"The Higher Life" by Andrew Murray

Sanctification part 7

Continuing in our sanctification series, we now turn to “the Higher Life” perspective. This does not come from the book Five Views on Sanctification but rather, Andrew Murray’s book on Absolute Surrender. Murray mentions the higher life and Keswick at least several times in the book and seems to speak positively about these terms. According to Wikipedia, they say he was a leader in Keswick, “Inner Life,” and “Higher Life” teachings. In the last article, we covered Keswick and responded to some of the criticisms about it. But here, this article will be a review of Murray’s book and some of his theological positions and practical solutions.

The contents of the book are:

Ch. 1: Be Filled with the Holy Spirit
Ch. 2: Changed by the Spirit of God
Ch. 3: From Carnal to Spiritual
Ch. 4: Conviction and Confession
Ch. 5: Separated unto the Holy Spirit
Ch. 6: Peter’s Repentance
Ch. 7: Absolute Surrender
Ch. 8: Christ Our Life
Ch. 9: The Fruit of the Spirit is Love
Ch. 10: We Cannot. God Can
Ch. 11: Continue in the Spirit
Ch. 12: Kept
Ch. 13: The Vine and the Branches

Andrew Murray was both a teacher and a preacher and so there are many Bible verses throughout his book. Murray’s teachings are consistent with the Keswick method yet may have some nuances.

The biggest difference from the last article is that Murray speaks of the baptism of fire in the Holy Spirit which brings about love and power (89). So, this could be understood as the second blessing. However, Murray didn’t believe that this was any kind of “quick-fix” or shortcut to spiritual maturity. He mentions the example of the Corinthians and how it is possible to operate in the gifts of the Spirit yet without the graces of the Spirit and that “the carnal state can coexist with great spiritual gifts” (28). He mentions how the Corinthians were in a prolonged state of infancy still drinking the spiritual milk. They were in a carnal state, “As Paul said, for a little child, a three-month-old spiritual baby, to be carnal and not to know what sin is or have victory over it is not worrisome. But when a man continues, year after year, in the same condition of always being conquered by sin, then something is radically wrong” (26).

According to 1 Corinthians 3 and Hebrews 5, he advocates that “there are two stages of Christian experience. Some Christians are carnal and some are spiritual” (23). Characteristics of a baby is that “a baby cannot help itself, and a baby cannot help others […] Someone must always care for the baby. You cannot leave the baby alone” (25). “The second mark of a carnal state is that sin and failure are in control. Sin has the upper hand” (26; cf. 1 Cor 3:3-4). “The word carnal is a form of the Latin word for flesh, and all unlovingness is nothing but the fruit or work of the flesh. The flesh is selfish and proud and unloving; therefore, every sin against love is proof that the person is carnal. You say, ‘I have tried to conquer it, but I cannot.’ That is what I want to impress upon you. Do not try to bear spiritual fruit while you are in the carnal state. You must have the Holy Spirit in order to love, and then the carnal will be conquered. God will give you His Spirit to help you walk in love” (27). Murray says that the spiritual state cannot be forced into from the carnal state by writing down resolutions or by simply making efforts to pray more or to do more. A transformation and empowerment from God must take place.

From my understanding of Andrew Murray, “the higher life” is just the spiritual life, and it is something that “the majority of Christians are not living up to their privileges” (105). It is a life of sanctifying faith, surrender to God, dependance upon God, abiding in Jesus who is the Vine, living continually in the filling and power of the Holy Spirit, and it is the death of the “self-life.” The higher life is Jesus’ call to discipleship and to follow after Him. He says:

To prevent wrong impressions of what it means to be filled with the Spirit, let me just say that it does not mean a state of high excitement, a state of absolute perfection, or a state in which there will be no growth. No. Being filled with the Spirit is simply this: having my whole nature yielded to His power. When the whole soul is yielded to the Holy Spirit, God Himself will fill it (2).

