Waiting on God

It is a set of thirty-one short daily readings by Andrew Murray on a single theme: that in all our religion, personal and public, we need more of God himself. Murray teaches the believer to cultivate a deep, habitual dependence on God — to wait on him not as a last resort but as the settled posture of the soul — and to expect that such waiting is never in vain.

A South African pastor and writer of Scottish descent, one of the most beloved devotional authors of the deeper Christian life. He wrote scores of short books on prayer, faith, and abiding in Christ; Waiting on God, published in 1896, is among the most treasured, arranged as a month of daily meditations.

For Murray it is far more than waiting for an answer to a particular request. It is the whole soul's turning to God in stillness and expectancy — resting in him, depending on him, looking to him for everything and hurrying him for nothing. Waiting is the acknowledgement that we have nothing and can do nothing apart from him, and the confidence that he will not fail those who wait.

Because the lesson is not learned by being understood once but by being practised daily. Murray arranged thirty-one brief chapters, one for each day of a month, so that the reader would return to the single theme morning after morning until waiting on God became not an idea but a habit of the heart.

Renewed strength, clearer light, and a deeper knowledge of God. Drawing on passages like Isaiah's promise that those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength, Murray teaches that the waiting soul is quietly changed — made humble, restful, and strong — and that God reveals himself to those who give him the time and the stillness in which to do it.

About God himself. Murray gently turns the reader away from waiting merely for God's gifts toward waiting for the Giver — teaching that the deepest blessing of waiting is God's own presence. The needs that first drive us to wait become, in his hands, occasions for learning to want God more than his benefits.

The anxious, the hurried, and the spiritually dry — anyone who senses they are living on their own resources rather than on God. Murray writes with unusual tenderness, and the book has long been a companion to Christians seeking to deepen their prayer life and their trust, especially in seasons of waiting and uncertainty.

With the first day's reading, and then one each day for a month, unhurried — the book is designed to be taken slowly and prayerfully rather than read straight through. Read this way, the repeated theme sinks in by degrees, until waiting on God becomes less a discipline to remember than an instinct of the soul.