The testimony of the Church.
George Mueller (1805-1898) was a Christian evangelist and
the director of the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England. He was one of the founders of the Plymouth
Brethren movement. Later during the split,
his group was called the Open Brethren.
· George Mueller’s Practice.
It has pleased the Lord to teach me a
truth, the benefit of which I have not lost for more than fourteen years. The
point is this: I saw more clearly than ever that the first great primary
business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the
Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not how much I might serve the
Lord, or how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy
state, and how my inner man might be nourished.…
Before this time my practice had been, at
least for ten years previously, as a habitual thing, to give myself to prayer
after having dressed myself in the morning. Now, I saw that the most important
thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God, and to
meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned,
reproved, instructed.…
The first thing I did, after having asked
in a few words the Lord’s blessing upon His precious Word, was to begin to
meditate on the Word of God, searching as it were into every verse to get
blessing out of it; not for the sake of public ministry of the Word, not for
the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon, but for the sake of
obtaining food for my soul. The result I have found to be almost invariably
this, that after a very few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to
thanksgiving, or to supplication; so that, though I did not, as it were, give
myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or
less into prayer. When thus I have been for a while making confession or
intercession or supplication, or have given thanks, I go on to the next words
or verse, turning all, as I go, into prayer for myself or others, as the Word
may lead to it.…
By breakfast time, with rare exceptions, I
am in a peaceful if not happy state of heart.
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