Murray encourages us to have God search our own hearts (Ps 139:23) and for Him to show us what is holding us back from being filled with the Spirit (3). In addition to this, he mentions how the disciples were trained by Jesus and were prepared in this way to receive the baptism of the Spirit. They left everything to follow Jesus (Mt 19:27). He says:

This is the first step to being filled with the Holy Spirit. We must forsake all to follow Christ. I am not speaking about forsaking sin, though you ought to do that when you are converted. Forsaking all is something that has far wider meaning. Man Christians think of Jesus as someone who can save them and help them, but they practically deny Him as Master. They think they have a right to have their own will in a thousand things. They speak however they like, do whatever they want to do, and use their property and possession however they choose. They are please with themselves and their lives, and they never stop to consider that they might not have forsaken all for Jesus. They are their own masters, and they have never dreamed of saying, “Jesus, I forsake all to follow You.” Yet this is the demand of Christ (Lk 14:26, 33). Jesus has such infinite riches and glory that He deserves it, and He is such a heavenly, spiritual, divine gift that unless we give up everything, our hearts cannot be filled with Him (5).

Murray says that “If you want to be filled with the Spirit and the risen life of glory, you must first die to self” (9). By self, he really means: self-will, self-trust, self-effort, self-perfection, self-focus, and all the self-life and whatever other selfs you can add to that list. D.L. Moody has said that oftentimes the reason why God can’t fill us is because we are too full of ourselves. By implication, all of this means that all those who are living the carnal life, the self-life, are not filled with the Spirit. Ephesians 5:18 says, “And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit.” Is it possible to be drunk with alcohol and be filled with the Spirit at the same time? What about watching porn and being filled with the Spirit at the same time? Or how about being angry while you’re driving and being filled with the Spirit at the same time? Or living with bitterness, unforgiveness, envy, jealousy, greed, etc.? Are they not mutually exclusive? That is not living by the filling of the Spirit or the graces of the Spirit but rather, by the flesh and by sin. But those sins are more like symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself.

As Murray has repeated multiple times in his book, the failure “to forsake all” is the problem, but by this, the emphasis is not about sin. It’s about forsaking the life controlled by self by yielding to a life under the control and submission to the Spirit. Yielding to God in faith, reliance, prayer, patience, and submission is how the life of God is allowed to come flowing through our entire being. We must come to the end of ourselves and die to any thought of our own strength so that we can be filled with God’s strength.

The strength of this consecration isn’t in the consecration itself, “it is not a surrender by the strength of our will” (37, 116). But the strength is in God who takes your “yes” to Him and works the pruning process in us so that we will be able to bear fruit, true fruit. But you must allow the process to strip you of the self-life to be filled from the Vine of God’s life. You must offer yourself to Him and say “I must be filled” because God commands it and I can’t live without it the way that I need to live. Then claim the promise for yourself. Believe that it is truly possible to be filled and say, “I may be filled,” and God can help you empty you of yourself. Then determine that you must have it like the pearl of great price, to do whatever you must to get it, saying “I must be filled.” Then at the very last, say, “I will be filled,” believing that God truly wants to give it to you and He is a good God who will not disappoint. Therefore, believe you will have it. The spiritual life is God’s provision for you to walk in (22). The faith element is essential here because it is a denial of the self-life and the means to God’s provision. Murray says, “The first thing needed is that a person must have some sight of the spiritual life and some faith in it. In reality, our hearts are so full of unbelief without our knowing it that we do not really believe we can become spiritual people today” (31). But “it is also necessary for a person to be convicted of his carnality,” because when he is, he can come to God for help and renounce his own strength to accomplish the change (33).

In some ways, coming into maturity is a process but at other times, it can happen instantly:

Another thing to know and believe is that we can pass from the carnal to the spiritual condition in one moment of time (in one step). People want to grow out of the carnal and into the spiritual, but they never can. They seek more preaching and teaching, in order, they think, to grow out of the carnal and into the spiritual. […] Let me say here that a man does not become a man of spiritual maturity immediately. [Also], the spiritual man has not reached final perfection. There is abundant room for growth…
(34-35)

From here, we can tell that Murray didn’t believe in perfectionism. He also believes that for the regular spiritual baby, coming into maturity is a process but for the spiritual baby who is stuck there from some kind of disease or problem, that coming into maturity can be a decisive act of faith and surrender (37)

