Andrew Murray on Waiting and the Strength of God
⏱ 8 min read
Your reserves are depleted, and the same techniques do not work anymore. The disciplines that used to refill you are returning less and less. The prayer time has become quieter than it was. The verse that used to lift you sits on the page now without lifting anything. Andrew Murray, writing in Waiting on God, recognised the woman in that sentence — and he spent a whole chapter on what she was being invited into, because what she was running out of was the wrong kind of strength.
This is the question underneath the depletion. What is spiritual strength — really? Not the muscular kind your old disciplines were building. A different kind. Murray’s claim, held quietly across Day 25: The Way to the New Song and the chapters around it, is that the strength of God meets the soul that has at last stopped striving for it. The techniques are not failing because you are doing them wrong. They are failing because they were never meant to be the strength itself. They were meant to be the open hand into which the strength is given.
The slow daily companion for the inside of this depletion is the Dry Season Devotional — a 140-day walk built for the woman whose old techniques have gone quiet and who needs a page that holds the new kind of strength while she is learning to receive it. The article below is the short reading for the doorway.
Murray’s first turn — the strength is not the same shape
The first thing Murray does, in his chapters on Isaiah 40 and the renewing of strength, is name the category mistake the depleted woman keeps making. She is asking the old kind of strength to keep showing up. She is asking the muscle to do what the muscle did before. Murray gently turns her toward a different category.
“The message is one of deep meaning: ‘Take heed and be quiet;’ ‘In quietness shall be your strength;’ ‘It is good that a man should quietly wait.’ How the very thought of God in His majesty and holiness should silence us, Scripture abundantly testifies. ‘The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him’ (Hab. 2: 20). ‘Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord God.’ (Zeph. 1:7). ‘Be silent, O all flesh, before the Lord; for He is raised up out of His holy habitation’ (Zech. 2:13).”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
In quietness shall be your strength. Read that phrase once more. Murray treats it as a definition, not a poetic flourish. The quietness is the strength. Not the precondition for it. Not the soil it grows in. The strength of God, in Isaiah and in Murray, has a quietness inside its very name. It is not the loud, muscular, building-something strength the productivity culture has trained you to recognise. It is the strength of a soul that has at last sat down before God and is willing to be still long enough to receive what only stillness can hold.
The reason your old techniques are not working is that they were trying to manufacture this strength from below. The strength you actually need is the kind that descends only on a quieted soul. The disciplines did their work in earlier seasons by occupying you long enough that the quieting could happen as a side effect. This season, the side effect has become the main thing — and so the disciplines themselves, which were always scaffolding, are gently being removed so the real thing they were holding can finally be received.
What the strength of God actually does
Here is where Murray turns toward the substance. The strength he is naming is not a feeling. It is a holding. A resting. A sustaining that does not require renewal from your end because the source is unceasing.
“Enter deep into thy relation of dependence as creature on God, to receive from Him every moment what He gives. Enter deeper still into His covenant of redemption, with His promise to restore more gloriously than ever what thou hadst lost, and by His Son and Spirit to give within you unceasingly, His actual divine Presence and Power. And thus wait upon your God continually and only.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
To give within you unceasingly, His actual divine Presence and Power. That is the spiritual strength the depleted woman is being moved toward. Not a power she generates. A power that is given, within her, by His Son and Spirit, unceasingly. The depletion she is experiencing is the depletion of the manufactured kind. The given kind has not yet been received, because the manufacturing engine has been so loud that the still soul required for the giving has not had room to form.
The strength of God is a strength that meets a quieted soul. The quieting is not the cost of receiving it. The quieting is the form the receiving takes.
A minute for the body
Stop reading. Sit somewhere quiet. Press both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders, which have been holding your dwindling reserves for a long time, come down by an inch. Let the jaw release. Let one slow inhale come in. Let one slow exhale go out. Stay in the stopping for sixty seconds, by a clock if you need to.
You are not being asked to feel strong afterwards. You are being asked to notice that the body, given one minute of unstrained sitting, does not collapse. It rests. The strength Murray is naming begins exactly there — in the body’s first willingness to stop carrying for one minute, and to discover it is still held.
The way to the new song
The chapter Murray titles The Way to the New Song is built on a single observation: that the Psalms which open with a new song almost always come after the Psalms in which the singer waited. The new strength is not the strength of the old technique re-applied harder. It is the strength of a soul that has been brought through the silence and given a song it could not have written on its own.
“They that wait on the Lord shall inherit the land; the promised land and its blessing. The heirs must wait; they can afford to wait. ‘Rest in the lord, and wait patiently for Him.’ The margin gives for ‘Rest in the Lord,’ ‘Be silent to the Lord,’ or R.V., ‘Be still before the Lord.’ It is resting in the Lord, in His will, His promise, His faithfulness, and His love, that makes patience easy. And the resting in Him is nothing but being silent unto Him, still before Him.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
The heirs must wait; they can afford to wait. That sentence is the whole pastoral correction in eight words. You are not running out. You are an heir. The depletion you are inside is not the running-out of the supply. It is the slow re-orientation from the manufactured kind of strength to the given kind. And the given kind, in Murray’s reading, makes patience easy — not because the season is shorter, but because the resting itself becomes the strength.
This is what spiritual strength is, in Andrew Murray’s hand. It is the strength of the soul that has stopped striving and has begun to rest in the One who is Himself the supply. The techniques are not failing. They are finishing the work they were given to do, which was to bring you to the place where the real strength could at last be received. (The chapter-a-day form of this same posture lives in the 31-day practice Andrew Murray built around one verse, and the slower foundational reading is what Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God actually asks of you.)
The daily companion when the techniques have gone quiet
The slow page that holds this new kind of strength, while you are learning to receive it, is the Dry Season Devotional. It pre-prints the slow passages and gives you a short morning page that does not demand from you the kind of strength you no longer have. It holds the rhythm Murray is teaching, day by day, for the woman whose reserves have gone low and whose techniques have stopped delivering, until the given strength has had room to take up residence again. (For the longer pastoral letter on the silence underneath this depletion, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence is the companion, and the practice for the year God goes quiet walks the year-long form.)
The Murray line to keep near the page
If you take only one line into the rest of the week, take this one:
In quietness shall be your strength.
The quietness is the strength. The techniques that have gone quiet are not the failure of the supply; they are the finishing of the scaffolding. What spiritual strength is, in Murray’s reading, is the strength of God Himself, given unceasingly within you, received by the still soul that has at last sat down. The depletion is not the end. It is the doorway.
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The 140-day form of this slow practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
We also intend, in time, to bring Waiting on God itself back into print under Stilling Waves Press, so Murray’s chapters on the strength of the waiting soul can sit beside the daily companion that walks the practice they hold.
The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional walks the slow receiving of the given strength at the pace of one short page per day. Built for the woman whose old techniques have gone quiet and who is ready, slowly, to be sustained by the strength only stillness receives.
