About the Book
"Abide in Christ" by Andrew Murray is a Christian devotional book that emphasizes the importance of remaining connected to Christ in order to experience spiritual growth, rest, and power. Murray examines the biblical concept of abiding in Jesus as a key component of a fulfilling and fruitful Christian life. The book offers practical advice and insights on how believers can abide in Christ through prayer, faith, and obedience to His teachings.
John Alexander Dowie
By John Alexander Dowie (1847 – 1907)
I sat in my study in the parsonage of the Congregational Church at Newtown, a suburb of the beautiful city of Sydney, Australia. My heart was very heavy, for I had visited the sick and dying beds of more than thirty of my flock, and I had cast the dust to its kindred dust into more than forty graves within a few weeks. Where, oh where, was He Who used to heal His suffering children? No prayer for healing seemed to reach His ear, and yet I knew His hand had not been shortened. Still it did not save from death even those for whom there was so much in life to live for God and others. Strong men, fathers, good citizens, and more than all, true Christians sickened with a putrid fever, suffered nameless agonies, passed into delirium, sometimes with convulsions, and then died.
Oh, what aching voids were left in many a widowed or orphaned heart. There were many homes where, one by one, the little children, the youths and the maidens lay stricken, and after a hard struggle with the foul disease, they too, lay cold and dead. It seemed sometimes as if I could almost hear the triumphant mockery of evil ringing in my ear whilst I spoke to the bereaved ones the words of Christian hope and consolation. Disease, the foul offspring of its father, Satan, and its mother Sin, was defiling and destroying the earthly temples of God’s children and there was no deliverance.
There I sat with sorrow-bowed head for my afflicted people, until the bitter tears came to relieve my burning heart. Then I prayed for some message, and oh, how I longed to hear some words from Him Who wept and sorrowed for the suffering long ago, a Man of Sorrows and Sympathies. The words of the Holy Ghost inspired In Acts 10:38, stood before me all radiant with light, revealing Satan as the Defiler, and Christ as the Healer. My tears were wiped away, my heart strong, I saw the way of healing, and the door thereto was opened wide, so I said, “God help me now to preach the Word to all the dying around, and tell them how Satan still defiles, and Jesus still delivers, for He is just the same today.”
A loud ring and several raps at the outer door, a rush of feet, and there at my door stood two panting messengers who said, “Oh, come at once, Mary is dying; come and pray. “With just a feeling as a shepherd has who hears that his sheep are being torn from the fold by a cruel wolf, I rushed from my house, ran without my hat down the street, and entered the room of the dying maiden. There she lay groaning and grinding her clenched teeth in the agony of the conflict with the destroyer. The white froth, mingled with her blood, oozing from her pale and distorted mouth. I looked at her and then my anger burned. “Oh,” I thought, “for some sharp sword of heavenly temper keen to slay this cruel foe who is strangling that lovely maiden like an invisible serpent, tightening his deadly coils for a final victory.”
In a strange way, It came to pass; I found the sword I needed was in my hands, and in my hand I hold it still and never will I lay It down. The doctor, a good Christian man, was quietly walking up and down the room, sharing the mother’s pain and grief. Presently he stood at my side and said, “Sir, are not God’s ways mysterious?” Instantly the sword was flashed in my hand, the Spirit’s sword, the Word of God. “God’s way?!” I said, pointing to the scene of conflict, “How dare you call that God’s way of bringing His children home from earth to Heaven? No sir, that is the devil’s work and it is time we called on Him Who came to destroy the work of the devil, to slay that deadly foul destroyer, and to save this child. Can you pray, Doctor, can you pray the prayer of faith that saves the sick?” At once, offended at my words, my friend was changed, and saying,” You are too much excited, sir, it is best to say ‘God’s will be done,’” and he left the room.
Excited?! The word was quite inadequate for I was almost frenzied with divinely imparted anger and hatred of that foul destroyer, disease, which was doing Satan’s will. “It is not so,” I exclaimed, “no will of God sends such cruelty, and I shall never say ‘God’s will be done’ to Satan’s works, which God’s own Son came to destroy, and this is one of them.” Oh, how the Word of God was burning in my heart: “Jesus of Nazareth went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with Him.” And was not God with me? And was not Jesus there and all His promises true? I felt that it was even so, and turning to the mother I inquired,” Why did you send for me?” To which she answered, “Do pray, oh pray for her that God may raise her up.” So we prayed.
What did I say? It may be that I cannot recall the words without mistake, but words are in themselves of small importance. The prayer of faith may be a voiceless prayer, a simple heartfelt look of confidence into the face of Christ. At such moment, words are few, but they mean much, for God is looking at the heart. Still, I can remember much of that prayer unto this day, and asking God to aid, I will attempt to recall it. I cried, “Our Father, help! and Holy Spirit, teach me how to pray. Plead Thou for us, oh, Jesus, Savior, Healer, Friend, our Advocate with God the Father. Hear and heal, Eternal One! From all disease and death, deliver this sweet child of yours. I rest upon the Word. We claim the promise now. The Word is true, ‘I am the Lord that heals thee.’ Then heal her now. The Word is true, ‘I am the Lord, I change not.’ Unchanging God, then prove Yourself the healer now. The Word is true. ‘These signs shall follow them that believe in My Name, they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’ And I believe and I lay hands in Jesus’ Name on her and claim this promise now. Your Word is true. ‘The prayer of faith shall save the sick. Trusting in You alone. I cry. Oh, save her now, for Jesus’ sake. Amen!”
