What Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God Actually Asks of You
⏱ 10 min read
What Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God Actually Asks of You
You are exhausted from hurrying and you do not know how to slow down inside. The body keeps moving — the day keeps demanding the next thing — but underneath the doing there is a small steady worry that the part of you that used to be still has gone somewhere you cannot reach. You opened the search bar for andrew murray waiting on god because you have a sense that the older voices, the ones who wrote slowly because they had time to, may have something the modern devotional bookshelf does not have.
Andrew Murray published Waiting on God in 1895 as a set of thirty-one short readings — one for each day of the month. He did not intend the book to be read quickly. He intended it to be returned to, slowly, across years, in stretches of dryness and stretches of comfort, in seasons when the soul was running and in seasons when the soul had stopped knowing how to. The book was built for exactly the woman who has typed the phrase you typed. The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional is the companion practice we built to carry Murray’s slow cadence into a daily page — verse pre-printed, room for the honest sentence, no demand to feel anything in particular. For now, read slowly. The article is the slow read; the journal is for after.
What waiting on God actually asks of you, in Murray’s reading, is not a delay. It is a posture. The two things are easily confused, and the confusion is part of why the modern Christian woman has so little resource for the inside of a waiting season. Waiting-as-delay is the wait you do for a bus. Waiting-as-posture is the wait you do at the feet of someone you love. The first asks nothing of the soul. The second asks the soul to be present, to be attentive, to be quiet enough that the other person can be heard. Murray’s whole book is the slow unfolding of the second kind.
The first passage — let us set ourselves in quiet trust
“Come, my brethren, and let us day by day set ourselves at His feet, and meditate on this word of His, with an eye fixed on Him alone. Let us set ourselves in quiet trust before Him, waiting to hear His holy voice — the still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks — breathing its quickening spirit within us, as He speaks: ‘Abide in me.'”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the verbs. Set ourselves. Meditate. Fix. Wait. These are not the verbs of delay. They are the verbs of posture. Murray is describing the inward arrangement of a soul that has decided to be present at God’s feet on purpose — and the arrangement is something the soul does, deliberately, day by day. Let us day by day set ourselves at His feet. The daily-ness is the point. Not the intensity. Not the breakthrough. The slow daily setting — the small return of the soul to the same chair, the same posture, the same patient willingness to be quiet for long enough that the still small voice can be heard.
The still small voice that is mightier than the storm that rends the rocks. This is the line Murray returns to across the book, because it names the inversion the waiting soul is being asked to trust. The world’s logic is that the loud thing is the powerful thing — the storm, the urgent task, the inbox at 4pm. God’s economy runs the other way. The still small voice is the one that carries the actual weight. The soul that has not learned to wait will not hear it, because the soul that has not learned to wait is still listening for thunder. The waiting is the slow inward retuning of the ear toward the kind of voice God actually uses.
This is the first thing Murray’s Waiting on God asks of you. Not a delay. A posture. The daily small setting of yourself at His feet, the fixed eye, the quieted body, the inward willingness to be present long enough that the voice that does not shout has time to be heard.
A small thing for your body
Pause for a moment. Set whatever is in your hands down. Notice the shoulders — they have probably been carrying the hurrying for longer than today. Let them lower by an inch. Not to perform calm. Just to allow the body to stop being braced for the next demand.
Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale. The slowness of the exhale is the body’s way of saying I do not have to leave yet. The waiting posture begins in the exhale that has nothing to do next. Stay there for a few breaths. The next sentence is here when you are ready.
The second passage — take heed and be quiet
The second passage is from later in Waiting on God, where Murray names the inward stillness that the waiting posture is gradually building in the soul:
“If we are to have our whole heart turned towards God, we must have it turned away from the creature, from all that occupies and interests, whether of joy or sorrow. God is a being of such infinite greatness and glory, and our nature has become so estranged from Him, that it needs our whole heart and desires set upon Him, even in some little measure to know and receive Him. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. 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.'”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it twice. Slowly.
Notice the precision in the middle. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. This is the line that is hardest for the modern Christian woman to receive, because the modern devotional life is built almost entirely on the things Murray is naming as hindrances — the stirred effort, the awakened hope, the inward gladness produced by the right verse on the right morning. Murray is not saying these things are bad. He is saying that the waiting posture, in its mature form, is not built on them. It is built underneath them, on a quieter ground, where the soul is with God Himself and not with the inward weather produced by thinking about Him.
