Chapter 80.
THE PROOF OF THE
LIVING GOD
(AS
FOUND IN
THE PRAYER LIFE OF GEORGE MULLER, OF
BY
ARTHUR T. PIERSON,
In
Psalm 68:4, we are bidden to "extol Him who rideth upon the heavens
by His name, JAH, and to rejoice before Him;" and in the next verse,
He is declared to be "a father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows,
in His holy habitation." The name, "Jah," here only found, is
not simply an abbreviation of "Jehovah;" but the present tense of
the Hebrew verb to be; and expresses the idea that this Jehovah is the Living,
Present God; and, as the heavens are always over our heads, He is always a
present Helper, especially to those who, like the widow and the orphan, lack
other providers and protectors.
George
Muller, of Bristol, undertook to demonstrate to the unbelieving world
that God is such a living, present God, and that He proves it by answering
prayer; and that the test of this fact might be definite and conclusive,
he undertook to gather, feed, house, clothe, and also to teach and
train, all available orphans, who were legitimate children, but deprived of
both parents by death and destitute.
SIXTY-FIVE
YEARS OF PROOF
This
work, which he began in 1833, in a very small and humble way, by giving
to a few children, gathered out of the streets, a bit of bread for breakfast,
and then teaching them for about an hour and a half to read the Scriptures,
he carried on for sixty-five years, with growing numbers until there
were under his care, and in the orphan houses which he built, twenty two hundred
orphans with their helpers; and yet, during all that time, Mr. Muller’s
sole dependence was Jah, the Living, Present God. He appealed to
no man for help; and did not even allow any need to be known before it had
been supplied, even his intimate co-workers being forbidden to mention
any existing want, outside the walls of the institution. His aim and purpose
were to effectually apply the test of prayer to the unseen God, in such
a way as to leave no doubt that, in these very days in which we live it is
perfectly safe to cut loose from every human dependence and cast ourselves
in faith upon the promises of a faithful Jehovah. To make the demonstration
more absolutely convincing, for some years he withheld even
the annual report of the work from the public, although it covered only
work already done, lest some should think such a report an indirect appeal
for future aid.
A
human life thus filled with the presence and power of God is one of God’s
choicest gifts to His church and to the world.
DEMONSTRATION
AND ILLUSTRATION
Things
unseen and eternal are, to the average man, distant and indistinct, while
what is seen and temporal is vivid and real. Practically, any object in nature
that can be seen or felt is thus more actual to most men than the Living
God. Every man who walks with God, and finds Him a present Help in
every time of need, who puts His promises to the practical proof and verifies
them in actual experience; every believer, who, with the key of faith,
unlocks God’s mysteries and with
the key of prayer unlocks God’s treasuries,
thus furnishes to the race demonstration and illustration of the fact
that "He is, and is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him."
George
Muller was such an argument and example —
a man of like passions,
and tempted in all points, as we are, but who believed God and was
established by believing; who prayed earnestly that he might live a life and
do a work, which should be a convincing proof that God hears prayer, and
that it is safe to trust Him at all times; and who furnished just such a witness
as he desired. Like Enoch, he truly walked with God, and had abundant
testimony borne to him that he pleased God. And, when on the tenth
day of March, 1898, it was told us of George Muller, that "he was not,"
we knew that "God had taken him": it seemed more like a translation than
like death.
THE
MAN HIMSELF
To
those familiar with his long life story, or who intimately knew him and felt
the power of personal contact, he was one of God’s
ripest saints, and
himself a living proof that a life of faith is possible;
that God may be
known, communed with, found, and become a conscious
companion in the
daily life. He proved for himself and for all others who
will receive his
witness, that to those who are willing to take God at His
word and to yield
self to His will, He is "the same yesterday and today
and forever;" that the days of divine intervention and deliverance are
past only so far as the days of faith and obedience are past; that believing
prayer works still the wonders of which our fathers told in the days of
old.
All
we can do in the limited space now at our disposal, is to present a brief summary
of George Muller’s work, the details of
which are spread through the five volumes of his carefully written
"Journal," and the facts of which have never been denied or doubted, being
embodied in five massive stone buildings on Ashley Down, and incarnated in
thousands of living orphans who have been, or still are, the beneficiaries
upon the bounty of the Lord, as administered by this great intercessor.
