In 2007 we experienced tremendous challenges of a spiritual nature through our church-planting ministry.  We finished the year feeling drained and seeking for strength in the Lord.  While reading Desiring God, Scott found the following testimony of George Muller.  We trust the following comments and excerpts will be an encouragement to you as well.

George Muller (1805-1898) is famous for establishing orphanages in England.  He was a man who joyfully depended on God for all his needs.  How did he kindle this joy and faith?  In 1841, he made a life-changing discovery.  I recommend that you read his autobiography.  His testimony has proved to be of tremendous value in my life and I pray that it will also bear fruit in yours.

“The point is this: I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and 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, 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.  For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers, might seek to relieve the distressed, I might in other ways seek to behave myself as it becomes a child of God in this world; and yet, not being happy in the Lord, and not being nourished and strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a right spirit.”

“Before this time my practice had been, at least for ten years previously, as an habitual thing, to give myself to prayer, after having dressed 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; and that thus, while meditating, my heart might be brought into experimental, communion with the Lord.  I began therefore, to meditate on the New Testament, from the beginning, early in the morning.”

“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 the public ministry of the Word; not for the sake or preaching on what I had meditated upon; but for the sake of obtaining food for my own 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 intercession, 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….”

“The difference between my former practice and my present one is this.  Formerly, when I rose, I began to pray as soon as possible, and generally spent all my time till breakfast in prayer, or almost all the time.  At all quiet times, I almost invariably began with prayer…. But what was the result?  I often spent a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, or even an hour on my knees, before being conscious to myself of having derived comfort, encouragement, humbling of soul, etc; and often after having suffered much from wandering of mind for the first ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, or even half an hour, I only then began really to pray.  I scarcely ever suffer now in this way.  For my heart being nourished by the truth, I speak to my Father, and to my Friend about the things He has brought before me in His precious Word.”

“The first thing the child of God has to do morning by morning is to obtain food for his inner man….  Now what is the food for the inner man: not prayer, but the Word of God.  Not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts….”

Autobiography of George Muller, comp. Fred Bergen (London: J. Nisbet, 1906), 152-4, quoted in Desiring God, John Piper (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2003),

May you grow more conformed to the image of Christ this year.