Category Archives: Andrew Murray

Andrew Murray

Obedience in the Christian Life

It is nothing less than the surrender to such a life of simple and entire obedience that is implied in becoming a Christian. There are, alas! too many Christians who, from the want either of proper instruction, or of proper attention to the teaching of God’s word, have never realized the place of supreme importance that obedience takes in the Christian life. They know not that Christ, and redemption, and faith all lead to it, because through it alone is the way to the fellowship of the Love, and the Likeness, and the Glory of God. We have all, possibly, suffered from it ourselves: in our prayers and efforts after the perfect peace and the rest of faith, after the abiding joy and the increasing power of the Christian life, there has been a secret something hindering the blessing, or causing the speedy loss of what had been apprehended. A wrong impression as to the absolute necessity of obedience was probably the cause. It cannot too earnestly be insisted on that the freeness and mighty power of grace has this for its object from our conversion onwards, the restoring us to the active obedience and harmony with God’s will from which we had fallen through the first sin in Paradise. Obedience leads to God and His Holiness. It is in obedience that the will is moulded, and the character fashioned, and an inner man built up which God can clothe and adorn with the beauty of holiness.

Such obedience is the pathway of holiness. Its every act is a link to the living God, a surrender of the being for God’s will, for God Himself to take possession. In the process of assimilation, slow but sure, by which the will of God, as the meat of our souls, is taken up into our inmost being, our spiritual nature is strengthened, is spiritualized, growing up into an holy temple in which God can reveal Himself and take up His abode.

1. ‘He became obedient unto death.’ ‘Though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.’ ‘I come to do Thy will.’ ‘In which will we are sanctified.’ Christ’s example teaches us that obedience is the only path to the Holiness or the glory of God. Be this your consecration: a surrender in everything to seek and do the will of God.

from Holy in Christ by Andrew Murray

Faith Welcomes God into our Life

Faith is that meekness of soul which waits in stillness to hear, to understand, to accept what God says; to receive, to retain, to possess what God gives or works. By faith we allow, we welcome God Himself, the Living Person, to enter in to make His abode with us, to become our very life. However well we think we know it, we always have to learn the truth afresh, for a deeper and fuller application of it, that in the Christian life faith is the first thing, the one thing that pleases God, and brings blessing to us. And because Holiness is God’s highest glory, and the highest blessing He has for us, it is especially in the life of holiness that we need to live by faith alone.

from Holy in Christ by Andrew Murray

 

Called according to His Purpose

THE call of God is the manifestation in time of the purpose of eternity; ‘Whom He predestined, them He also called.’ Believers are ‘the called according to His purpose.’ In His call He reveals to us what His thoughts and His will concerning us are, and what the life to which He invites us. In His call He makes clear to us what the hope of our calling is; as we spiritually apprehend and enter into this, our life on earth will be the reflection of His purpose in eternity.

1. Let me press it upon every reader of this little book, that if it is to help him in the pursuit of Holiness, he must begin with God Himself. You must go to Him who calls you. It is only in the personal revelation of God to you, as He speaks, I am holy, that the command, Be ye holy, can have life or power.

from Holy in Christ by Andrew Murray

How to Learn to Pray like Moses

Think of the place God had in Moses’ life, as the God who had sent him, the God to whom he was totally devoted, the God who had promised to be with him, and who would and did always help him when he prayed.

Now for the practical application:  How to learn to pray like Moses?  We cannot secure this grace by an act of the will.  Out first lesson must be the sense of impotence.  Then grace will work it in us, slowly and surely, if we give ourselves into its training.  But though the training will be gradual, there is one thing that can be done at once. We can at once decide to give ourselves to this life and take up the right position.  Do this now.  Take the decision, to LIVE ENTIRELY TO BE A CHANNEL FOR GOD’S BLESSING TO FLOW THROUGH YOU TO THE WORLD.  TAKE THE STEP.  If need be, take ten minutes for deliberate thought.  Accept the Divine appointment, and take up some object of intercession.

Take time, say a week, and get firm hold on the elementary truths Moses’ example teaches.  As a music teacher insists upon practicing the scales—only practice makes perfect.  Set yourself to learn thoroughly and to apply the needed first lessons.  God seeks men through whom He can bless the world.  Say definitely, Here am I.  I will give my life to this.  Cultivate large faith in the simple truth:  God hears prayer; God will do what I ask.