Believe that it is possible. Decide for yourself to have faith. Do not believe the false and cowardly report like the spies who went to seek out the land God had promised to them but they came back in fear and unbelief and caused Israel to not enter into the promised land. And so, they continued to wander around in the wilderness for the rest of their lives in that generation (Num 13-14). Believe promises like Romans 8:2 and Luke 11:13 that “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” and “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (38)

But unless we think just asking for power is enough, Murray cautions:

Do not ask God only for power. Many Christians have their own plan of working, but God must send the power. A man works in his own will, and he expects God to give the grace. That is one reason God often gives so little grace and so little success. We make our own plans, say a quick prayer, and think that we are doing God’s will His way. Instead, let us take our place before God and seek His will (41-42; cf. Acts 13). […] Why isn’t there more blessing? There can only be one answer. We have not honored the Holy Spirit as we should have done (49). […] I hardly know a more solemn warning in God’s Word than we find in Galatians 3:3, where Paul asked, Having begun by the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? Do you understand what that means? A terrible danger in Christian work, just as in a Christian life that is begun with much prayer and in the Holy Spirit, is that it may be gradually diverted to the flesh; and the Word comes, Having begun by the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? (48)

But we need more than willingness, obedience, surrender, or faith to receive the spiritual life of God’s power. We see that Peter had much willingness. He said that he was willing to die for Christ (Mt 26:35). He was a man of surrender, leaving everything to follow Jesus (Mt 19:27). He had obeyed Jesus when He was told to cast his nets into the deep water (Lk 5:4-5). And he had the faith to walk on water when Jesus told him to come (Mt 14:28-29). He also had great insight to recognize Jesus as the Son of God (Mt 16:15-17). But yet, there was so much lacking in him! (52). He trusted his own wisdom against Jesus’ plan to die for the world (Mt 16:22-23). He sought to be honored above the other disciples and was full of self-confidence. And so, the self had to be utterly denied. He had to come to the end of himself. He found what was lacking in him when he denied his Lord three times. Yet the depth of his humiliation was the turning point of his change to renounce the self-life. Then his change was revealed when he preached on the day of Pentecost and thousands were led to Christ that day and he went on to write first and second Peter and was foundational for the church (53-55).

There are two main lessons that we can learn from Peter. The first is that is it possible to be an earnest, godly, devoted, and successful worker while the power of the flesh is still strong (56). The second is that it is the work of Jesus to reveal the power of self in us (58). Murray says:

There may be children of God, servants of God—they may be pastors or missionaries, they may be leaders of large ministries, they may be Sunday school teachers or helpers, they may be people of power and position and talent, and they may simply be humble workers working earnestly for God—in whom the self-life prevails. […] What a great pity it would be if we lived our entire Christian life in the flesh, too proud to realize it and too busy to honestly and fervently seek God (57)

So then, the question we are left with is this: “are you willing to surrender yourselves absolutely into His hands?” “The condition of God’s blessing is absolute surrender of all into His hands” (59-60). Murray encourages to offer a prayer of surrender to God and at that moment, even though you may not feel anything, God will take possession of you and will do His work. God will accept your surrender and “then God holds Himself bound to care for it and to keep it. Will you believe that?” (64-65). The reason for not experiencing the radiance of God’s light to change us is because we haven’t trusted God for it, and have not surrendered ourselves completely to God in that trust. The surrender is our work but the change is God’s work but both are necessary (66). It is also necessary that we come out of the evils of this world for God to fill us because “God can fill an empty vessel, but He cannot fill one that has the love of the world inside” (68; cf. 2 Cor 6:17).

Though Murray mentioned before that the power of the Christ-life that comes from leaving the self-life will sometimes be a decisive act of faith, he also reiterates how this can also be a process:

But we believe that through faith on our part He does accept it, although the experience and the power of that absolute surrender do not come at once, and that it is our responsibility to hold firm our attitude before God until the experience and power come. Let me add that if this absolute surrender is to be maintained and lived out, it must be by having Christ come into our lives in new power. […] Christ must truly be our life (71; Col 3:4).

