The Deeper Life

It gathers books on holiness, surrender, and the abundant life hidden with Christ — works for the believer who wants to go further in than conversion, past the first steps into the fullness of the Christian life. Its keynote is Colossians 3:3, "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God": the deeper life is presented not as an achievement to be won but as a hiddenness already secured in Christ, to be entered by faith.

Among them are Andrew Murray's "Humility" and "The Way into the Holiest," Bernard of Clairvaux's "On Loving God," Hannah Whitall Smith's "The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life," and Andrew Murray's "Holy in Christ" — a spread across centuries and traditions united by a single concern: the life of God lived out from within the believer.

The yielding of the whole self to God as the doorway to the deeper life — not striving to become holy by effort but abandoning oneself to Christ so that He may live His life through the believer. It is the note struck across the collection, from Murray's insistence on humility as the root to Nee's account of the Christian life as Christ's own life reproduced in us.

Not an intenser version of religious effort but Christ living His own life through the believer, so that holiness becomes a gift received rather than a height climbed. Andrew Murray's "The Master's Indwelling" and "Holy in Christ" are the shelf's fullest treatment — that the ordinary birthright of every Christian is not endless struggle but Christ Himself lived out from within.

Because these writers agree that pride is the great obstacle to the deeper life and humility its root. Andrew Murray's little book on the subject argues that humility is not one virtue among many but the ground in which all the others grow — the emptying of self that alone makes room for the fullness of God. Without it, the deeper life is sought in vain.

Hannah Whitall Smith's "The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life" is a warm and accessible entry into the life of trust; Andrew Murray's "Humility" goes to the root; and Andrew Murray's "The Master's Indwelling" sets out the whole mechanism — how surrender and the indwelling Spirit make the abundant life a reality rather than a hope.

The shelf holds the classic holiness and Keswick stream, but read at its best it points not to a single later crisis that lifts a believer onto a permanently higher plane so much as to a continual return to Christ and daily abiding in Him. The emphasis falls on dependence and surrender kept up over a lifetime rather than on one decisive experience held ever after.

Because the gap between knowing about God and actually abiding in Him is perennial, and few writers have mapped the way across it so faithfully. Tested over generations, these works speak to the Christian who has believed the gospel and still longs for more — and they answer that longing not with a technique but with a Person, the Christ in whom the believer's life is already hidden.