Give yourself wholly to men as to God, and set your eyes open to a sense of the need of a perishing world.  Take your position in Christ, and in the power which His Name, and Life and Spirit give you, and go on practicing definite intercession.

These are quotes from The Inner Chamber by Andrew Murray.

Moses the Man of Prayer

Before Moses was the patriarchal dispensation with the family life, and the power the fathers had, marking it.  Moses is the first man appointed to be a teacher and leader of men.  In him we find wonderful illustrations of the place and power of intercession in the servant of God.

Moses’ Prayers—In Egypt, from his first call, Moses prayed.  He asked God what he was to say to the people, 3:11-13.   He told Him all his weakness, and besought Him to be relieved of his mission, 4:1-13.   When the people reproached him that their burdens were increased, he went and told God, 5:22, and he made known to Him all his fears, 6:12.  This was his first training.  Out of this was born his power in prayer when, time after time, Pharaoh asked him to entreat the Lord for him, and deliverance came at Moses’ request (8:8-9, 12,

28-31; 9:28-29, 33; 10:17-18).  Study these passages until you come under the full impression of how real a factor in Moses’ work and God’s redemption prayer was.

At the Red Sea, Moses cried to God with the people and the answer came (14:15).  In the wilderness when the people thirsted, and when Amalek attacked them, it was also prayer that brought deliverance (17:4, 11).

At Sinai, when Israel made the Golden Calf, it was prayer that averted the threatened destruction, 32:11, and 14.  It was renewed prayer that gained them restoration, 32:31.  It was more prayer that secured God’s presence to go with them (33:17), and once again it was prayer that brought the revelation of God’s glory (33:19).  And when that had been given it was fresh prayer that received the renewal of the covenant, 34:9-10.

In Deuteronomy we have a wonderful summary of all this, 9:18-20, 26.  We see with what intensity he prayed, and how in one case it was for forty days and forty nights that he fell on his face before the Lord, 9:25; 10:10.

In Numbers we read of Moses’ prayer quenching the fire of the Lord, 11:2, and obtaining the supply of meat, 11:2, 11, of prayer healing Miriam, 12:13; of prayer again saving the nation when they refused to go into the land, 14:17-20.   Prayer brought down judgment on Korah, 16:15, and when God would consume the whole congregation, prayer made atonement, 46.   Prayer brought water out of the rock, 22:6, and in answer to prayer the brazen serpent was given, 21:7.  To prayer God’s will was made known in the case of difficulty, 27:5, and Joshua given as Moses’ successor, 16.

Study all this until your whole heart is filled with the thought of the part prayer must play, may play, in the life of the man who would be God’s servant to his fellowmen.

As we study, the parts will unite into a living whole and Moses will be to us a living model for our prayer life.  We shall learn what is needed to be an intercessor. The lessons that will come to us will be such as these:

I see Moses was a man given up to God, zealous, yea, zealous for God, for His honour and will.

These are quotes from The Inner Chamber by Andrew Murray.

Moses was a Man Given up to God

I see Moses was a man given up to God, zealous, yea, zealous for God, for His honour and will.  A man, too, absolutely given up to his people, ready to sacrifice himself, if they may be saved.

(The more one is given to God, the more prayers will be effective – Drew)

A man conscious of a Divine calling to act as mediator, to be the link, the channel of communication and blessing, between a God in heaven and men on earth.  A life so entirely possessed by this mediatorial consciousness that nothing can be more simple and natural than to expect that God will hear.

I see here God in answer to the prayers of one man saves and blesses those He has entrusted to him, and does what He would not do without it.  I see how the whole government of God has taken up prayer into its plan as one of its constituent parts.  I see how heaven is filled with the life and power and blessing earth needs, and how the prayer of earth is the power to bring that blessing down.

I see above all how prayer is an index of the spiritual life, and how prayer depends upon my relation to God, and the consciousness of being His representative.  He entrusts His work to me, and the more simple and entire my devotion to His interests are, the more natural and certain becomes the assurance that He hears me.