Sometimes there are hinderances to this Christ-life and surrender to God and filling of the Spirit:

One of the main reasons God does not bless is the lack of love. When the body is divided, there cannot be strength. […] If a drinking glass that ought to be one whole piece is cracked into many pieces, it cannot be filled. You can take a piece of broken glass and dip out a little water into that, but if you want the glass to be full, the glass must be whole. That is literally true of Christ’s church… (81) Nothing but love can expel and conquer our selfishness. Self is the great curse… (84).

Far from a life of surrender to God being about laziness or doing nothing, Andrew Murray says that we should love one another and that love should be on our minds so much that we die to our selfishness. He warns “Do not wait upon God only for yourselves, or the power to do so will soon be lost. Give yourselves up to the ministry and the love of intercession, and pray more for God’s people… (92) They must love each other intensely, or the Spirit of God cannot do His work (87).

Another reason why we don’t receive the blessing is because we are too focused on ourselves and wanting to feel something from God. Our self-absorption reveals to us that the self-life still needs to die:

How can I learn to love? I cannot, until the Spirit of God fills my heart with God’s love, and I long for God’s love in a very different sense from which I have sought it so selfishly, as a comfort and a joy and a happiness and a pleasure to myself. I cannot learn to love until I learn that God is love and to claim it and receive it as an indwelling power for self-sacrifice. I cannot learn to love until I see that my glory and my blessedness is to be like God and like Christ in giving up everything in myself for my fellow men (85).

If the Spirit of God is love, then why should we expect God to fill us if we would seek to only use that filling for ourselves? If the main reason we want God’s filling is for ourselves, then we have completely missed all the teachings and examples of Jesus that have shown us selfless love and sacrifice. We need to get out of ourselves and into serving one another. Should we expect God to fill us if we are presently grieving His Spirit by our lack of love? (87).

The spiritual life is not supposed to be lived in our own strength but how many Christians live that way? They believed that when they were first converted to Christ, salvation was a work of God in their hearts that changed them but now they think it’s their turn to start changing themselves. But this cannot be because such a change to live as a disciple of Jesus and a life of sacrifice, is not within our own power to do. Peter tried it at first but failed miserably. It was also impossible for the rich young ruler (Lk 18:22-27). Yet those things which are impossible for man, are possible with God (v. 27; Mt 19:26). We must admit the impossibility of our power to receive Christ’s power. But also, we must believe that a higher victory is possible, that what Christ commanded us, we are also able to do if we do it by His strength. Just like when people are converted to Christ, they come to the end of themselves, so also, we must come to the end of ourselves in our sanctification, realizing, we are “utterly helpless.” But unfortunately, many people have only learned half the lesson: “It is impossible with men, so they give up in helpless despair and live wretched Christian lives without joy or strength or victory. Why? Because they do not humble themselves to learn that other lesson: with God all things are possible” […] The cause of weakness of your Christian life is that you want to partly work it out yourself, and you want to partly let God help you. That cannot be. You must come to be utterly helpless and let God work, and God will work gloriously. We need this if we are indeed to be workers for God” (97, 99).

Yet many young converts don’t understand this yet, and so they run the race and fight the battle, even thinking that God will help them and are surprised when they fail and sin gets the better of them. This person “is disappointed, but he thinks he was not watchful and careful enough and did not make his resolutions strong enough. Again he makes promises to God. Again he prays, and yet he fails. […] Later, he comes to another state of mind. He begins to see that such a life is impossible, but he does not accept it. Multitudes of Christians have come to this point. They say they cannot do it and then think God never expected them to do what they cannot do. If you tell them that God does expect it, they do not understand. Perhaps they are living a life of failure and sin instead of rest and victory. They began to see that they cannot succeed, that it is impossible; yet they do not fully understand it. So, under the impression that they cannot succeed in holiness, they give way to thoughts of despair. They will try their best, but they never really expect to make much progress” (94-95).

