Tag: george mueller

How to be Happy in God

Posted on March 25, 2010

Darrin Patrick, pastor of The Journey Church in St. Louis, shares some helpful reflections on his own spiritual journey wiht prayer and Scripture reading. He points us to George Muller, a great man of faith who started five orphanages on Ashley Down and filled them with hundreds of abused, neglected, and abandoned children. He had the faith of ten thousand church planters, but beneath his great faith and prayer for God’s provision was a goal even more noble that housing and caring for orphans, a goal greater than ministry or church planting. This goal was to be happy in God, and to bring others into that happiness. Darrin shares some of Muller’s thoughts on this:

Darrin on Mueller

I have always struggled with prayer as a Christian. I was sharing my frustration one day with my seminary professor and spiritual disciplines guru Don Whitney. Dr. Whitney shared with me a quote for George Müller, a godly giant of the faith who also struggled with prayer. This is from an entry in George Müller’s diary, dated May 7, 1841.

Mueller on Happiness in God

    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 . . . 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 set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers . . . 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 . . . 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; and that thus, by means of the Word of God, whilst meditating on it, my heart might be brought into experimental communion with the Lord.
    John Piper came to similar conclusions several decades ago. He reflects on Mueller and happiness in God here.

    Praying with Muller for the Demonstration of God

    Posted on June 11, 2008

    God is disposed to give himself to us, if we will only press into him. How can we receive of the bounty of God’s infinite goodness unless we pray? We have not because we ask not.

    We become lifeless in ministry apart from him, as reminded by a friend this morning, the branch withers apart from the sap-flowing, life-sustaining vine. He is the Vine! And he ultimately calls us to come to him, not for the fruit of conversion or for the anointing in sermons or wisdom in counsel, but rather ,he is calling us to come to him for Him.

    How do we come to him? We come to him in prayer, in the secret closet of communion with the holy Trinity.George Mueller has rightly been recognized as a man of prayer, a man who faithfully prayed and steadily restrained himself from asking others for money, financial support, to build five orphanages on Ashley Down and fill them with hundreds of abused, neglected, and abandoned children. He had the faith of ten thousand church planters, but beneath his great faith and prayer for God’s provision was a goal even more noble that housing and caring for orphans, a goal greater than ministry or church planting. Why did he not fundraise but “merely” pray for orphan provision? He writes:

    I have refrained, because one of the primary objects of this Institution is, to bring before the world and the Church a tangible proof, how much even in this Nineteenth Century can be accomplished simply through the instrumentality of prayer and faith; and to give a clear demonstration, that God is now as much the Living God as He was Four Thousand years ago.

    Brothers, we are in need of such a clear demonstration in the 21st century, not so much a demonstration of good works and godly provision, but a demonstration of the Living God. Mueller’s aim was ultimately the display of God’s living and abiding glory in a world that was prone to neglect and dismiss him. And should our aim as church planters, as pastors, as disciples of Jesus be any different? Should we not join Mueller on our knees, not supremely for his providential care or provision, but for Him, for a first-hand experience and demonstration of his sublime excellency and animated glory? To this end, may we pray, may we seek, and may we find him.