“The chief mark of counterfeit holiness is its lack of humility.” — Andrew Murray, Humility, ch. 7, (Archive.org)
In 1895, the South African pastor Andrew Murray (1828–1917) wrote Humility: The Beauty of Holiness. (Project Gutenberg) This ninety-six-page book is one of the most widely read among his more than two hundred and forty works, and together with his earlier Abide in Christ (1882) became a defining text of the late-nineteenth-century “deeper life” movement. On the dedication page Murray printed the prayer that sets the key for the whole book: “Lord Jesus! May our Holiness be perfect Humility! Let Thy perfect Humility be our Holiness!”
The book’s central thesis can be stated in a single sentence: humility is not one virtue among many but the root of every virtue; pride is not one sin among many but the root of every sin. Murray asks the question again and again — why do the most zealous, most committed Christians (preachers, teachers, missionaries) so often wound one another over trifles? Why do those who seek the “deeper life” so often display a deeper pride? His answer never changes: the whole foundation of the Christian life — the creature’s total dependence on the Creator — has been neglected. Wherever that foundation is lost, every spiritual pursuit becomes a hotbed of pride.
Major Themes
1. Humility is the creature’s true position; pride is the loss of it
Murray opens with a sentence that reads almost like a philosophical proposition: “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.” (p. 5, Archive.org) This is not a moral demand — it is an ontological fact. God alone is self-existent; everything else is created; every moment’s life depends on Him. Humility, therefore, is simply the acknowledgment of this fact — returning the creature to the place it was always meant to occupy.
Pride is the exact opposite — it is the “loss of this humility.” “In Heaven and earth, pride, self-exaltation, is the gate and the birth and the curse of Hell.” Satan fell through pride; Adam fell by swallowing its poison. All the misery of human history — “all its wars and bloodshed among the nations, all its selfishness and suffering, all its ambitions and jealousies, all its broken hearts and embittered lives, with all its daily unhappiness” — traces back to this single root. (p. 6) You do not become a good Christian by being humble; you can only be a Christian at all because you have come back to humility.
2. The humility of the Incarnation: Christ’s whole life was “nothing”
Chapter three is the most theologically concentrated chapter in the book. Murray counts the words Jesus speaks of Himself in John’s Gospel and notices a pattern most readers miss — Christ keeps saying “not” and “nothing”:
“The Son can do nothing of Himself.” (John 5:19) “I can of mine own self do nothing… because I seek not mine own will.” (John 5:30) “I came down from Heaven, not to do mine own will.” (John 6:38) “My doctrine is not mine.” (John 7:16) “I do nothing of myself.” (John 8:28) “I seek not mine own glory.” (John 8:50) “The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself.” (John 14:10)
Murray’s conclusion lands like a formula: “He was nothing, that God might be all.” (p. 7, Archive.org) The Incarnation itself is the humility of God — “Christ is the humility of God embodied in human nature; the Eternal Love humbling itself, to win and serve and save us.”
From the manger to the cross to the throne, the line carries one theme. “What is the Incarnation but His heavenly humility, His emptying Himself and becoming man? What is His life on earth but humility, His taking the form of a servant? And what is His atonement but humility? ‘He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death.’ And what is His ascension and His glory, but humility exalted to the throne and crowned with glory?” (p. 6) From this Murray gives the single most condensed sentence in the book — the one he prints on the dedication page as its key: “His humility is our salvation. His salvation is our humility.” (p. 13)
3. Three years of discipleship could not conquer pride
Chapter five is the chapter most likely to chill anyone trying to “be a better Christian” by effort. The Twelve forsook everything to follow the Lord, heard His teaching directly, watched His daily life, were sent out by Him to preach, heal, and cast out demons. And yet — at the Last Supper they were still disputing about who would be greatest. From this fact Murray draws three conclusions no one can dodge. First, “how much there may be of earnest and active religion while humility is still sadly wanting.” (p. 9, Archive.org) Second, “how impotent all external teaching and all personal effort is, to conquer pride or give the meek and lowly heart.” Then he speaks the most devastating sentence in the book:
“To teach them and us the much-needed lesson, that no outward instruction, not even of Christ Himself; no argument however convincing; no sense of the beauty of humility, however deep; no personal resolve or effort, however sincere and earnest, can cast out the devil of pride… Nothing can avail but this, that the new nature in its divine humility be revealed in power to take the place of the old.” — Chapter 5, p. 9, (Archive.org)
The third conclusion: “it is only by the indwelling of Christ in His divine humility that we become truly humble.” This chapter is a final verdict on any “sanctification by exercise” — three years living with the incarnate Jesus was not enough; how much less your disciplines, your Bible reading, your decisions, your vows?
