Andrew Murray on Working for God Without Striving
⏱ 11 min read
You are burning out in ministry and you do not know how to stop. The work has been holy and the load has been crushing and the two facts have, for a long time, refused to resolve into a sentence that would let you keep going without losing yourself. Andrew Murray, in Working for God, wrote the patient extended answer to this exact exhaustion, and the slow walk below through three of his passages is for the woman whose service has gone past the edge of what her own strength was ever meant to carry and is ready, slowly, to learn that the carrying was never meant to be hers. The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion for the dry stretches of ministry life if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Murray, by the time he wrote Working for God, had been in ministry himself for more than forty years. He knew the burnout he was writing about because he had walked, multiple times, through the long collapse of his own physical and spiritual strength under the weight of a pastorate that did not let him stop. His answer to Christian burnout is not a productivity reorganisation. It is a reordering of the inward source of the work. The exhausted Christian worker has been operating from the assumption that she is the source of the work, and the work is what she produces. Murray, gently, names the alternative scripture has always offered. The source is the Spirit. The work is His. Her part is the daily waiting upon Him that lets His strength be the strength the work is done from. The slow walk into the alternative is the slow walk out of the burnout that the wrong source was always going to produce.
The first passage — abiding is blessed rest, not a work to perform
Murray, in Abide in Christ — which is the practical companion to Working for God and is the inward foundation of everything Working for God says about service — wrote the sentence that names the inward atmosphere the un-striving worker lives in.
“Let this truth, accepted under the teaching of the Spirit in faith, remove every vestige of fear, as if abiding in Christ were a burden and a work. In the light of His life in the Father, let it henceforth be to you a blessed rest in the union with Him, an overflowing fountain of joy and strength. To abide in His love, His mighty, saving, keeping, satisfying love, even as He abode in the Father’s love — surely the very greatness of our calling teaches us that it never can be a work we have to perform; it must be with us as with Him, the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The hinge sentence is the one Murray spends the rest of the paragraph unfolding. It never can be a work we have to perform. The exhausted Christian worker has been performing her abiding. The praying has been a performance. The serving has been a performance. The faithfulness has been a performance — meaning, the worker has been the agent of every inward and outward act, and the strength of every act has had to come from her own reserves. Murray is saying — patiently, urgently — that this was never how the New Covenant work was meant to be done. Abiding in Christ is not a work. It is a blessed rest. The work that flows from the abiding is not a performance. It is a spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above.
The two phrases together name the new architecture. Spontaneous outflowing of a life from within. The life is in you — the Spirit, dwelling, working — and the service that flows from the life is not a thing you have to will or manufacture; it flows the way water flows from a spring, because the spring is there. Mighty inworking of the love from above. The love is descending — the Father’s love, channelled through Christ, by the Spirit — and the love is doing its own work in you, without your assistance. Your part is the blessed rest in the union with Him. The work is done in the rest. The Christian burnout that has been consuming you has been because you have been trying to do, by manufacture, what was only ever meant to be done by spontaneous outflow.
This is the first piece of Murray’s answer. The work continues. The agency shifts. The work is His, done through you, while you rest in Him. The shift is not a permission to stop serving. It is a permission to stop performing the serving from your own strength. The serving will, in many seasons, look the same from the outside. The inside is different. The exhaustion that the wrong source was producing slowly stops, because the source has been changed.
The second passage — the lesson of stillness as the soul’s strength
Murray, a little further into Abide in Christ, named the practice the new architecture is sustained by. (If the holiness-side of this same practice is the next slow read, what Andrew Murray meant by holiness walks the received-not-produced model for the woman whose inward life has also been exhausted by the wrong source. And the upstream context of all of this, the difference between justification and sanctification, walks the legal-versus-lived ground the New Covenant worker stands on.)
“Blessed the man who learns the lesson of stillness, and fully accepts God’s word: ‘In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.’ Each time he listens to the word of the Father, or asks the Father to listen to his words, he dares not begin his Bible reading or prayer without first pausing and waiting, until the soul be hushed in the presence of the Eternal Majesty. Under a sense of the divine nearness, the soul, feeling how self is always ready to assert itself, and intrude even into the holiest of all with its thoughts and efforts, yields itself in a quiet act of self-surrender to the teaching and working of the divine Spirit. It is still and waits in holy silence, until all is calm and ready to receive the revelation of the divine will and presence.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
The line at the centre is the practice. He dares not begin his Bible reading or prayer without first pausing and waiting, until the soul be hushed in the presence of the Eternal Majesty.
This is the small daily reset the exhausted worker needs and almost never gets. The work has been crowding the pausing. The pausing has been treated as optional, as something to fit in if there is time, as the part of the day that yields first when the schedule tightens. Murray is saying the pausing is not optional. The pausing is where the strength comes from. The worker who skips the pausing is the worker who is, by definition, running on her own strength — because the strength of the Spirit is given to the soul that has been hushed in the presence of the Eternal Majesty, and the hushing cannot happen at the speed the schedule is currently running at. In quietness and confidence shall be your strength. The strength is given in the quietness. There is no other way to receive it.
