How to Overcome Doubt — Murray on the Faith That Survives Doubting
⏱ 14 min read
What if the doubt you have been carrying — the doubt you have been ashamed of, the doubt you have been carefully not saying out loud in front of the women in your small group — is not the failure of faith you have been told it is, but the soul examining what it has been carrying, asking, with a kind of strange faithfulness, whether the weight it has been carrying is the weight it was actually given? You have read the apologetics. You have listened to the podcasts. You have wrestled the verses and won most of the arguments and still, in the quiet of the late evening, a part of you turns the question over: is any of this true the way I was told it is. That turning-over is not unbelief. It is the soul doing inventory. It is what the older saints, with great gentleness, called the trial of faith — and the trial, in their reading, was never the end of faith. It was the room faith grew up in.
This essay reads two slow passages from Andrew Murray — the nineteenth-century South African pastor whose Abide in Christ and Absolute Surrender taught a generation of Christians whose certainty had thinned what to do in the room where it had thinned — and reads them carefully enough that the question of how to overcome doubt as a Christian opens into a quieter, more pastoral room than the apologetics-conference can offer. The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional is the daily companion for the season this article describes — the dry, the doubting, the long quiet. For now, read slowly. (If your wider question has been what to do when the doubt is at its sharpest, what to do when you’re doubting God — Murray on the soul in crisis is the slow companion to this one and walks the acute-crisis variant; if anxiety has been sitting under the doubt, a faith journal for the anxious Christian woman is the daily page for that exact ground; and if a daughter at home is sitting with her own version of the doubting, faith gifts for teen girls beyond the wall decor walks the teen-shaped quietness of the same season.)
Andrew Murray was born on a Dutch Reformed farm in the Cape Colony in 1828, educated in Aberdeen and Utrecht, ordained at twenty, and spent the next six decades pastoring small frontier parishes whose populations included men and women whose faith had been thinned by isolation, by the death of children, by drought, by the long ordinary attrition of believing inside seasons that did not feel like belief seasons. He buried a daughter. He watched two wars sweep across the territory of his parishes. He wrote, across that long lifetime, more than 240 books — most of them written for the doubting soul, not the strong one. Murray is the older voice the modern Christian woman whose certainty has thinned can read at midnight without being preached at. He has been there. He knows what the room feels like at three in the morning. The room is what he wrote from.
The thing he keeps returning to, across the long books, is this: the soul does not overcome doubt by producing louder certainty. The soul overcomes doubt by being still — by abiding, by resting in Him, by letting the doubting itself be brought into the presence of the One it has been doubting, instead of staying outside the room because it has not been doubting well enough to come in.
The first passage: the heart as His resting-place
“It is where Thou enterest to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself, that Thou makest holy. O my God! may my heart be Thy resting-place. I would, in the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. Let such fellowship with Thee, and Thy love, and Thy will be to me the secret of a life of holiness.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly, and notice the verbs.
Murray is naming, in one short paragraph, the entire posture of the believing soul in the doubting season. The Lord is the one who enters to rest, to refresh and reveal Himself. The believer’s job is to make the heart His resting-place. The believer rests in Him, believing that He does all in me. The faith is restful. The fellowship is the secret. The doing is His. The receiving is the believer’s only contribution.
Notice the word that the doubting soul will want to argue with. Believing. Murray uses it twice in two sentences. In the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. The doubting soul will say: but the believing is what has been thinning. The believing is what I cannot manufacture. The believing is the part I am trying to overcome the doubt about.
This is the part where Murray’s pastoral patience is most worth attending to. He does not, in Holy in Christ, define believing as the production of certainty. He defines believing as the resting — the small, daily, un-dramatic decision to let the heart be His resting-place, even on the day the certainty has not arrived. The believing is the putting yourself in the way of His resting. The certainty, if it returns, returns to a soul that has been resting. It does not return to a soul that has been performing resolution.