Then, the maid lay in sleep so deep and sweet that the mother asked in a low whisper, “Is she dead?” “No,” I answered, in a whisper lower still. “Mary will live; the fever is gone. She is perfectly well and sleeping as an infant sleeps.” I was smoothing the long dark hair from her now peaceful brow, and feeling the steady pulsation of her heart and cool moist hands. I saw that Christ had heard, and that once more, as long ago in Peter’s house, “He touched her and the fever left her.” Turning to the nurse, I said, “Get me at once, please, a cup of cocoa and several slices of bread and butter.” Beside the sleeping maid we sat quietly and almost silently until the nurse returned, and then I bent over her and snapping my fingers called, “Mary!”
Instantly she woke, smiled and said, “Oh, sir, when did you come? I have slept so long;” then stretching her arms out to meet her mother’s embrace, she said, “Mother, I feel so well.” “And hungry, too?” I asked, pouring some of the cocoa in a saucer and offering it to her when cooled by my breath. “Yes, hungry too,” she answered with a little laugh, and drank and ate again, and yet again until all was gone. In a few minutes, she fell asleep, breathing easily and softly. Quietly thanking God. We left her bed and went to the next room where her brother and sister also lay sick of the same fever. With these two, we prayed and they were healed too. The following day all three were well and in a week or so they brought me a little letter and a gift of gold, two sleeve links with my monogram, which I wore for many years. As I went away from the home where Christ as the Healer had been victorious, I could not but have somewhat in my heart of the triumphant song that rang through Heaven, and yet I was not a little amazed at my own strange doings, and still more at my discovery that He is just the same today.
Excerpt from the Sermons of John Alexander Dowie Champions of Faith by Gordon Lindsay
Am I Really a Christian
Am I really a Christian? Perhaps for you, that question looms like a shadow in the back of the soul, threatening your dearest hopes and peace. Others may struggle to understand why. You bear all the outward marks of a Christian: You read, pray, and gather with your church faithfully. You serve and sacrifice your time. You look for opportunities to share Christ with neighbors. You hide no secret sins. But “the heart knows its own bitterness” (Proverbs 14:10), and so too its own darkness. No matter how much you obey on the outside, when you look within you find a mass of conflicting desires and warring ambitions. Every godly impulse seems mixed with an ungodly one; every holy desire with something shameful. You can’t pray earnestly without feeling proud of yourself afterward. You can’t serve without some part of you wanting to be praised. You remember Judas and Demas, men whose outward appearance deceived others and deceived themselves. You know that on the last day many will find themselves surprised, knocking on the door of heaven only to hear four haunting words: “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23; 25:11–12). And so, in the stillness before sleep, in quiet moments of the day, and sometimes in the middle of worship itself, the shadow returns: Am I real — or am I just deceiving myself? ‘With You There Is Forgiveness’ Sometimes, the most apt answers to our most pressing questions are buried hundreds of years ago. And when it comes to assurance in particular, we may never surpass the pastoral wisdom of those seventeenth-century soul physicians, the Puritans. Assurance proved to be a common struggle for the Christians of that era, such that John Owen devoted over three hundred pages to the topic in his masterful Exposition of Psalm 130, most of which addresses a single verse: “With you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared” (Psalm 130:4). “When it comes to assurance, what matters most is not sin’s persistence, but our resistance.” With God there is forgiveness — free forgiveness, abundant forgiveness, glad forgiveness, based on the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ. But Owen knew that some Christians would hesitate to believe that forgiveness was for them. He knew that some introspective believers, bruised with a sense of their indwelling sin, would respond, “Yes, there is forgiveness with God, but I see so much darkness within myself — is there forgiveness for me?” In a way, Owen’s entire book is his answer to that question. But he devotes special attention to such believers in one brief section — not aiming, necessarily, to remove every doubt (something only God can do), but merely to help readers see themselves from a new, more gracious angle. Grief can be a good sign. When some Christians search their hearts, they have eyes only for their sin. Their highest worship seems tainted with self-focus; their best obedience seems spoiled by strains of insincerity. They are ready to sigh with David, “My iniquities have overtaken me, and I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head; my heart fails me” (Psalm 40:12). But such grief can be a good sign. Owen asks us to imagine a man with a numb leg. As long as his leg has lost sensation, the man “endures deep cuts and lancings, and feels them not.” Yet as soon as his nerves awake, he “feels the least cut, and may think the instruments sharper than they were before, when all the difference is, that he hath got a quickness of sense” (Works of John Owen, 6:604). Outside of Christ, our souls are numb to the evil of sin. The guilt and the consequences of sin may have wounded us from time to time, but its evil we could hardly feel (if at all) — no matter how often