Humility

By Andrew Murray

While some books have a certain audience they apply to, Humility by Andrew Murray is relevant for all people, across all time. The minute someone thinks they have perfected their humility, they have found a new place to root their pride. And as Murray says, “The truth is this: Pride may die in you, or nothing of heaven can live in you.” Questions added give the reader the needed time to process and reflect on the immeasurable truths presented in each chapter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BH Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781433650048

Andrew Murray

ANDREW MURRAY (1828-1917) was a church leader, evangelist, and missionary statesman. As a young man, Murray wanted to be a minister, but it was a career choice rather than an act of faith. Not until he had finished his general studies and begun his theological training in the Netherlands, did he experience a conversion of heart. Sixty years of ministry in the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa, more than 200 books and tracts on Christian spirituality and ministry, extensive social work, and the founding of educational institutions were some of the outward signs of the inward grace that Murray experienced by continually casting himself on Christ. A few of his books include The True Vine, Absolute Surrender, The School of Obedience, Waiting on God, and The Prayer Life.

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Copyright © 2017 by B&H Publishing Group

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

978-1-4336-5003-1

Published by B&H Publishing Group

Nashville, Tennessee

Dewey Decimal Classification: 241.4

Subject Heading: HUMILITY \ CHRISTIAN LIFE \ DISCIPLESHIP

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version. Public domain.

Also used: English Standard Version, ESV® Permanent Text Edition® (2016). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

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Letter to the Reader

The tricky thing about humility is once you think you have it, you’ve lost it again, immediately. The pursuit of it is nearly impossible, not at all like marriage or children or a house or even joy or contentment or happiness, which you know you have when you have them. Humility is like trying to find the end of a rainbow or catch a shadow—it is almost a sort of child’s play in its elusiveness. Writing a book on humility seems like the very opposite of humility in itself. How does one remain humble while claiming to have the answers to the pursuit of it?

The answer is to say, Not I, but He, while ever pointing to the Father above. Andrew Murray has done so in this small book. With a constant, unrelenting look to the gospel of Christ and the Father of every good and perfect gift, Andrew Murray shows the path toward the pursuit of humility. He cannot guarantee the finding of it nor the keeping of it, but he can guarantee the way to look, which is to Christ.

While working on this small volume, I was convicted again and again of my own desire to self-protect, self-perform, and self-gain. In one of my favorite quotes from chapter 7, Murray says, Humility is the bloom and beauty of holiness, and this has remained a reminder to me of where true humility is born, even if it is never fully grown in us. The pursuit of holiness and the worship of the only One True Wise King who is holiness Himself, is the path toward humility. It is in worship, not vain asceticism, that humility is born. Beating ourselves up, groveling in pitiful states, clothing ourselves in a modern equivalent of sackcloth and ashes are not the means by which to become humble, but instead make more of us than of God. But looking at the cross, the King, the empty tomb, the Father awaiting us, and the Holy Spirit inside of us is the means to humility, and Andrew Murray never lets us forget it.

My prayer for you as you read and reflect on this volume is that even as you delve into the recesses of your heart, finding and sweeping out the cobwebs, washing it with the water of the Word, you would also worship the King before whom you stand, fully clean, fully clothed, and fully claimed as His. If there is a trick to becoming humble, this is it; and it is no trick at all. It is simply to believe Christ is who He says He is and has done what He says He has done.

Chapter I


The Glory of the Creature

[They shall] cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou are worthy, O Lord and our God, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.

(Revelation 4:10–11)

When God created the universe, it was with the one object of making the creature partaker of His perfection and blessedness, and so showing in it the glory of His love and wisdom and power. God wished to reveal Himself in and through created beings by communicating to them as much of His own goodness and glory as they were capable of receiving. But this communication was not a giving to the creature something which it could possess in itself, a certain life or goodness, of which it had the charge and disposal. By no means. But as God is the ever-living, ever-present, ever-acting One, who upholds all things by the word of His power, and in whom all things exist, the relation of the creature to God could only be one of unceasing, absolute, universal dependence. As truly as God by His power once created, so too by that same power must God every moment maintain. The creature has not only to look back to the origin and first beginning of existence, and acknowledge that it there owes everything to God; its chief care, its highest virtue, its only happiness, now and through all eternity, is to present itself an empty vessel, in which God can dwell and manifest His power and goodness.

The life God gives is imparted not once for all, but each moment continuously, by the unceasing operation of His mighty power. Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is, from the very nature of things, the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue.

And so pride, or the loss of this humility, is the root of every sin and evil. It was when the now fallen angels began to look upon themselves with self-complacency that they were led to disobedience, and were cast down from the light of heaven into outer darkness. Even so it was, when the serpent breathed the poison of his pride, the desire to be as God, into the hearts of our first parents, that they too fell from their high estate into all the wretchedness in which man is now sunk. In heaven and earth, pride, self-exaltation, is the gate and the birth, and the curse, of hell. (See Note A.)

Therefore it follows that nothing can be our redemption, but the restoration of the lost humility, the original and only true relation of the creature to its God. And so Jesus came to bring humility back to earth, to make us partakers of it, and by it to save us. In heaven He humbled Himself to become man. The humility we see in Him possessed Him in heaven; it brought Him, He brought it, from there. Here on earth he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death (Philippians 2:8). His humility gave His death its value, and so became our redemption.

And now the salvation He imparts is nothing less and nothing more than a communication of His own life and death, His own disposition and spirit, His own humility, as the ground and root of His relation to God and His redeeming work. Jesus Christ took the place and fulfilled the destiny of man, as a creature, by His life of perfect humility. His humility is our salvation. His salvation is our humility.

And so the life of the saved ones, the saints, must bear this stamp of deliverance from sin, and full restoration to their original state; their whole relation to God and man marked by an all pervading humility. Without this