Then God leads His children on to “a third stage.” They realize the impossibility to live victoriously but tell themselves they must do it anyway and so they rise up in more faith and perseverance to be diligent about it because God tells them that they should and so they pursue it despite their failures. They are beginning to be enlightened by the Christ-life. They realize the struggle of sin and the law, trying to please God but cannot until they come to the end of themselves and renounce all strength in themselves to do it as we read in Romans 7 and then comes the victory and their attitude and belief come more into alignment with Philippians 2:13 that “it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” Murray says:

Note the contrast. In Romans 7, the regenerate person says, “I want to do good, but I am not able to.” But in Philippians 2, you have a person who has been led on further, one who understand that when God has worked the renewed will, God will give the power to accomplish what that will desires. Let us receive this as the first great lesson in the spiritual life. Let us pray, “It is impossible for me, my God; let there be an end of the flesh and all its power, an end of self, and let it be my glory to be helpless” (94-96).

Young Christians have often come up to Murray, puzzled as to why they still fail in all their sincerity and Murray always answered, “My dear friend, you are trying to do in your own strength what Christ alone can do in you.” But if they told him, “I am sure that I knew Christ alone could do it; I was not trusting in myself,” Murray would always reply, “You were trusting in yourself or you could not have failed. If you had trusted Christ, He could not fail.” Then he says, “This perfecting in the flesh what was begun in the Spirit runs far deeper through us than we know. Let us ask God to clearly show us that it is only when we are brought to utter shame and emptiness that we will be prepared to receive the blessing that comes from on high” (114-115).

Then he asks, “Can there be any reason why the keeping of God should not be continuous and unbroken? […] If I were to ask you if you think God is able to keep you one entire day from actual transgression, some of you would answer that not only is He able to do it, but He has done it. There have been days in which He has kept my heart in His holy presence, and though I have always had a sinful nature within me, He has kept me from conscious, actual transgression. Now, if He can do that for an hour or a day, why not for two days? Let’s make God’s omnipotence as revealed in His Word the measure of our expectations. […] This keeping is to be continuous” (123-124).

Then Murray defines what faith is: “utter weakness and helplessness before God,” “trust,” “hope in God alone,” and “rest” (125-127), “Do you want to enter what people call ‘the higher life’? Then go a step down lower. […] The great hinderance to trust is self-effort. As long as I have my own wisdom and thoughts and strength, I cannot fully trust God. […] As long as we are something, God cannot be everything, and His omnipotence cannot do its full work. […] When faith in its struggling gets to the end of itself and throws itself upon God and rests on Him, then joy and victory arrive. […] Let these be the two characteristics of our souls every day—deep helplessness and simple, childlike rest” (126-128).

Then Murray tells us that we cannot separate God from His Word and so we need to have fellowship with God to develop our trust for God. It is not enough to simply take God’s Word and believe a Bible passage. We must spend time in fellowship with God to develop this life of godliness. We don’t simply trust the Word or the omnipotence of God alone as if they were separate from God but we come to trust God Himself. Because of this, faith is not about the power of faith or trying to stir up or arouse faith from within. Instead, we need to leave our hearts and look to Christ (128-129).

In John 15:4-5 Jesus says, “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” Murray says that the branch “has no responsibility except simply to receive sap and nourishment from the root and stem. If we only by the Holy Spirit understood our relationship to Jesus Christ, our work would be changed into the brightest and most heavenly thing upon earth. Instead of soul-weariness or exhaustion, our work would be like a new experience, linking us to Jesus as nothing else can. When Christian workers feel burned-out and too busy, it may be that they have not yet learned to abide in the vine. […] It is a sad thought that the bearing of fruit should separate the branch from the vine! That must be because we have looked upon our work as something other than the branch bearing fruit” (131-132).

Absolute dependance upon God is a must. If we have something to offer God, then we are not dependent but when we realize we have nothing to offer and that all life and strength is in Him, then we can be something. And when we learn to live that life of dependance, “it is a life of deep restfulness” (136). But someone might think, “Won’t that make me lazy?” and Murray says, “I tell you it will not. No one who learns to rest upon the living Christ can become lazy, for the closer your contact with Christ, the more of the Spirit of His zeal and love will be impressed upon you and in you. You cannot rightfully work fully for Christ Jesus unless you work in entire dependance upon Him and with deep restfulness in Him. A man sometimes tries and tries to be dependent upon Christ, but he worries himself about this absolute dependence; he tries and tries and he cannot get it. Let him instead sink into entire restfulness every day” (137).

