Andrew Murray on the Surrendered Will
⏱ 10 min read
You say yes to God on Sunday and pull back on Tuesday, at the point the yes starts costing something. The pulling back is not loud. You did not renounce anything. You simply noticed, mid-week, that the inward consent has thinned — that the will which said yes, Lord in the pew has quietly resumed its small daily management of your own affairs by Wednesday afternoon, with the yes still technically in place but no longer doing any work.
Andrew Murray wrote The School of Obedience for exactly this gap. The Sunday yes is not the problem; the Tuesday retraction is the place the will is actually located. Murray was a Dutch Reformed minister in the Cape, and the small book is his careful, slow account of what surrendered to God actually means — not as a single dramatic act, but as the daily relocation of the will into a place from which the Sunday yes can become the Wednesday yes without the inward retraction. The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women is the 140-day companion this essay opens the door of — a place where the what does surrendered to God mean question gets walked out across small daily portions, in the very week the yes most needs to be re-given.
The surrendered will, in Murray’s reading, is not the abolition of the will. It is the will yielded — meaning, not erased, but oriented. The yes is still yours to give. The will is still active. What changes is the direction the will is facing when it gives its consent, and what it consents to when no one is watching.
The first passage: child, abide in me
The line that names what Murray is actually after, more clearly than any other in The School of Obedience and its companion Abide in Christ, is the one he writes about the inward word the surrendered soul learns to listen for:
“‘At Thy bidding I take Thy yoke; I undertake the duty without delay; I abide in Thee.’ Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command, and teach us to listen more earnestly than ever till the Spirit again give us to hear the voice of Jesus saying, with a love and authority that inspire both hope and obedience, ‘Child, abide in me.’ That word, listened to as coming from Himself, will be an end of all doubting — a divine promise of what shall surely be granted. And with ever-increasing simplicity its meaning will be interpreted. Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it twice. Slowly. Notice the line let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command.
The Tuesday retraction is the consciousness of failure. The pulling back, the inward retraction of the Sunday yes, the small private noticing that you have not actually been operating from the surrender all week — Murray names this exactly, and then does something most modern Christian writing does not do. He does not turn the consciousness of failure into shame. He turns it into urgency. Each noticing of the gap becomes, in his hand, not an indictment but a fresh occasion for the will to listen again — more earnestly than ever — for the same inward voice. Child, abide in me. The voice is still being spoken. The yes is still being asked for. The Tuesday is still the territory the surrender is meant to be walked in.
This is the first move in Murray’s account of what does surrendered to God mean. The yielded will is not the will that never retracts. It is the will that knows what to do with the retraction — that has learned, through repetition, to let the small failure become the next occasion for listening, rather than the proof that the listening is not worth doing. The yes you gave on Sunday and pulled back on Tuesday is not undone by the pulling back. It is re-asked on Wednesday, and on Wednesday afternoon, and again on Thursday morning, until the rhythm of the listening becomes the inward shape of the will itself.
Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led. Three verbs, doing the precise work of naming what the surrendered will hands over. Ruled — the will gives up self-rule, the constant low-grade decision to be the one in charge of your own direction. Taught — the will gives up self-instruction, the assumption that you already know what your soul needs and only need techniques to deliver it. Led — the will gives up self-direction, the small private anxiety of having to figure out, alone, where the next step goes. The yielding is the relinquishment of these three self-functions, slowly, in exchange for the arms of Everlasting Love that can do them better than the small managing self has been doing them all week.
The somatic — locating the yielded will in your own body
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the will sits closer to the body than most modern readers know.
Sit somewhere quiet. Notice the position of your hands. Are they tight, in your lap, on the arms of the chair? Are they making a small fist without your awareness? Slowly, let the fingers open. Let both palms turn upward, lightly, on your thighs — the open posture, not the closed one.
Now let the phrase child, abide in me arise inwardly, as if you were listening for it rather than saying it. The will, when it is yielding, has a body-signature. The chest opens by a fraction. The shoulders lower by an inch. The jaw releases. The opening of the hands has already taught the body a small version of the inward yielding the will is being asked for. Stay with the open hands for a minute. Then return to the page, with the hands still open if you can. The yielded will is not an abstract spiritual posture. It is the inward correlate of an open hand. The Sunday yes that holds to Tuesday is, in your body, the inward continuation of the openness you just located.