Think of the place God had in Moses’ life, as the God who had sent him, the God to whom he was totally devoted, the God who had promised to be with him, and who would and did always help him when he prayed.

These are quotes from The Inner Chamber by Andrew Murray.

Intercession is a Work of Faith

Intercession is preeminently a work of faith. Not the faith that tries only to believe the prayer will be heard, but the faith that is at home amid heavenly realities—a  faith that does not trouble about one’s own nothingness and feebleness, because it is living in Christ.  A faith that does not make its hope depend upon its feelings, but upon the faithfulness of the Three–One God, in what each person has undertaken to do in prayer.  A faith that has overcome the world, and sacrifices the visible to be wholly free for the spiritual, heavenly and eternal to take possession of it.  A faith that knows that it is heard and receives what it asks, and therefore quietly and deliberately perseveres in its application till the answer comes.  The true intercessor must be a man of faith.

The intercessor must be a MESSENGER—one who holds himself ready, who earnestly offers himself personally to receive the answer and to dispense it.  Praying and working go together.  Think of Moses—his boldness in pleading with God for the people was no greater than his pleading with the people for God.  We see the same in Elijah—the urgency of his prayer in secret is equaled by his jealousy for God in public, as he witnessed against the sin of the nation.  Let intercession always be accomplished, not so much by more diligent work, as by the meek and humble waiting on God to receive His grace and spirit, and to know more definitely what and how He would have us work.  It is one thing,  a great thing, to begin to take up the work of intercession—the drawing down to earth of the blessings which heaven has for every need.  It is a greater thing as an intercessor personally to receive that blessing, and go out from God’s face, knowing that we have secured something that we can impart.  May God make us all whole-hearted, believing, blessing-bearing intercessors.

But there is so much conscious sinfulness and defect in our prayer? True, but have you not learned what it is to pray IN THE NAME OF CHRIST?  Does the name not mean the living power?  Do you know that you are in Christ and He in you—-that your whole life is hid and bound up in His, and His whole life is hid and working in you? The man who is to intercede in power must be very clear that, not in thought and reckoning only, but in the most actual, living, divine reality, Christ and he are one in the work of intercession.  He appears before God clothed with the name and the nature, the righteousness and worthiness, the image and the spirit of life of Christ.   Do not spend your chief time in prayer in reiterating your petition, but in humbly, quietly, confidently claiming your place in Christ, your perfect union with Him, your access to God in Him. It is the man who comes to God in Christ, bringing to the Father that Christ in whom He delights, as his life and his law and only trust who will have power to intercede.

These are quotes from The Inner Chamber by Andrew Murray on Moses the man of prayer.

Devotion and Obedience to God gives Power in Prayer

“Tell me wherein thy great strength lieth.”  It is the question we fain would have answered the men of old, and in later times, as intercessors for others, have had power with God, and have prevailed.  More than one, who has desired to give himself to this ministry, has wondered why he found it so difficult to rejoice in it, to persevere, and to prevail.  Let us study the lives of the leaders and heroes of the prayer world.  Maybe some of the elements of their success will be discovered to us.

The true intercessor is a man who knows that God knows of him that his heart and life are WHOLLY GIVEN UP TO GOD AND HIS GLORY.  This is the only condition on which an officer at the court of an earthly sovereign could expect to exert much influence.   Moses, Elijah, Daniel and Paul prove that it is so in the spiritual world.  Our blessed Lord is Himself the proof of it.  He did not save us by intercession, but by self-sacrifice.  His power of intercession roots in His sacrifice; it claims and receives what the sacrifice won.  As we have it so clearly put in the last words of Isaiah 53, He poured out His soul unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors, and He bare the sins of man.”  Study this in connection with the whole chapter of which it is the crown—“and made intercession for the transgressors.”  He first gave Himself up to the will of God.  There He won the power to influence and guide that will.  He gave Himself for sinners in all-consuming love, and so He won the power to intercede for them.  There is no other path for us.  It is the man who seeks to enter personally into death with Christ, and gives himself wholly for God and men, who will dare to be bold like Moses or Elijah, who will persevere like Daniel or Paul.  Whole-hearted devotion and obedience to God are the first marks of an intercessor.

These are quotes from The Inner Chamber by Andrew Murray on Moses the man of prayer.