4. The test of humility is not the prayer closet but the dinner table
Chapter six moves the stage of humility from between you and God to between you and others — this is the most practical chapter in the book. “Humility before God is nothing if not proved in humility before men.” (p. 10, Archive.org)
Murray’s argument is simple and merciless: you think it is easy to be humble before God — kneeling alone, praying alone, alone admitting you are nothing. But the real test is this: when that brother who irritates you irritates you yet again, what is your response? When someone else is praised and you are overlooked, what is the flicker of emotion in your heart? When opinions clash and the meeting turns heated, what scent do you carry as you walk out? Private devotion is not the test of real character; public dealing is.
Then he gives the most concrete image in the book:
“Let the discovery of the lack of this grace stir us to larger expectation from God. Let us look upon every brother who tries or vexes us, as God’s means of grace, God’s instrument for our purification, for our exercise of the humility Jesus our Life breathes within us.” — Chapter 6, p. 10, (Archive.org)
That person you find hardest to bear — not God’s oversight, but God’s grace.
5. Counterfeit holiness: the most dangerous pride is the pride of the spiritual life
Chapter seven is the book’s sharpest strike at today’s high-pressure religious environments. Murray’s target was the nineteenth-century “Holiness movement” — congregations focused on sanctification, on the pursuit of the “deeper life.” His deepest concern about them can be compressed into a single line: “The holiest will ever be the humblest.”
The inverse is equally true — “The chief mark of counterfeit holiness is its lack of humility.” This is a sharp diagnostic criterion: if a community, a teaching, or a spiritual practice claims to pursue holiness, yet the people involved grow prouder, touchier, sharper, more judgmental — that is counterfeit holiness, whatever name it bears.
Murray names the danger directly:
“Is there not many a Church or assembly of the saints, many a mission or convention, many a society or committee, even many a mission away in heathendom, where the harmony has been disturbed and the work of God hindered, because men who are counted saints have proved in touchiness and haste and impatience, in self-defense and self-assertion, in sharp judgments and unkind words, that they did not each reckon others better than themselves, and that their holiness has but little in it of the meekness of the saints?” — Chapter 7, p. 11, (Archive.org)
Murray is not describing worldly people — he is describing those “counted saints,” those who genuinely pursue holiness, in whom pride has grown up on the same soil as their devotion. “Pride can lift its head in the very temple of God” and can “clothe itself in the garments of praise or of penitence” — in the holiest places, pride hides most easily. For those in high-pressure spiritual environments who are continually told to do more, Murray’s word is not condemnation but medicine: the true measure of holiness is not how much you have done, but whether you have become smaller.
6. Sin cannot humble you; only grace can
Chapter eight contains the book’s most counterintuitive — and most liberating — teaching. Most believers assume that to be humble you must dwell more on your sin, see more of your unworthiness. Murray says: no. “Humility is often identified with penitence and contrition. As a consequence, there appears to be no way of fostering humility but by keeping the soul occupied with its sin.” (p. 12, Archive.org)
But Murray points to a fact that cannot be evaded: Christ was perfectly sinless, yet perfectly humble. The essence of humility, therefore, cannot be about sin — it must be about God. “It is the displacement of self by the enthronement of God. Where God is all, self is nothing.”
He calls the apostle Paul as witness. Paul called himself “the chief of sinners,” “the least of the apostles,” “less than the least of all saints” — yet Paul never said he was “sinning daily.” His sense of his own sin was pressed down on him by the overwhelming greatness of God’s grace, not by constant rumination on his sin. “The very fact of the absence of such confession of sinning only gives the more force to the truth that it is not in daily sinning that the secret of the deeper humility will be found, but in the habitual, never for a moment to be forgotten position… that our one place before God, must be that of those whose highest joy it is to confess that they are sinners saved by grace.” (p. 63)
From this Murray gives the most powerfully counterintuitive sentence in the book:
“Being occupied with self, even amid the deepest self-abhorrence, can never free us from self. It is the revelation of God, not only by the law condemning sin but also by His grace delivering from it, that will make us humble. The law may break the heart with fear; it is only grace that works that sweet humility which becomes a joy to the soul as its second nature.” — Chapter 8, p. 12, (Archive.org)
For believers growing dry under unending self-examination, this is medicine: not to stop confessing sin, but to turn the gaze from sin to God. The greatness of God, not the greatness of sin, is the source of humility.
