“The Most Important Christian Duty”: George Muller’s Counsel for Christian Living
Known for his life of faith, power in prayer, and service to orphans, George Muller (1805-1898) was a man whose depth with Christ stands in stark contrast to the shallowness that pervades our Christian landscape. Recently, I took the opportunity to read Muller’s autobiography again. If you’ve never read it, I would highly recommend that you do so. Muller’s counsel on how to live the Christian life is absolutely priceless! Below are a few highlights from his journal entries that might be a help to you in your pursuit of Christ-likeness:
Embracing Our Christian Duty
“What is the most important Christian duty?” Muller asks. “The most important Christian duty is having a daily quiet time with our Heavenly Father.” He states,
“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, but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. For I might seek to benefit believers, I 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 in a right manner.”
Muller recognized that before he could be effective in his service to Christ, his soul must be happy in Christ. For Muller, “quiet time” was not some kind of formality or legalistic obligation. Instead, he rightly esteemed time spent in the Word and prayer as one of God’s primary and gracious means of bringing glory to Himself and joy to His people!
Gaining a Panoramic View of God’s Glory
If the “great and primary business” is to delight in God, how does a believer cultivate this joy?
“Now in brotherly love and affection I would give a few hints to my younger fellow-believers as to the way in which to keep up spiritual enjoyment. It is absolutely needful in order that happiness in the Lord may continue, that the Scriptures be regularly read. These are God’s appointed means for the nourishment of the inner man. … Consider it, and ponder over it. … Especially we should read regularly through the Scriptures, consecutively, and not pick out here and there a chapter. If we do, we remain spiritual dwarfs. I tell you so affectionately. For the first four years after my conversion I made no progress, because I neglected the Bible. But when I regularly read on through the whole with reference to my own heart and soul, I directly made progress. Then my peace and joy continued more and more. Now I have been doing this for 47 years. I have read through the whole Bible about 100 times and I always find it fresh when I begin again. Thus my peace and joy have increased more and more.”
Spiritual dwarfs?!? Nobody writes or talks like that today! But Muller is right. If we don’t consistently read, study, and meditate on the entire Scriptures, we will never behold the full panorama of God’s glory revealed from Genesis to Revelation.
Tethering Prayer to the Scriptures
Reading Muller’s biography, one can’t help but marvel at the many timely, almost miraculous answers to prayer he experienced throughout his long ministry. What made Muller’s prayers so effectual? Simple faith in the Scriptures! Muller writes about the importance of letting the Scriptures inform, shape, and tether our prayers so that God and His glory, not our perceived emotional needs, becomes the focal point of our communion with God. When God’s Word becomes the basis of our prayers, we can have confidence that He will answer. Muller again:
“Before my practice had been, at least for ten years previously, as an habitual thing, to give myself to prayer, after having dressed 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, whilst meditation, my heart might be brought into experimental, communion with the Lord… 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 to prayer but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less to prayer.”
Conclusion
To be happy in the Lord: this is our Christian duty. May the Lord grant us grace today to pursue joy in Christ as we meditate on His Word and respond to Him in prayer.
Micah Colbert is the discipleship and outreach pastor at Community of Grace Church in Buffalo, NY. You can find his booklet, Good News for All Nations, designed for evangelism in ESL encounters, here. He blogs at Rooted Thinking, where this article first appeared.
Photo from two submitted by Robert Cutts shared on flickr with an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.