This re-orders the question. The question you have been asking — how do I produce enough belief to silence the doubt — Murray quietly replaces with a different question: how do I sit, in the doubting, in the room where He rests. The first question demands a feeling the doubting soul cannot manufacture. The second asks only the small daily showing-up Murray named in one sentence: may my heart be Thy resting-place. That is the work. The work is not the silencing of the doubt. The work is the offering of the heart as a place He is welcome to rest in, while the doubt is still in the room.
What does this mean for how to overcome doubt as a Christian?
It means the doubt and the abiding are not mutually exclusive. The doubting soul that has been waiting for the doubt to leave before re-entering the room of faith has been waiting on the wrong threshold. Murray would gently tell her: enter the room with the doubt. The Lord does not require the doubt to be resolved before He rests. The Lord rests in the heart that offers Him the rest of itself — including the part that is, today, still doubting. The doubting is not the un-faith. The leaving of the room is the un-faith. The faith is the staying. The faith is the resting in Him, believing that He does all in me — even when all includes the slow work He is doing inside the doubting itself.
The second passage: souls still unto God, gazing
“What we only need is this: to take time and study the divine image of this life of love set before us in Christ. We need to have our souls still unto God, gazing upon that life of Christ in the Father until the light from heaven falls on it, and we hear the living voice of our Beloved whispering gently to us personally the teaching He gave to the disciples. Soul, be still and listen; let every thought be hushed until the word has entered your heart too: ‘Child!’”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it twice. Once for the doctrine, once for the closing word.
Murray is doing something quietly enormous in this passage. He is telling the doubting soul that the cure for doubt is not the production of more arguments. The cure is gazing. Souls still unto God, gazing upon that life of Christ in the Father. The cure is not in the doubting soul’s effort. The cure is in the light from heaven that falls on the gaze. The believer’s part is the being-still. The light is His. The voice is His. The whisper — Child — is His. The whole movement is His, and the doubting soul’s only contribution is the small daily refusal to leave the room of the gazing.
This is exactly the part the modern apologetics-conference cannot teach. The conference can teach the soul how to think the believing. Murray is teaching the soul how to receive the believing. The two are different. The thinking is muscular and tires the soul out. The receiving is restful and lets the soul be quieted by Someone other than itself. The doubting soul has been thinking-itself-back-into-faith for years. Murray is gently asking her to stop. Stop the thinking. Soul, be still and listen. The believing is not produced by the volume of the inner argument. The believing is the slow consequence of having been quiet in the room while the Child was whispered into the chest by Someone whose voice the doubting soul will recognise when she hears it.
Notice the last word of the passage. Child. Murray is not closing with Believer, or Servant, or even Disciple. He closes with the word that names the relational ground underneath all the others. Child. The doubting soul, in this passage, is not addressed as the failing apologist. The doubting soul is addressed as the child who has been held in the love of the Father the whole time her arguments have been going back and forth in the upper rooms of her mind. The Child is the cure. Child is the word that does not require the doubt to be resolved before the address can land. Child is the address He has been making the whole time.
This is the second movement in how to overcome doubt as a Christian. The doubting soul does not overcome doubt by being smarter than the doubt. The doubting soul overcomes doubt by being recognised. The recognising happens in the quietness. The Father whispers Child to the soul that has stopped trying to perform its way back to a feeling of faith. The doubt does not have anywhere to live, over time, in a soul that has been daily addressed as Child by the One whose voice it knows. The doubt becomes background. The address becomes the foreground. The slow practice is the small daily sitting-still in which the address has space to be heard.
For the modern Christian woman whose nights have been the long quiet wrestle with whether any of this is true the way she was told it is, Murray’s second passage is the older tradition’s quiet correction. The wrestle has not been wrong. The wrestle has been honourable. But the resolution of the wrestle is not produced by winning the wrestle. The resolution is given by the One whose whisper of Child is the actual end of the doubting season. Your job is not to win. Your job is to be still long enough to hear the address. The address has been waiting for the stillness.
(If the question of how to keep showing up to the daily quiet when the verses feel like furniture is the practical one, what the old saints knew about God’s silence — Murray on waiting is the slow companion for the day-to-day; and the sibling article how to overcome bitterness — Murray on the root that defiles reads Murray on a related root condition.)