7. The perfection of humility is death to self
Chapter ten is the most quoted chapter in the book. “Humility is the blossom of which death to self is the perfect fruit.” (p. 73, Archive.org) The two cannot be separated — “Only humility leads to perfect death; Only death perfects humility.”
How then does one die to self? Here Murray steps outside the logic of “try harder” — “The death to self is not your work, it is God’s work.” But the believer has a part that cannot be deferred:
“If you would enter into full fellowship with Christ in His death, and know the full deliverance from self, humble yourself. This is your one duty. Place yourself before God in your utter helplessness; consent heartily to the fact of your impotence to slay or make alive yourself; sink down into your own nothingness, in the spirit of meek and patient and trustful surrender to God. Accept every humiliation, look upon every fellow-man who tries or vexes you, as a means of grace to humble you.” — Chapter 10, p. 14, (Archive.org)
Near the end of the chapter he gives the most vivid practical image in the book: “Believer, claim in faith the death and the life of Jesus as thine. Enter in His grave into the rest from self and its work — the rest of God. With Christ, who committed His spirit into the Father’s hands, humble thyself and descend each day into that perfect, helpless dependence upon God. God will raise thee up and exalt thee. Sink every morning in deep, deep nothingness into the grave of Jesus; every day the life of Jesus will be manifest in thee.” (p. 14)
Practical Applications
- Sink each morning into “nothingness.” From chapter 10: at the start of every day, consciously place self in the death of the cross, consent to your inability to kill yourself, and receive the life of Christ as the power that takes its place. This is not a single experience — it is a daily posture.
- Treat every vexing person as God’s instrument prepared for you. From chapters 6 and 10: that brother who irritates you is not God’s oversight but God’s grace for your exercise in humility. Next time you feel the pressure rise, ask: what is God saying to me through this person?
- Measure your humility by your relationships, not your private devotions. From chapter 6: once a week, review your real interactions — your tone, your impatient moments, your reaction when overlooked. That, not the time you spent on your knees, is the honest spiritual report.
- Do not be occupied with sin or even self-reproach — be occupied with God. From chapter 8: when you find yourself ruminating on your sin, do not try harder to confess — turn your gaze to the greatness of God. Filled with God, self empties on its own.
- The more spiritual you feel, the more vigilant you should be against pride. From chapter 7: the more blessing and fruit you receive in ministry, the greater pride’s danger becomes. After every significant spiritual experience, deliberately add a layer of watchfulness.
Lineage and Legacy
Murray was born on the South African frontier, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian missionary; he was sent at ten to Scotland for schooling, trained theologically at Utrecht in Holland, and was ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1848 before returning to pastor in South Africa. In 1860 a great revival broke out in his parish, and from that point on he became one of the defining figures of the late-nineteenth-century “deeper life” movement. (Wikipedia) His theology is a confluence of several streams: the Dutch Reformed emphasis on God’s sovereignty, the Wesleyan longing for sanctification, the Keswick Convention’s message that “full sanctification is experientially available,” and his deep reading of the medieval mystics (especially William Law and Tersteegen). 1895, the year Humility appeared, was also the year Murray was preaching extensively at the Keswick and Northfield Conventions — and the book is distilled from those messages.
Brother Watchman Nee was directly influenced by Murray. Brother Nee’s official website records Murray as a named source of spiritual enlightenment on two points: on “the Spirit” through Murray’s The Spirit of Christ, and on “abiding in Christ” through Murray together with Hudson Taylor. (watchmannee.org) Brother Witness Lee directly cites Murray in chapter twelve of Christ as the Reality — in chapter five of The Spirit of Christ he found “the strongest confirmation” of his own teaching that the Spirit contains both divine and human elements. (Ministry Samples) For Humility specifically, no documented direct reference by Brother Nee or Brother Lee was found — but the book’s central themes (pride as the root of all sin, only the indwelling Christ produces true humility, sin cannot humble you but grace can) receive their fuller development in Brother Nee’s The Normal Christian Life and The Life That Wins and in Brother Lee’s many messages on the self and the mind. The Recovery’s vision of the Body, and of the Spirit as the consummation of the Triune God, goes further than Murray.
