Good evening, brothers. For this first session tonight, I’d like to learn together from a man many of you are likely familiar with: George Müller.

You may know Müller as the great benefactor of orphans in nineteenth-century England. Through his orphan houses, he cared for more than ten thousand destitute children during his lifetime. You may also know him as a remarkable man of prayer. Fifty years after his conversion, he said it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say he had received thirty thousand answers to prayer in the same day or same hour he had prayed — one or two every day (on average).

But tonight, I want to focus on another part of Müller, and I want to get there by introducing him as a man who walked under tremendous pressure with tremendous peace.

Man of Pressure and Peace

Müller was a man who walked under tremendous pressure. If anyone had a right to be worried and careworn, he did. If anyone had a reason to be distracted and harried, he did.

From the start of his orphan work, he resolved to never ask anyone for money except God — because he wanted to show the church and the world that the God we meet in Scripture is still the living God who hears and answers prayer. And his life did show that, but only through countless trials of faith. He wrote at one point, “Hundreds of times we have commenced the day without a penny in hand” (Delighted in God, 221). At another point he mentions the “many times . . . I could have gone insane from worry” (Autobiography, 154).

The world was watching to see what would come of this man who had ventured his all upon God. At any given point, the welfare of hundreds or even thousands of children hung in the balance. And that’s to say nothing of the typical church pressures he was under as a pastor who also preached weekly or more. He was a man under tremendous pressure.

And yet, Müller was also a man who walked with tremendous peace. If anyone was calm and cheerful, he was. If anyone’s life exhibited the peace that surpasses understanding, his did.

I love the way a farmer in Müller’s city of Bristol once put it. He said, “I was going up Ashley Hill the other morning when I met Mr. Müller walking towards the city. Had I not known him, I would have said he was a gentleman of leisure and without a care, so quietly did he walk and so peaceful and stately was his demeanor! The twenty-third Psalm seemed written all over his face” (Delighted in God, 139). And similar testimonies abounded. He walked with tremendous peace.

Brothers, you and I know pressure — maybe not like Müller knew pressure, but we know it nonetheless. Some of you may feel yourself in the grip of some impossible pressure right now. So, the question I want to explore is this: Where did Müller find the peace not only to endure pressure but to walk through it with Psalm 23 written on his face for all to see?

Great Lover of God’s Word

Those who know something of Müller’s life might want to say that prayer was the key to his peace. And it’s true that prayer goes a long way toward explaining Müller. He depended on God for everything, big and small. He loved to roll every burden upon God and cast every care his way.

But Müller’s remarkable life of prayer was strengthened and sustained by his remarkable relationship with Scripture. Müller prayed as he did only because he engaged with God’s word as he did.

It was a practice he had to learn. He didn’t always read Scripture in a way that led to mighty prayer and mighty peace. But something happened in 1841, sixteen years into Müller’s Christian life — something pivotal. Müller discovered a way of engaging with God’s word that led, he said, to “immense spiritual profit and refreshment.” And here’s a key sentence: “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 trials, in various ways, than I have ever had before.”

“The world was watching to see what would come of this man who had ventured his all upon God.”

By engaging with Scripture in a certain way, by a certain “mode,” Müller found the strength he needed from God to pass through deep pressure with deep peace. So, what was his way of reading Scripture?

He tells us in a long journal entry from 1841 (which you may be familiar with if you’ve read the book Desiring God). So, for the rest of our time, I want to consider Müller’s approach to Scripture from four angles. If you can bear with an alliteration, we’ll look at his pursuit, his priority, his pace, and his particular focus.

1. His Pursuit: A Soul Happy in God

So, first, his pursuit. Müller begins the journal entry this way:

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 . . . how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished.

We’ve already seen that those who knew Müller knew him as a man happy in God. But he tells us here that he didn’t usually wake up that way. On most days, he woke up needy, hungry, beset with trials, and desperate for his inner man to be nourished by God. And in 1841, he realized that, of all the things he could do first in the day, his main morning pursuit, his “first great and primary business,” was to get happy in God again.

Müller sets this main pursuit over against other good things, second-best things that he had to say no to:

The first thing to be concerned about was not how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord.