It is necessary to abide in the Vine through “close fellowship with Christ in secret prayer” and to “take plenty of time for communion with God” “to maintain the link of connection” or else “He cannot give you that blessing of His unbroken fellowship” (142-143). “The life of the branch is a life of absolute surrender” and “the vine can give me as much or as little sap as it chooses. Here I am at its disposal, and the vine can do with me what it likes” (143-144).

Just as Jesus gave Himself to God and lived entirely for Him, so also should we but abiding in Him is one of the greatest blessings. “Christ Jesus came to breathe His own Spirit into us, to make us find our highest happiness in living entirely for God, just as He did” (144). Murray says that he does not speak so much about the giving up of sins. However, he is “afraid that unconsciously many hearts compromise with the idea that they cannot be without sin, that they must sin a little every day, and that they cannot help it. Oh, that people would actually cry out to God, ‘Lord, keep me from sin!’ Give yourself utterly to Jesus, and ask Him to do His utmost for you in keeping you from sin” (146).

My response:

And there you have it, a whole book of 150 pages summed up in under 10 pages. Of course, there are many things I didn’t include. I couldn’t quote everything that was good so I recommend you read it for yourself if you have the time. There are many more applications, examples, and details that he goes over in the book. But this article is the raw bones and meat of it.

As you can see, restfulness is about dependence on God and abiding in the Vine who is Jesus. To get there, we have to come to the end of the self-life so that we can draw the nutrients from the vine of God’s life to produce genuine fruit of good works that are pleasing to God. This is about faith, surrender, and fellowship with God. The problem though is that we often get too busy doing our own thing and then afterwards we ask God to bless it. This is how we produce fake fruit—works of the flesh, which are not pleasing to God. But if we want to produce genuine fruit, God must do it through us. But it won’t just happen automatically because we’re Christians. We have to offer ourselves to God in surrender and live a life of daily trusting Him. The greatest hinderance is unbelief. We might think it’s impossible to attain or that it’s just natural and expected to sin a little every single day, hour, or minute. But that mindset keeps people in unbelief. Our faith must rise above the status quo to attain this higher life, which is just our natural privileges in Christ. But we must come into agreement that anything is possible to him who believes and we have to continue that mindset even if we don’t see or feel anything right away but trust that God is doing a work in us. We must wait for it and pursue to strengthen our faith in all the truth of God in our relationship with Him and by believing His good character daily.

Having learned about both the Keswick method and Higher Life teachings from both J. Robertson McQuilkin and Andrew Murray, we come to the conclusion that the accusations of their critics simply do not have substance. I agree with almost everything Andrew Murray has said. We must remember that the spiritual kingdom of God is an upside-down kingdom. The way up is the way down. To come to great power, fervency, and diligent labor, we must first learn to trust, rest in God, and abandon all self-reliance. Andrew Murray’s teachings offered to us the balance between resting and working, believing and doing, conviction over our helpless state and faith in God, forsaking all and God taking hold of us, a decisive act of faith and the process of maturing. Though he mentioned the baptism of fire, he also mentioned that sometimes we may not feel God working but He can bring us into that maturity nonetheless. He distinguished between the Spirit’s giftings and the Spirit’s graces and it’s possible to have one and not the other, like the Corinthians. It’s possible for a Christian to be both fervent and carnal. But this carnality and immaturity is often not because of the sin itself but it is a disease of self-reliance and not learning how to abide in the vine. It’s this place where you’re trying to produce good works through the power of the flesh rather than through the power of the Spirit through faith and abiding.

