Andrew Murray’s Inner Chamber: What to Do Before You Pray
⏱ 7 min read
Search for what Andrew Murray meant by the inner chamber and you will find a great deal about abiding, waiting, and the school of prayer, and very little about the plain question underneath it: once the door is shut, what does a person actually do first? Murray wrote close to a shelf of books on prayer, and readers usually come to them for the theology. What is easy to miss, until the books are set beside one another, is that his first instruction in the inner chamber is not a thought at all. It has to do with the body and the clock.
Andrew Murray’s inner chamber, in his own vocabulary
Inner chamber was simply Murray’s word for the place of private prayer — the shut room of Christ’s instruction in Matthew’s gospel — and he thought well enough of the phrase to give one of his later books that title. It is worth noticing that his vocabulary for prayer starts with a room rather than a mood. Before he says anything about what prayer is, he has already said where it happens and that you have to go there.
How did Andrew Murray pray? Bow first
In Waiting on God he puts it as plainly as he puts anything:
Before you pray, bow quietly before God, just to remember and realize who He is, how near He is, how certainly He can and will help.
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Notice what is absent. He does not say compose your petitions, or examine your motives, or work up a feeling. He says bow. Then he says quietly. Only after those two words does he give a reason.
The same instruction, in book after book
Once the pattern is visible it turns up everywhere in Murray. In The Prayer Life the same counsel arrives with the clock attached:
Take time to present yourself reverently and in quietness before God.
— Andrew Murray, The Prayer Life
In The Ministry of Intercession, writing to people who pray for others and therefore arrive with a list, he interrupts the list before it starts:
Each time you intercede, be quiet first and worship God in his glory.
— Andrew Murray, The Ministry of Intercession
Set the three sentences in a row and the verbs are worth reading on their own: bow, take time, be quiet, present yourself. Posture, clock, manner, posture again. Not one of the four is an instruction about what to say. Whatever else Murray thought prayer was, he did not think a person arrived at it as a disembodied mind that simply began transmitting.
It is important to say what this is not. Murray is not describing a technique, and certainly not anything a modern wellness page would recognise. There is no breathing pattern here, no count, no scan of the body. There is a place, a posture, and an unhurried minute. The honest claim about the old devotional writers is the modest one: they prescribed physical conditions for prayer and never treated the body as an irrelevance. They did not teach body-technique, and it does them no favours to pretend otherwise.
Is the pause one more thing to fail at?
The obvious risk of an instruction like this is that a tired reader turns it into one more thing to fail at. Murray saw that, and in the same book where he tells people to be quiet first, he takes the pressure off:
Quietly tell your Lord Jesus of your feebleness; believe that the Holy Spirit is in you to teach you to pray, and be assured that if you begin, God will help you.
— Andrew Murray, The Ministry of Intercession
The quiet is a place to say the feebleness out loud, not a standard the feeble have to reach first. That distinction is the whole difference between a preparation and a gate.
Where Murray got it: Guyon, Fénelon and de Caussade
He was repeating something older, and the repetition is close enough to be worth showing. Madame Guyon gives the instruction in almost the same shape:
First of all, when you bring yourself into the presence of God by faith, remain a short time in an attitude of respectful silence.
— Madame Guyon, A Short Method of Prayer
And in the English collection published as Fénelon’s Spiritual Progress, the sentence surfaces again, barely altered:
First, as soon as the soul by faith places itself in the presence of God, and becomes recollected before Him, let it remain thus for a little time in respectful silence.
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
That body of quietist material circulated in overlapping editions, and the sentence appears to have travelled with it. What matters here is only that the counsel keeps being handed forward: place yourself, then wait a little before you speak.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade extends it past prayer into the ordinary movements of a day:
In the second place avoid in your actions, whether exterior or interior, all eagerness, hurry, and natural activity; accustom yourself on the contrary, to speak, to walk, to pray and to read quietly, slowly, without overexerting yourself no matter for what, not even to repulse the most frightful temptations.
— Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence
He says the same thing again about prayer itself, and the counsel is against volume rather than against effort:
Do not make a number of acts during prayer, but make a few very quietly, with the greatest repose of mind and heart, and in the greatest tranquillity possible.
— Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence
P.T. Forsyth, a Congregationalist writing from a very different theological address, still assumes prayer has furniture:
Go into your chamber, shut the door, and cultivate the habit of praying audibly.
— P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer
A room. A door that closes. A voice used out loud. None of it is mystical. All of it is physical.
Wesley’s objection: pray now, prepare later
It would be dishonest to present this as a settled consensus. John Wesley, who prayed as much as any of them, puts the emphasis somewhere else entirely. His counsel about prayer is not about how to begin well but about refusing to stop:
Only remember always to pray, to seek, to knock, and not to faint.
— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions
That is a real corrective. Wesley’s instinct is that the person who cannot pray should begin anyway and keep knocking, and that any preliminary which delays the knocking is worth suspecting. He is not, for what it is worth, an advocate of rush. The same body of sermons contains this:
Meantime, watch always against all hurry and dissipation of spirit; and pray always, with all earnestness and perseverance, that your faith fail not.
— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions
So the disagreement is narrower than it looks. Wesley and Murray both distrust hurry. Where they part company is on whether a settling-in is a help or a hurdle, and a reader is entitled to conclude that it depends on the reader. Fénelon, from the other side of the argument, adds a caution that lands on his own party:
Pray simply from the heart, from pure love, and not from the head, from the intellect alone.
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
A pause designed to produce the right interior condition has already become head-work. That is precisely the failure a quiet minute is supposed to prevent.
What the quiet minute in the inner chamber is actually for
It is not for generating a mood, and it does not resolve anything. Alexander Maclaren, a preacher not given to overstatement, says so about his own praying:
Frequently when I pray I am face to face with problems to which I can see no solution.
— Alexander Maclaren, Things That Matter Most
The pause does not answer the problem. What it does is change what happens next. Forsyth describes the sequence that follows it, and it is unglamorous:
Read a passage of Scripture and then sit down and turn it into prayer, written or spoken.
— P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer
Stop. Read. Turn the reading into words addressed to God, on paper if speaking is beyond you. That is the whole method, and the stopping is the part most people skip. De Caussade, at the end of his own list of small instructions, is careful to keep the outcome out of the practitioner’s hands:
Do nothing but this, and God will, gradually, operate all the rest in your soul.
— Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence
Gradually. Not today, and not because the pause worked.
For readers who want to follow Murray further, his prayer books are surveyed in the complete readers guide, and something of the setting he wrote from survives at the Andrew Murray Centre in Wellington.
A note on the pause in a Stilling Waves day
This is why every day in a Stilling Waves journal opens with a short pause before the reading rather than a paragraph. It is not a technique and it is not the point of the day. It is simply the oldest instruction in the tradition, printed where a hurried person will meet it: stop for a moment, before the words start.
This article belongs to a series on what the older devotional writers actually taught about the body in prayer. The overview is here: Does the Body Matter in Prayer? What the Old Writers Said.
More on this author: Andrew Murray: The Complete Reader’s Guide and inside the Andrew Murray Centre.