The second passage: obedience as the key to abiding
The second passage Murray sets next to this one — and the one that completes his account of what the yielded will actually does, day to day — is from The School of Obedience itself, and it is the sentence the modern reader most needs to hold:
“How well we know the parable of the vine. How often and how earnestly we have asked how to be able to abide continually in Christ. We have thought of more study of the Word, more faith, more prayer, more communion with God, and we have overlooked the simple truth that Jesus teaches so clearly: ‘If ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love,’ with its divine sanction, ‘Even as I kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His love.’ For Him as for us, the only way under heaven to abide in divine love is to keep the commandments. Do let me ask — have you known it, have you heard it preached, have you believed it and proved it true in your experience: obedience on earth is the key to a place in God’s love in heaven?”
— Andrew Murray, The School of Obedience
Slow down at we have overlooked the simple truth.
This is the line that names the misreading most modern Christian women have been quietly operating under. The Sunday yes has been understood as an emotional posture — a softening of the heart toward God — and the disciplines that follow have been understood as the means of feeling the surrender more vividly. More study, more faith, more prayer, more communion. These are not bad. But they are not, in Murray’s reading, where the yielded will actually lives. The will is yielded in the keeping of the commandments — meaning, in the small daily Tuesday acts of obedience that the Sunday emotion was supposed to be leading toward in the first place. The retraction you noticed on Tuesday is not, in Murray’s hand, a failure of feeling. It is a failure of obedience. And the cure is not to manufacture more feeling. The cure is to keep the next small commandment, in the small spare moment the Tuesday actually offers.
This is the precision of the second move. The yielded will does not show itself in the intensity of the Sunday yes. It shows itself in the kept commandment of the Tuesday afternoon — the patience with the difficult person, the honesty about the small temptation, the prayer prayed when the prayer was inconvenient, the apology made when the apology was costly. Obedience on earth is the key to a place in God’s love in heaven. The yielded will is the will that walks the Sunday yes into the Tuesday act, by the small mechanism of keeping the next commandment that arrives. The rest follows. The feeling that the Sunday yes had — the inward warmth, the sense of having been heard — gradually returns to the Tuesday as well, because the abiding has now been built on the ground it was supposed to be built on the whole time.
(The slow daily form of this kept-yes is what the Prayer Journal for Women is built to hold — one short page each evening for the next yielded act, one honest sentence about the day the will tried to walk it. The sibling essay What Andrew Murray Meant by Absolute Surrender walks the all-or-nothing version of the same question. The Daily Surrender Andrew Murray Practiced Every Morning walks the renewal-each-morning version. And Why Andrew Murray Said Self-Will Is the Root of All Sin walks the diagnostic side. If you are reading this from a long stretch of spiritual dryness, part of what may be happening is that the Tuesday acts have thinned and the Sunday feeling is doing its quiet work of trying to call them back.)
What does surrendered to God mean — held together
Hold the two passages together. The first names what the yielded will listens for — child, abide in me — and what the consciousness of failure becomes in the hand of the soul that has learned to use it well: not shame, but fresh urgency. The second names what the yielded will does — keeps the next small commandment the Tuesday offers, on the simple ground that obedience is the territory the abiding lives in.
What does surrendered to God mean, in Murray’s plain reading? It means a will that has stopped trying to feel its way into surrender, and has begun to act its way into it — by the small unspectacular Tuesday keeping of the next commandment, again and again, until the Sunday yes has become the inward shape of the whole week rather than the brief emotional crest of one of its mornings. The yielded will is not the will that never pulls back. It is the will that has learned to use the pulling back as the next occasion for the small re-yielding — the open hand, the kept commandment, the inward word child, abide in me — until the rhythm itself is the surrender.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take only one sentence from Murray into the week ahead, take this one:
“Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command.”
Write it small. Put it where the Tuesday retraction will find it — by the kettle, in the car, on the kitchen window. The yielded will is not formed by avoiding the failure. It is formed by what you do in the small inward moment after the failure has been noticed. Listen again. Child, abide in me. Open the hand. Keep the next small commandment the day actually offers. That, in Murray’s slow reading of The School of Obedience, is what surrendered to God actually means on the Wednesday afternoon the Sunday yes is being walked back into the centre of the will. (Stilling Waves Press intends, in time, to bring The School of Obedience back into print as part of the slow Murray reading library; for now this essay sits as part of the working library the reprint will draw from.)
Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women.