George Müller preached this sermon to a group of Christians. Where and when, we do not know, but it’s a gem of a teaching that we all ought to take to heart!
When your words came, I ate them;
they were my joy and my heart’s delight,
for I bear your name,
Lord God Almighty. (Jeremiah 15:16, NIV)
While I was staying at Nailsworth, the Lord was pleased to teach me a truth—without, as far as I know, using any human intervention. I have never lost the benefit of that lesson, though more than forty years have now gone by. The truth was this: I realized more clearly than ever that my first and most important task each day was to make sure my soul was happy in the Lord. Even before considering how I might serve Him or glorify Him, I needed to begin with having my heart refreshed and my inner being nourished. Because I might try to share the truth with unbelievers, help fellow believers, or live as a child of God should in this world—but if I wasn’t daily strengthened and joyful in the Lord, none of it would be done in the right spirit.
Up until then, for at least ten years, my regular practice had been to pray first thing in the morning after getting dressed. But I realized that the most important thing I could do was to begin with reading and meditating on God’s Word—so that my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, corrected, and instructed, and so that, through this meditation, I could enter into real communion with the Lord. So I began meditating on the New Testament from the very start, early each morning. I ask the Lord’s blessing upon me to read His precious Word, and then I begin to meditate on it, seeking to receive blessing from it. Not for the sake of preaching. Not for the sake of ministry. I did it for the sake of feeding my soul. And the results have been, almost invariably, this: after a few minutes, my soul would be led to confession, to thanksgiving, to intercession or supplication. Even if I don’t begin with prayer, through meditation, it turns almost immediately to prayer! After spending some time in confession, intercession, supplication, or thanksgiving, I move on to the next words or verse, turning each part into prayer for myself or for others, as the Word leads me. But through it all, I keep in mind that the main purpose is to feed my own soul. The result is that I always end up with plenty of confession and prayer, and my soul is consistently nourished and strengthened. By the time breakfast comes, with very few exceptions, I find myself in a peaceful—if not happy—state of heart. And often, what the Lord has shared with me in these times, later becomes food for other believers, though it was not for the sake of the ministry that I gave myself to meditation, but for the profit of my own inner man
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 in prayer until breakfast—or, at least, most of the time. What were the results? Often, I spent fifteen minutes up to an hour on my knees before feeling any bit of comfort, encouragement, humility, and so on. In those moments, I would suffer a wandering mind—fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, or even an hour before I could really begin to pray. But now my mind barely wanders. My heart is nourished by truth and is brought into living fellowship with God! I talk to my Father, to my Friend—vile and unworthy though I am—about the things that He has revealed to me in His precious Word. I am often astonished that I didn’t recognize this truth for my soul sooner. No book talks about this. No minister revealed it to me. No private conversations with Christian brothers stirred it up in my heart. And yet, since God revealed this truth to me, it’s as plain to me as anything that the first thing the child of God has to do every morning is to obtain food for their soul.
As the physical body cannot live without food, and this is one of the first things we do in the morning, so it should be for our souls. We must eat. Everyone knows that. But what is the food for our souls? It’s not prayer; it’s the Word of God! It’s not simply reading the Word of God passively so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but it’s considering what we read, thinking about it over and over, and applying it to our hearts. I emphasize this so strongly because of the immense spiritual blessing and refreshment I have personally experienced. Out of love, I sincerely urge all my fellow believers to consider what I’ve shared.
By God’s blessing, I attribute to this practice the strength and help He has given me to walk in peace through the many trials I have ever had before. And after living this way for more than forty years in fear of the Lord, I can wholeheartedly commend the practice to others. How different it is to face the duties, trials, and temptations of the day with a soul refreshed and made glad in the Lord early in the morning, compared to facing them without that spiritual preparation!
May we ever be nourished and satisfied by our Lord!
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George Müller