And the reason, he says, is because he cannot serve or glorify the Lord as he ought unless his soul is happy in Jesus.

For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers, I might seek to relieve the distressed . . . and yet, not being happy in the Lord . . . all this might not be attended to in a right spirit.

Don’t we know this? We know the difference between ministering from fullness and ministering from emptiness. We know what it feels like to counsel a church member or meet with fellow elders while our soul is still hungry. And we know what it feels like to do those things with a soul so full of God that we have something to give.

Brothers, I know the needs of the day — the needs of the family and the church and beyond — can crowd upon our minds in the morning. I know we sometimes wake up and find a dozen demands waiting for us. And I know how easy it is to sit before an open Bible and, in your mind, to work on the problems ahead of you. But if Müller were here, he would counsel us like this:

Other things may press upon you, the Lord’s work may even have urgent claims upon your attention, but I deliberately repeat, it is of supreme and paramount importance that you should seek above all things to have your souls truly happy in God Himself! Day by day seek to make this the most important business of your life. (When I Don’t Desire God, 163)

So said the man who had thousands of souls depending on him. Before he attended to their souls, he had to attend to his own. That was the only way he could care for them well, and it was the only way he could walk under great pressure with great peace.

2. His Priority: Scripture Then Prayer

Now, that overarching pursuit led to a certain priority as Müller approached God. Before this discovery of 1841, he tells us that he used to “pray as soon as possible” when he woke up. And he spent most of his morning devotional time praying. “But what was the result?” he writes.

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.

So, Müller realized that he needed a different morning priority: Instead of praying first, he needed to read and meditate on Scripture first. “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 upon it.” A little later, he goes back to the language of feeding and asks, “What is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the word of God.”

Müller makes a big deal out of this. But why? Why did his soul become happier when he focused on reading rather than praying? He gives at least two reasons.

First, he notes that sustained prayer requires “a measure of strength or godly desire.” It takes spiritual stamina to pray earnestly and sincerely for a sustained period. And it’s difficult to pray like that if your inner man hasn’t been nourished yet. But that’s not the case with receiving Scripture. Here’s how he says it: “We may . . . profitably meditate, with God’s blessing, though we are ever so weak spiritually; nay, the weaker we are, the more we need meditation for the strengthening of our inner man.”

You don’t have to be strong to eat. Eating is how you get strong again. Even on our weakest mornings, when we can barely pray, we can still hear. We can read. We can grab ahold of something God says and feed on it until we feel stronger.

The second reason Müller prioritized Scripture is because when he did, he found himself praying soon after. He writes, “Though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer.” Hearing from God naturally led him to speaking to God. So, instead of praying for half an hour before he really began to pray, he found that he prayed quickly and sincerely when he made Scripture his priority.

3. His Pace: Slow and Meditative

Let’s consider now Müller’s pace. When Müller talks about reading God’s word, he has in mind not just reading but meditating. We’ve already heard him use that word more than once. And meditation requires a pace different from regular reading. He describes it as

not the simple reading of the word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts.

In meditation, we handle a verse like a jeweler handles a gem. We walk through the hallways of a passage and open every door. We sit across the table from a word or phrase and let it counsel us. Or, as Müller says, we “[search] as it were into every verse, to get a blessing out of it.”

There are over 31,000 verses in Scripture. And part of Müller’s spiritual peace came from reading all of them over and over. One biographer says he read the whole Bible almost two hundred times — more than twice a year on average. But another part of Müller’s peace, and perhaps the bigger part, came from slowing down to sit with just one verse among the 31,000, feeding on it for all its worth.

Again and again in Müller’s life, it was particular verses and specific promises that sustained him through his deepest trials.

• When his infant son died, his soul laid hold “on that word” from Matthew 19:14: “Of such is the kingdom of heaven” (Delighted in God, 51).
• When the food was close to running out at the orphan houses, he wasn’t alarmed but repeated to himself and his family Matthew 6:33: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Delighted in God, 65).
• When his brother and father died in an uncertain spiritual state, it was Genesis 18:25 that settled all questioning in his soul: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Autobiography, 154).

