The Secret Place of Andrew Murray

Andrew Murray was born on May 9, 1828 in Graaff Reinet in the Cape Colony, the son of a Dutch Reformed pastor whose home was a school of Scripture, catechism, and prayer. The Karoo's quiet vastness formed a backdrop to his boyhood, and the life of the church formed his habits. As a teenager he and his brother John were sent to Scotland for education and then to the Netherlands for theological training. He returned to South Africa at the close of the eighteen forties, scarcely twenty years old, already marked by disciplined devotion and an eagerness to spend and be spent for the gospel. Ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church, he began with an itinerant ministry centered in Bloemfontein, where long rides across the veld and long hours with an open Bible gave shape to a life that would feed congregations and readers for generations.

His early parish years were strenuous. He preached in town and farm, catechized children, counseled families, and rode great distances to visit the scattered flock. Yet beneath the visible labor another work was growing. He was learning to wait upon God. He read deeply in Scripture and in devotional writers who pressed the believer toward stillness before the Lord. He married Emma Rutherford in 1856, and their home became an altar of family prayer and hospitality. In the late eighteen fifties he moved to Worcester, where the Lord was preparing him for a visitation that would stamp his ministry forever.

In 1860 a revival stirred the Cape. At Worcester a prayer meeting of young people melted into confession and intercession that flowed into the congregation with holy power. Murray, who had prayed for awakening, recognized the hand of God and shepherded the movement with pastoral firmness and tenderness. From Worcester the blessing touched other towns. Meetings lengthened into the night. Believers made restitution and renewed family worship. The revival did not make him a mystic turned away from parish work. It made him a pastor whose study and schedule were ordered around the presence of God. The secret place became the furnace of his preaching and the nursery of the books that would soon appear.

In the decades that followed he served congregations in Cape Town and then in Wellington while also bearing heavy responsibilities in the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church. He encouraged mission among the peoples of southern Africa, supported new evangelistic societies, and gave himself to education. In 1874 he helped establish the Huguenot Seminary for women in Wellington, working with devoted American teachers to provide Bible grounded learning for a rising generation. His voice, often strained by overwork, failed him for a season and was graciously restored, a mercy that deepened his interest in the ministry of prayer for the sick and his pastoral teaching on the Lord as healer. He continued to preach with a gravity born in prayer and to write with a clarity that made profound truths plain to ordinary readers.

Invitations drew him beyond South Africa. He addressed gatherings in Britain and on the continent and found a ready welcome in conventions devoted to the deeper Christian life. Yet he never traded the quiet of his study for the acclaim of platforms. His mornings began with Scripture and waiting upon God. His afternoons were full of people and letters. His evenings often returned to prayer. Out of that rhythm came a stream of books that have rarely gone out of print. Abide in Christ called believers to union with the living Lord. With Christ in the School of Prayer turned the heart into a sanctuary and the Scriptures into a tutor in intercession. The Ministry of Intercession summoned the church to take its priestly place. Humility and Absolute Surrender explored the inner ground where the Spirit forms the likeness of Christ. He wrote not as a theorist but as a pastor whose inner room had become the place where doctrine ripened into life.

When age bent his shoulders his pen was still strong. He saw the fruit of the revival he had stewarded in the renewed life of congregations and in the rise of workers who loved prayer and holiness. He witnessed the growth of mission ventures he had encouraged. He watched students trained in institutions he had fostered take their places as teachers, mothers, pastors, and evangelists. On January 18, 1917 he went to be with the Lord in Wellington, closing a long pilgrimage in which public influence rested on a private altar.