Take heed and be quiet. In quietness shall be your strength. It is good that a man should quietly wait. Three short imperatives. Murray is repeating them because the soul needs to hear them several times before it begins to believe them. Quietness is the strength. Not the energetic prayer. Not the stirred-up faith. The quietness — the inward stilling that has stopped trying to produce anything and is simply present with God — is, in Murray’s reading, the strongest spiritual posture the Christian can occupy. The waiting is not the absence of strength. The waiting is the strength, in a form the activist soul does not yet recognise as strength.
This is the second thing andrew murray waiting on god asks of you. The quieting of the inward noise — even the religious inward noise, even the good devotional excitement — so that the soul can be perfectly waiting, in the sense Murray means it: present with God, not with the soul’s own response to God. The journal companion built for exactly this stretch — when the loud religious feeling has thinned and the soul is being asked to learn the quieter posture underneath — is the Dry Season Devotional. The dry season is, in Murray’s frame, often the very season in which the waiting posture is being slowly taught. The dryness is the inward stilling. The journal is the page that holds the soul there.
The third passage — my soul, wait thou only upon God
The third passage is the one Murray closes the book with — the prayer the whole thirty-one days has been quietly preparing the soul to be able to pray:
“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. ‘My soul, wait thou only upon God.’ No words can tell, no heart conceive, the riches of the glory of this mystery of the Father and of Christ. Our God, in the infinite tenderness and omnipotence of His love, waits to be our Life and Joy.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it slowly. Notice the final line.
Our God, in the infinite tenderness and omnipotence of His love, waits to be our Life and Joy. This is the inversion that Murray spends the whole book leading the reader toward. The God you have been straining toward is also waiting. He is not the impatient deity the over-functioning soul half-suspects Him to be. He is the tender one, the omnipotent one, who is — Himself — in a posture of waiting. The waiting is mutual. You wait on Him; He waits on you. The whole Christian life, in Murray’s reading, is the slow discovery that the waiting posture you are being taught is the one He has been holding toward you the entire time.
My soul, wait thou only upon God. The only is doing the load-bearing work in this short verse. Not partly upon God and partly upon the circumstances. Not partly upon God and partly upon the inward feeling. Only upon God. The waiting posture, in its mature form, is the soul that has stopped looking at the other places it used to look for stability and has settled — slowly, daily, over years — into the single attention on the One who is its actual ground. The only is the work of a lifetime. Murray does not expect you to arrive at it in thirty-one days. He expects you to begin walking toward it, one slow chair-time at a time, until the inward gravity of the soul has been quietly retrained.
This is the third thing the book asks of you. The slow daily only. The soul that, day by day, returns its attention to God Himself — not to what He is doing, not to what He is giving, not to what He is permitting — and that learns, across years, to wait only there. The other waiting will not steady the soul. This one will.
(For the next reading in this small library, the 31-day practice Andrew Murray built around one verse walks the structure of the book itself, and why Andrew Murray said God waits longer than we do is the slow read of the mutual-waiting line above. The two together open the rest of Murray’s contemplative territory. If the dry season is where you are reading from, feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence is the bridge letter for the inside of that stretch.)
What waiting on God actually asks of you, in plain summary
Not a delay. A posture. The daily small setting of yourself at His feet, the fixed eye, the quieted body, the inward willingness to be present long enough that the still small voice has time to be heard. The slow stilling of the inward noise — even the religious noise — so that the soul can be perfectly with God, not with the soul’s own response to Him. And, slowly, across years, the deepening of the only — the single attention on God Himself that becomes, in time, the soul’s natural inward gravity.
This is what andrew murray waiting on god will, slowly, walk you into. Not in a week. Not by intensity. By the daily small return to the chair, on the days you feel it and on the days you do not, until the posture has settled into you the way posture settles into a body that has practised it long enough to no longer have to think about it.
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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.
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The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
Stilling Waves is, in the coming years, planning a careful reprint of Murray’s Waiting on God in a typeset edition built for the contemplative reader. The journal above is the daily companion. The book itself, in due course, will be the slow chair-time partner alongside it.
