Andrew Murray and the School of Abiding

In the long story of South African Christianity there is a name that crops up again and again, on the spines of small devotional books worn soft from handling. Andrew Murray. Born in 1828, he was a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, a man who rode the wide dry country on horseback to reach scattered congregations, who preached in two languages, and who outlived nearly everyone who began the journey with him. He was a churchman, a revival preacher, a tireless writer. And of all the things he gave the church, the one that has travelled furthest is a single quiet idea. Abide.

Now here is the thing you have to understand about that word, because it is easy to miss how strange it was. Murray lived a busy life. Decades of ministry, dozens of books, councils and controversies and long journeys across the veld. He knew the temptation of the restless believer better than most, because he had lived inside it. The endless striving. The sense that you must do more, pray harder, feel deeper, prove yourself to God by the sheer effort of your religion. He had felt how exhausting that road is. And so the heart of his most loved book, Abide in Christ, was not a call to try harder. It was a call to stop. To stay. To remain.

Picture the kind of soul he wrote for. A Christian who rises each morning already tired. Who measures her faith by how much she has done, and finds it always wanting. Who treats prayer like a performance, and silence like failure, and rest like laziness. To that soul Murray held out one image taken straight from the words of Jesus. The branch in the vine. A branch does not strain to produce fruit. A branch does not grip the vine with all its might, terrified it might fall off. A branch simply stays joined, and lets the life of the vine flow up into it. The fruit comes because the branch abides. That was Murray's whole gospel of the spiritual life. Not climb. Not strive. Not impress. Remain.

It sounds gentle. It was not soft. Murray meant abiding as the labour of a lifetime, the patient covenant faithfulness of staying near to Christ when nothing dramatic is happening at all. In the dryness. In the ordinary obedience of an ordinary Tuesday. He warned that the disciplines of the faith, prayer and Scripture and worship, could become tools to control God or to win the admiration of others. The cure was not to abandon them. The cure was to bring them back to their true purpose, which was simply to keep you close to the One who is your life. Abiding, he taught, was not a feeling that came over you in a tent meeting and faded by morning. It was a place you chose to live.

Murray died in 1917, near ninety years old, having served the church across most of a century. The books he left behind are slim. You could read Abide in Christ in an afternoon. Generations have, in mission stations and sickrooms and quiet kitchens, in languages he never spoke. And what he handed them was not a technique and not a thrill. It was a door back to rest. To the weary believer convinced that God's favour must be earned by exhaustion, Andrew Murray said the oldest and most freeing thing in the world. You do not have to climb to reach him. You only have to stay.