it thrust us through. But once our souls come alive, we need only a paper cut to wince. Sin burdens us, oppresses us, grieves us, not because we are worse than we were before, but because we finally feel sin for what it is: the thorns that crowned our Savior’s head, the spear that pierced our Lord. So, Owen writes, “‘Oh wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ [Romans 7:24] is a better evidence of grace and holiness than ‘God, I thank thee I am not as other men’ [Luke 18:11]” (601). Grief over our sin, far from disqualifying us from the kingdom, suggests that comfort is on the way (Matthew 5:4). Your resistance, not sin’s persistence, matters most. Temptation is frustratingly persistent. Sin would grieve us less if it left us alone more often: if pride were not ready to rise on all occasions, if anger did not flame up from the smallest sparks, if foolish thoughts did not fill our minds so often. Can we have any confidence of assurance if we find sin so relentlessly tempting? Owen takes us to 1 Peter 2:11, where the apostle writes, “Abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.” He comments, “Now, to war is not to make faint or gentle opposition, . . . but it is to go out with great strength, to use craft, subtlety, and force, so as to put the whole issue to a hazard. So these lusts war” (605). “God’s ‘well done’ says less about the worth of our works than about the wonder of his mercy.” Sin wars — and not against those whom it holds captive, but against those who have been rescued from its authority and now fight below Christ’s banner. When it comes to assurance, then, what matters most is not sin’s persistence, but our resistance. Or as Owen puts it, “Your state is not at all to be measured by the opposition that sin makes to you, but by the opposition you make to it” (605). Sin may burden and tempt you, oppose and oppress you. Every army does. But do you, for your part, resist? Do you run up the watchtower and raise an alarm? Do you grip your shield and swing your sword? Do you labor, strive, watch, pray, and keep close to your Captain? Then sin’s warfare against you may be a sign that you are in Christ’s service. Christ purifies our obedience. The most sensitive Christians, Owen writes, often “find their hearts weak, and all their duties worthless. . . . In the best of them there is such a mixture of self, hypocrisy, unbelief, vain-glory, that they are even ashamed and confounded with the remembrance of them” (600). Whatever fruit they bear seems covered with the mold of indwelling sin. But often, God sees more grace in his sin-burdened people than they see in themselves. Remember Sarah, Owen says: even when she was walking in unbelief, God took notice of the fact — a trifle in our eyes — that she called her husband “lord” (Genesis 18:12; 1 Peter 3:6). So too, on the last day, Jesus will commend his people for good works they have long forgotten and struggle even to recognize (Matthew 25:37–40). Of course, God’s “well done” says less about the worth of our works than about the wonder of his mercy. Our Father hangs our pictures upon his wall because Christ adorns them with the jewels of his own crown. Owen writes, Jesus Christ takes whatever is evil and unsavoury out of them, and makes them acceptable. . . . All the ingredients of self that are in them on any account he takes away, and adds incense to what remains, and presents it to God. . . . So that God accepts a little, and Christ makes our little a great deal. (603) The only works that God accepts are those that have been washed in the blood of Jesus (Revelation 7:14). And any work that is washed in the blood of Jesus becomes transfigured, a small but resplendent reflection of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). And therefore God, in unspeakable grace, “remembers the duties which we forget, and forgets the sins which we remember” (603). Assurance arises from faith. Owen’s final piece of counsel may feel counterintuitive to the unassured heart. Many who struggle with assurance hesitate to rest their full weight on Christ’s saving promises until they feel some warrant from within that the promises belong to them. They wait to come boldly to the throne of grace until they find something to bring with them. But this gets the order exactly backward. Owen writes, “Do not resolve not to eat thy meat until thou art strong, when thou hast no means of being strong but by eating” (603). When we wait to focus our gaze on Christ’s promises until we are holy enough, we are like a man waiting to eat until he becomes strong, or waiting to sleep until he feels energized, or waiting to study until he grows wise. Sinclair Ferguson, a modern-day pupil of Owen, puts it this way: Believing [gives] rise to obedience, not obedience . . . to assurance irrespective of believing. Such faith cannot be forced into us by our efforts to be obedient; it arises only from larger and clearer views of Christ. (The Whole Christ, 204) The faith that nourishes both obedience and assurance arises only from larger and clearer views of Christ. If we stay away from Jesus until we are holy enough, we will stay away forever. But if we come to him right now and every morning hereafter, no matter how dead we feel, looking for welcome on the basis of his blood rather than our efforts, then we can hope, in time, to find faith flowering in fuller obedience and deeper assurance. But we will come only if we know, with Owen, that “with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared” (Psalm 130:4). All who come to Christ, trust in Christ, and embrace Christ find the forgiveness that is with Christ. And you are no exception. Article by Scott Hubbard
