To
Have My Soul Happy in the Lord
By George Muller
“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 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, 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.
“I saw that the most important thing I
had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God—not prayer, but
the Word of God. And here again, not the simple reading of the Word of God so
that it only passes through my mind just as water runs through a pipe, but
considering what I read, pondering over it, and applying it to my heart. To
meditate on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned,
reproved, instructed. And that thus, by means of the Word of God, whilst
meditating on it, my heart 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.
“When we pray, we speak to God. Now,
prayer, in order to be continued for any length of time in any other than a
formal manner, requires, generally speaking, a measure of strength or godly
desire; and the season, therefore, when this exercise of the soul can be most
effectively performed is after the inner man has been nourished by meditation
on the Word of God, where we find our Father speaking to us, to encourage us,
to comfort us, to instruct us, to humble us, to reprove us.
“By the blessing of God, I ascribe to
this mode the help and strength which I have had from God to pass in peace
through deeper trails, in various ways, than I had ever had before.
“How different, when the soul is
refreshed and made happy early in the morning, from what it is when, without
spiritual preparation, the service, the trials, and the temptations of the day
come upon me!”
From
The Autobiography of George Muller (New
Kensington, PA: Whitaker House).
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