Honest Assessment
What this book does well: In twelve short chapters, Murray dissects with surgical precision the most hidden disease of religious life. His diagnosis of pride is not moralistic (“you should be more humble”) but structural (“any spiritual pursuit not rooted in humility will become a hotbed of pride”). Chapter seven on “counterfeit holiness” is the high point of the book — for any reader in a high-pressure spiritual environment, that single chapter is worth the price of admission. The counterintuitive teaching of chapter eight — that sin cannot humble you — is medicine for many believers paralyzed by self-reproach: turn the gaze from sin to God, and humility comes as the by-product. Most important of all, Murray refuses to make humility into a project — he insists that humility can flow only as the expression of the indwelling Christ. That single insistence rescues the book from joining the long shelf of “how to be more humble” self-help.
The book’s limitations:
First, the treatment of self is moral rather than positional. When Murray speaks of “death to self,” he speaks chiefly from the angle of the will — you must choose to surrender self, sink each day into nothingness. But he never reaches the deeper reality Paul opens in Romans 6–8: the believer has already been crucified, has already died, has already been buried, has already been raised with Christ — this is not a matter of choosing to die but of seeing that you have already died. Brother Watchman Nee in The Normal Christian Life (especially the chapter “Dead to Sin”) goes further than Murray — you do not “decide” to die; you reckon by faith that you are already dead. The difference looks small, but it flips the entire logic of the spiritual life from struggle to rest.
Second, the Body dimension is exceedingly thin. Murray’s field of vision is almost entirely between “you” and “God,” or between “you” and “your brother” — but the Church as the Body of Christ, the blending of the members, the church-life as one new man, are scarcely visible in the book. Chapter six on “Humility in Daily Life” comes closest to Body-life, but his concern remains at the level of individual virtue (you ought to treat your brother with humility), not the Body’s reality (you are only one member of the Body — how could you not be humble?).
Third, the two-stage framework can become a new spiritual ladder. In chapter eleven Murray describes the Christian as “virtually passing through two stages” — first fleeing humiliation, then welcoming it. This language can produce a kind of spiritual elitism — as if some believers have reached “stage two” while others are still in “stage one.” This is linked to Keswick’s tendency toward “two-tier” believers. The biblical teaching is that every believer has already been created “one new man” in Christ — humility is not the top of a ladder you ascend but the daily life lived inside an accomplished fact.
Fourth, the treatment of the Spirit is insufficient. Direct treatment of the Spirit in the book is limited — chiefly at the end of chapter five, where Murray notes that only the indwelling Christ after Pentecost can produce true humility. Given that humility is entirely produced by the Spirit’s operation in the believer, this proportion feels inadequate. Murray treats the Spirit more fully elsewhere — in his The Spirit of Christ — but in this book the Spirit is at the margin.
Read This If…
Read this book if you live in an environment where “spiritual stature” functions as an unspoken ranking — where you are continually pressed to pray more, read more, give more, serve more, and you have begun to wonder whether the engine inside you is really God or really spiritual ambition. Murray will tell you gently: the only reliable test of the difference is not how much you have done, but whether you are becoming smaller. Read it, too, if you have found that the harder you try to be humble, the prouder you become — Murray will say that your trying is itself the problem; stop, and let Christ live humility in you.
Not suited as an introduction to systematic theology — this is a book of meditations, not arguments. Not suited either for readers looking for a blueprint of church-building — the book scarcely touches Body-life. For readers in the Recovery: read this book as a diagnostic instrument; after the disease of pride has been seen clearly, turn to Brother Watchman Nee’s The Normal Christian Life and to Brother Witness Lee’s many messages on the self and the mind for the fuller cure.
One hundred and thirty years later, this ninety-six-page book does what almost no other spiritual book can — it leaves every reader who finishes it in an inescapable recognition: your deepest sin is the one you cannot see in yourself; your most dangerous pride is the one wearing devout clothing; and the only thing that can free you from it is not harder trying at humility, but the humility of Christ already given, already accomplished, already in you.
“Lord Jesus! May our Holiness be perfect Humility! Let Thy perfect Humility be our Holiness!” — Andrew Murray, Humility, dedication page