specific people, specific nations, and specific spiritual conditions for years — sometimes decades — without visible answer, trusting that the unseen work was as real as the visible world would one day reveal it to be.

His teaching on humility and prayer was among his most distinctive contributions. He wrote an entire book on the subject — simply titled “Humility” — arguing that pride is the root of all spiritual failure and that no prayer truly reaches God without genuine self-abasement before Him. The tax collector’s prayer in Luke 18:13 — “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” — was not a model for the prayer of conversion alone but for every prayer, every day. Murray taught that the moment a man approached God with even a trace of self-congratulation on his lips, his prayer had already begun to lose altitude.

Yet Murray balanced this stringency with the most generous of promises. Because Christ’s righteousness was the believer’s standing before the Father, the humbled believer could come with complete confidence: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7, NIV). Humility did not shrink the prayer — it purified it. The man who had emptied himself of pretense could ask for great things, because he was asking not in his own name but in the name of the Son of God. Murray wrote: “The prayer of the humble is the prayer of faith, and the prayer of faith is the prayer God answers.”

Murray also gave sustained attention to what he called “the prayer of the Spirit” — the reality that the Holy Spirit does not merely assist human prayer but generates divine prayer through the human vessel. Paul’s assurance that “the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans” (Romans 8:26, NIV) meant, for Murray, that the deepest intercession was not the product of the believer’s own spiritual exertion but the overflow of the Spirit of Christ who lived within him. The practical implication was liberating: the believer did not need to manufacture fervency or summon intensity. He needed to be still enough, surrendered enough, and yielded enough for the Spirit’s own intercession to rise through him unobstructed. This was the prayer that moved heaven, because it was heaven’s own prayer moving through an earthen vessel.

Murray’s life bore consistent fruit because his roots went deep. He conducted extended prayer retreats, led prayer conferences that sparked multiple revivals, and modeled in his personal life the disciplines he urged upon others. Those who knew him described him as a man of extraordinary, settled peace — the fruit, those closest to him said, of a man who had learned to cast every care upon God and to leave it there.

A Prayer: Lord Jesus, enroll us in Your school of prayer. Teach us the humility that opens heaven’s door, the persistence that holds on until the blessing comes, and the love that turns our praying outward toward the needs of others. Be our teacher, and let our lives become a testimony of answered prayer. Amen.