Though Murray mentions these things, I do feel that there is a missing element or emphasis in this book and that is to break down every lie of the devil and every doubt against the love and goodness of God for both yourself and how you view God’s interaction for other people. You must believe that He is completely and wholly good because He is love and He is light and there is not an ounce of darkness in Him. Pursuing such faith in God to see Him as He truly is—can bring that moment of decisive faith to cleanse and purify the heart of its evil to be free from the power of sin. This is generally where people begin when they are converted to Christ but it is also where they must stay and reside. But once they get out of that spiritual way of living and abiding in Jesus to be in a state of carnality and self-effort, they can easily forget how to get back in and how exactly the spiritual life operates. I think that is why they can get stuck. It used to be natural to them and they were just doing it without thinking but then they got out because of the busyness of life, being sucked into pietism, the way of self-improvement, wrong theology, the hardships and trials of life, and the sins that have beset them. But because the vitality of spiritual life has now become unnatural to them, they must now think how to get back into it again. And so they think, if only I get rid of this sin or that sin, then my relationship with God will flourish. And so they make even more diligent efforts in their own strength to find solutions and to fix their sin and brokenness so that all can be made right again. They even use Christian or biblical methods to do it and so they convince themselves that they’re doing it in God’s strength and God’s way. But they are mistaken. They’ve actually propelled themselves deeper into a life of self-effort whereas they really need to renounce all that and pursue faith to be their strength and then they will relearn how to walk in the spiritual life again. Sin was merely a symptom of their unbelief the whole time. Find me someone who is struggling with sin and I will show you someone who is struggling with faith. If their faith didn’t have a problem, then they wouldn’t have a problem with sin either. But because their faith is weak, the darkness hasn’t been expelled from their hearts. If God’s love and light truly came into our hearts through the window of faith, then the darkness would leave. Because where can darkness be where the light of God is?

Another thing to understand is, relying on God is not simply “doing” reliance on God through such means of grace as prayer, praise, Bible reading, and going to church. Those things can help curb the flesh but they won’t in and of themselves bring us into a state of resting in God. We can’t “do” reliance. Reliance isn’t something we “do.” It is something we “receive.” The corruption of this disease goes so deep that even prayer can be a form of self-effort and self-reliance. That’s not to say that we should stop doing it. But we have to stop thinking of these things as our doing of them that makes the difference and begin thinking of them as God doing them through us as making the difference. As we are the branches, we cannot do, we can only receive. But how much do we deceive ourselves into thinking that we’re relying on God just because we read our Bibles and prayed at the beginning of the day? Have you conceived it as even being possible that God could bring you into a state of rest and relying in Him that if you don’t do any of these means of grace, He will still support you and the flesh will not have power over you? It’s possible to enter into that kind of rest.

But as Andrew Murray has mentioned, it’s more of a state of the heart rather than the thinking of the mind. You can’t force your will and your mind into this rest. It comes from a state of the heart. It is a heart that has been cleansed through a deeper faith in God’s love and goodness that brings about this power; and that one time cleansing has lasting results. How long it lasts? I’m not sure. But it lasts longer than how frequently you wash your car or go shopping or need to change the oil in your car. But besides being this state of change, this spiritual rest is also an attitude of the heart where you truly believe and are aware of this fact that you are simply holding on to God and He is holding on to you. In this place of rest, you’re not thinking “I must do this,” or “I must do that” to stay hanging on to God and to rest in Him. No. That won’t work. That’s an attitude of anxiety and striving. Worrying like that produces the opposite effect and gives more power to the flesh to make use of sin. You could be even reading your Bible like that and the power of sin may rise up within you and all your spiritual disciplines will fail you. But this attitude of striving in self-effort must die. Instead, this rest is simply being there in faith where you have all confidence in God and no confidence in your own power and strength. Even this phrase, “hanging on” might falsely imply the thought that we’re using muscles to hold on. But if God is holding on to you, that is not the case. He’s the one exerting all the strength. All you do, is to be conscious of that and will to be there to abide in Him. Using the imagination can help. But what is first needed is a decisive moment of faith or gradual increases in faith that do the cleansing work. And your whole approach to reading the Bible must change. Stop reading the Bible as reading about yourself and what you must do and what the next step in your life is going to be and how you can see yourself. Stop reading about you in the Bible and start reading about God. It’s a book about Him. It’s not a book about you. Worship and see God for who He truly His in all His love, light, and splendor, and then your heart will begin to change. Take a break from all the pastoral epistles and get back into Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and some of the Old Testament. Doing certainly has its place and it is biblical. But it is first necessary to re-learn how to rest in faith in God again. Then, you’ll actually be able to do the things God commands. Obeying Him is only truly possible when we abide in Him.

Here are some other related articles to check out:

Piety or Pietism?

Romans 7 is Not What You Think

How to Walk by Faith