Andrew Murray - A Minister of the Spirit

Andrew Murray, 1828-1917

Andrew Murray was one of four children....their father was a pastor. Andrew was raised in remote Graaff-Reinet, South Africa. Educated in Scotland and Holland, in 1848 Andrew, Jr., returned to South Africa as a missionary and minister with the Dutch Reformed Church. His first appointment was to Bloemfontein, a territory of nearly 50,000 square miles and 12,000 people.

Andrew and his brother had been in contact with a revival movement in Scotland, an evangelical extension of the Second Great Awakening in America. He prayed for the same sort of awakening for the church in South Africa and wrote, "My prayer is for revival, but I am held back by the increasing sense of my own unfitness for the work. I lament the awful pride and self complacency that have till now ruled my heart. O that I may be more and more a minister of the Spirit."

In 1860, revival did come to the churches of Cape Town, South Africa, and spread to surrounding towns and villages. Even remote farms and plantations were impacted as lives were changed. Where once the churches had not been able to find one man to be a leader for God, the revival raised up 50 in Murray's Cape Town parish alone. There were more conversions in one month in that parish than in the whole course of its previous history.

Greatly concerned for the spiritual guidance of new converts and renewed Christians, Andrew Murray wrote over 240 books. His writings reflect his own longing for a deeper life in Christ and his prayer that others would long for and experience that life as well. 


Christian Connection Network