Here’s how Müller summarizes the fruit of this particular attention to God’s word: “I believed his promises and I poured out my soul before him. I could rise from my knees in peace” (Autobiography, 155).

Now, here’s a question. Maybe the biggest thing that keeps me from slowing down and meditating during my devotions is the sense that I need to make more progress than that practice would allow. I need to keep up with my Bible plan. I need to pray for a handful of people. I can slow down some but not enough (it seems) to do what Müller was doing.

So, how did he do it? If he’s reading the whole Bible twice a year, how could he ever slow down to meditate? One answer is that he simply spent a lot of time with his Bible. He was in many ways a man of one book. But he also gives us a sense of what this looked like for him.

He tells us that he would often read larger portions of Scripture later in the day, after his morning devotions, and he would also devote “other parts of the day . . . more especially for prayer.” This suggests that for the first stretch of the morning, when he was seeking to get his soul into a happy state, his goal was not to read a lot of Scripture. He wasn’t trying to meditate and move through an ambitious Bible-reading plan and pray extensively for others. Instead, his goal was to move at whatever pace he needed to get his soul happy in God.

We each need to find our own way of reading both broadly and deeply. But here’s a question for you that I’ve been asking myself: How often do you come to God’s word feeling no pressure to read a certain amount or pray a certain amount but simply seeking to feed your soul? If you get through a chapter — great. If you stay in a single verse — also great. Do you have any regular time in Scripture where other goals take a back seat to the main goal of getting happy in God?

That’s how Müller began his day. And so, he passed through deep trials with deep peace.

4. His Particular Focus: God’s Character

We’ve considered Müller’s pursuit (a soul happy in God), his priority (Scripture, then prayer), and his pace (slow and meditative). Now, finally, let’s look at his particular focus.

“Müller’s goal was to move at whatever pace he needed to get his soul happy in God.”

On the one hand, it’s clear that Müller came to Scripture wanting to hear and receive whatever God had to say. But on the other hand, Müller was also on the lookout for something specific: As he meditated on God’s word, he wanted to see God.

He needed to see God. How else was he going to get perspective on the impossible pressures in front of him? How else was he going to rise above the worries that could have driven him insane? He needed to see his God.

He writes this in another part of his autobiography:

Through reading the Word of God, and especially through meditation on it, the believer becomes acquainted with the nature and character of God. Besides God’s holiness and justice, he realizes what a kind, loving, gracious, merciful, mighty, wise, and faithful Father he is. (Autobiography, 156–57)

There is no accounting for Müller’s life — there is no accounting for his peace — apart from the fact that he daily enjoyed what a kind, loving, gracious, merciful, mighty, wise, and faithful God he had. And he got there through this way of reading Scripture.

Let me close by mentioning just one example among many. Picture him now, walking in his garden sometime between 5:00 and 8:00am. It’s a typical morning, a typical season in ministry, which means that he finds himself surrounded by need: personal needs, family needs, church needs, orphan needs.

He walks with a New Testament in hand, and he’s meditating on Hebrews 13. Then he comes to verse 8: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” And instead of going on to verse 9, he stops. And this is what he experiences:

I meditated on his unchangeable love, power, and wisdom while I prayed about my present spiritual and temporal circumstances. Suddenly, the present need of the Orphan Houses was brought to my mind. I said to myself, Jesus, in His love and power, has supplied me with what I have needed for the orphans. In the same unchangeable love and power, He will provide me with what I need for the future. Joy flooded my soul when I realized the unchangeableness of our mighty Lord. (Autobiography, 94)

In the face of impossible pressures, Müller rested his soul in the character of his God. And, brothers, the same God of love and power is with you in your family, in your ministry, in the internal battles you face, no matter the pressure you’re under. There is no true need we have that God is not able to meet in ways far greater than we can ask or imagine. And there is no true need we have that God is not willing to meet, with all his heart and all his soul.

And the peace we need to rest there will come, in part, from waking up in the morning, reading God’s word with a slow, meditative posture, and grabbing hold of those descriptions of his character that get your soul happy in him.