A note about the journal
If the small daily practice of being still in the room where He whispers Child is the work you want to walk into, the Dry Season Devotional is built around precisely this kind of quietness. One short page each evening, a passage chosen for the soul whose certainty has thinned, room for the honest sentence — today the doubting was the loudest thing in the inner room, and the verse did not feel like much — and a slow companion that does not demand the doubt be resolved before the page is allowed to be opened. The journal is not the cure for the doubt. He is. The journal is the small daily place the soul keeps sitting still in until the Child is heard again.
The somatic that goes with the doubting
Pause here.
Doubt lives in the body more than the modern Christian usually lets herself notice. There is a particular held quality the doubting body carries — a small constant tension in the jaw, a furrowing of the brow that does not relax even at rest, a held quality in the chest as though the soul has been holding the door of itself slightly closed against the possibility of being met by something it cannot prove. The body has been faithful to the inner wrestle. The body has been bracing for the conclusion the mind has not been able to reach. The slow undoing of the doubt is, in part, the slow letting of the body know that the conclusion does not have to be reached for the room to be safe to sit in.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet on the floor. Let the hands rest in your lap, palms up. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the jaw soften by a fraction — not by trying to relax it, but by ceasing the small ongoing tension that has been holding it. Take a second slow inhale. On the exhale, let the brow ease, as though one small wrinkle between the eyes has been released. Take a third slow inhale, slower than the others. On the exhale, let one word rest in the chest: Child. That word alone. Not as a doctrine to prove. As an address to receive.
Stay with the open palms and the softened brow for sixty seconds, by a clock if you need to. Then continue reading. The single minute is the practice. The body that has been wrestling for years will not unbrace under argument. The body unbraces under address. Child is the address. Sat with daily, the address begins to be true at the level of the body before it is true at the level of the conclusion the mind has been chasing.
A short word on the modern apologetics
The reason the modern apologetics-conference, however excellent, leaves the doubting soul tireder than when she walked in is that it has located the work in the wrong faculty. It has located the work in the believer’s intellect — the strength of the argument, the precision of the answer, the persuasiveness of the case. The older tradition Murray stands inside locates the work in the believer’s stillness — the soul still unto God, gazing, while the Child is whispered into the heart by Someone other than the believer. The modern conference asks you to think your way out of doubt. Murray asks you to be still until you are addressed. The two practices look different from outside. They produce different fruits over a year. The thinking wears the soul out. The stillness slowly lets the doubt be quieted by a voice the soul knows.
The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional is built on the stillness, not the thinking. Each evening, a short page, a slow passage, the small daily return to the room where the Child is whispered. The conferences you have been to have not been wrong. They have been incomplete. The slower practice the older saints handed to doubting souls was always this one — and it is the one that survives the doubting because it does not depend on the doubting being resolved first.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take only one sentence from Murray into this week, take the last line of the second passage. Soul, be still and listen; let every thought be hushed until the word has entered your heart too: ‘Child!’ Carry it on a small piece of paper. Put it inside your journal. The instruction is the whole counsel for the doubting soul in a single breath. Be still. Listen. Let the address land. The Child is what overcomes doubt, in the older tradition. The doubt does not need to be argued out. It needs to be displaced by an address you have stopped trying to earn.
Your sister-articles in this contemplative-fathers cluster are how to overcome bitterness — Murray on the root that defiles and how to forgive someone who hurt you — De Sales on hard forgiveness. Read the three together if you can; they were written across different centuries but they are speaking, in their different vocabularies, about the same slow returning to the room of His address.
☕ 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.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional. Each evening, a short page that lets the doubting be brought without performance, and a passage anchored in the Child address of the Father — the small daily home for the soul learning, slowly, how to overcome doubt as a Christian by being still long enough to be addressed by the One whose voice it knows.
The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — the heart as His resting-place, the soul still unto God, the whispered Child — into a daily companion built for the woman whose certainty has thinned and who is ready, at last, to learn what the older saints actually meant by faith that survives doubting.