This is also why the Christian burnout has been so resistant to the usual solutions. Better time management does not solve it. Delegation does not solve it. Sabbath, taken as a single weekly day, does not solve it. The burnout is not a calendar problem. The burnout is a source problem, and the source is changed only by the daily small pausing and waiting until the soul be hushed. Murray is not asking for an hour. He is asking for the small minutes before the Bible is opened, the small minutes before the prayer is begun, the small breath of stillness before the work that lets the soul be quieted enough for the Spirit’s strength to be the strength the work is done from.
The soul yields itself in a quiet act of self-surrender to the teaching and working of the divine Spirit. This is the daily small yielding the work is sustained by. The exhausted worker has been operating from her own teaching and working. The un-striving worker is yielding to His. The yielding is small. The yielding is daily. The yielding is the door the Spirit’s strength comes through.
A small somatic, here
Set the article down for a moment. Let one slow exhale go all the way out. Let the shoulders drop by a small inch. Acknowledge, in that one exhale, that the work of the next hour does not have to be carried by your strength. The Spirit’s strength is available. The yielding to it is small. The exhausted body, given even one slow exhale of pausing before the work, begins to remember that the carrying was never meant to be only its own. The lesson of stillness, in Murray’s hand, is learned by the body first and the mind second. That is by design.
The third passage — the Spirit’s place in the New Covenant of work
The third passage, from The Two Covenants, names the inward source the un-striving work is done from.
“To believe fully in the Holy Spirit, as the present and abiding and all-comprehending gift of the New Covenant, has been to many a one an entrance into its fulness of blessing. Begin at once, child of God, to give the Holy Spirit the place in thy religion He has in God’s plan. Be still before God, and believe that He is within thee, and ask the Father to work in thee through Him. Regard thyself, thy spirit as well as thy body, with holy reverence as His temple. Let the consciousness of His holy presence and working fill thee with holy calm and fear.”
— Andrew Murray, The Two Covenants
The line to keep near the page is the small one. Ask the Father to work in thee through Him.
This is the daily small prayer the un-striving worker is sustained by. The exhausted prayer has been Father, give me the strength to do this work for You. Murray’s prayer is Father, work in me through Him. The two prayers are different. The exhausted prayer asks for resources the worker will then deploy through her own agency. Murray’s prayer asks for the agency itself to be His. The Father, asked, does work in you through Him. The Spirit is the present and abiding gift. The work is the spontaneous outflow. Your part is the asking and the being still and the regarding yourself as His temple. His part is the work done through you in the day that follows.
This is Andrew Murray on working for God without striving in one practice. Be still. Believe He is within. Ask the Father to work in you through Him. Regard your body and your spirit as His temple. The four small acts, repeated daily, become the architecture of a ministry that does not consume the worker, because the worker has stopped being the source. The Christian burnout that the wrong architecture was producing slowly stops being the daily atmosphere, because the daily atmosphere has been changed.
If the Christian burnout is acute right now and the practice above feels like one more thing to do — start smaller. Five minutes a morning, in the chair, with the prayer Father, work in me through Him. The Dry Season Devotional is built for exactly this — the woman in ministry whose dry season has been longer than she has admitted to anyone, with a daily short page that opens the small being still and the small asking and lets the Spirit’s strength begin, slowly, to be the strength the work is done from. (The companion essays in this short series will walk the wider posture. Andrew Murray on the Christian’s whole life as service walks the same architecture into the whole day, not only the religious hours. Andrew Murray on consecration as daily renewal walks the daily small re-consecration the un-striving work is sustained by.)
What the slow walk does over a year
What changes, if you sit with Murray’s three passages — one a month for three months — and then let the practice of abide as rest not work, learn the lesson of stillness, ask the Father to work in you through Him become the daily small shape of your ministry, is not a sudden lightness. The Christian burnout does not disappear on a Tuesday morning. What happens is that the source of the work slowly changes, and the change is felt in the body before it is felt anywhere else. The bracing that has been carrying the wrong source for years starts, in small evenings, to lower. The chest, on the slow exhale before sleep, stops carrying the load it was never meant to carry alone. The morning, on the chair, begins with the small asking, and the day that follows is — slowly, not dramatically — worked in you instead of manufactured by you.
The work continues. The output is, in many cases, not smaller. The exhaustion stops being the daily ground note, because the source has been changed, and the spontaneous outflow that Murray names is the actual mechanic of a sustainable ministry. The slow walk out of striving, in Murray’s hand, is the slow walk into the New Covenant work the church was always meant to do — His work, done in you, while you abide. (We hope, in time, to bring Working for God back into print through Stilling Waves Press, so the slow reading has a clean, contemplative edition to live inside.)
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A daily home for the slow un-striving
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — abiding as rest not work, the lesson of stillness as the soul’s strength, the Father working in you through the Spirit — into a daily companion for the woman in ministry whose dry season has been longer than she has admitted, and who is ready, in small mornings, to let the source of the work change.