HIS
LIFE PURPOSE
One
sentence from Mr. Muller’s pen marks the
purpose which was the very pivot of his whole being: "I have joyfully
dedicated my whole life to the object of exemplifying how much may be
accomplished by prayer and faith." This prepared both for the
development of the character of him who had such singleness of aim and for the
development of the work in which that aim found action. Mr. Muller’s
oldest friend, Robert C. Chapman, of
NO
VISIBLE SUPPORT
Mr.
James Wright, Mr. Muller’s son-in-law and
successor, said, in reviewing the sixty-five years of work, "It
is written (Job 26:7) ‘He hangeth
the earth upon nothing’ —
that is, no visible support. And so we exult in the fact that ‘The
Scriptural Knowledge Institution for Home and Abroad’
hangs, as it has ever hung, since its commencement, ‘upon nothing,’
that is, upon no visible support. It hangs upon no human patron, upon
no endowment or funded property, but solely upon the good pleasure of
the blessed God."
Blessed
lesson to learn: that to depend upon the invisible God is not to hang
"upon nothing," though it be upon nothing visible. The power and permanence
of the invisible forces that hold up the earth after sixty centuries
of human history are sufficiently shown by the fact that this great globe
still swings securely in space and is whirled through its vast orbit, and
without variation of a second still moves with divine exactness in its appointed
path. Mr. Muller therefore trusted the same invisible God to sustain
with His unseen power all the work which faith suspended upon His
truth and love and unfailing word of promise, though to the natural eye all
these may seem as nothing.
SUMMARY
OF WORK DONE
In
the comprehensive summary contained in the fifty-ninth report, remarkable
growth is apparent during the sixty-four years since the outset of
the work in 1834.
During
the year ending May 26, 1898, the number of day schools was seven
and of pupils 354; the number of children in attendance from the beginning
81,501. The number of home Sunday Schools, twelve, and of children
in them 1,341; but, from the beginning, 32,944. The number of Sunday
Schools aided in
The
number of orphans on Ashley Down 1,620, and from the first 10,024. Money
spent that year, £22,523. 13s. 1d., and from the beginning £988,829. To
carry conviction into action sometimes requires a costly sacrifice; but, whatever
Mr. Muller’s fidelity to
conviction cost in one way, he had stupendous results of his life work to
contemplate even while he lived.
GIVING
WITH PRAYING
Let
any one look at these figures and facts, and remember that one poor man
who had been solely dependent on the help of God and only in answer to
prayer, could look back, over more than three score years and see how he
had built five large orphan houses, and taken under his care over ten thousand
orphans, expending for them within twelve thousand pounds of a round
million! This same man had given aid to day schools and Sunday Schools,
in
Besides
all this, he had spent over two hundred and sixty thousand pounds to
aid missionary laborers in various lands. The sum total of the money thus
expended during sixty years thus reached very nearly the astonishing aggregate
of one and a half million of pounds sterling ($7,500,000). Mr. Muller’s
own gifts to the service of the Lord found, only after his death, full
record and recognition. In the annual reports, an entry recurring with strange
frequency, suggested a giver that must have reached a very ripe age:
"from a servant of the Lord Jesus, who, constrained by the love of Christ,
seeks to lay up treasure in heaven." If that entry be carefully followed
throughout and there be added the personal gifts made by Mr. Muller
to various benevolent objects, the aggregate sum from this "servant"
reaches, up to March 1, 1898, a total of eighty-one thousand, four
hundred and ninety British pounds, eighteen shillings and eight pence.
After
his death, it first became known that this "servant of the Lord
Jesus" was
no other than George Muller himself who thus donated, from money given
to him or left to him for his own use by legacies, an amount equal to more
than one-fifteenth of the entire sum expended from the beginning upon
all five departments of the work (1,448,959 British pounds). This is a record
of personal giving to which we know no parallel.
HIS
INVESTMENTS
Mr.
Muller had received increasingly large sums from the Lord which he invested
well and most profitably, so that for over sixty years he never lost a
penny through a bad speculation! But his investments were not in lands, or
banks, or railways, but in the work of God. He made "friends of the mammon
of unrighteousness," and, when he failed, they received him into everlasting
habitations. He continued year after year to make provision for himself,
his beloved wife and daughter only by laying up treasure in heaven.
Such
a giver had a right to exhort others to systematic beneficence. He gave
as not one in a million gives — not a tithe, not any
fixed proportion
of annual income, but all that was left after the simplest
and most necessary
supply of actual wants. While most disciples regard
themselves as doing their duty if, after they have given a portion
to the Lord, they spend all the rest on themselves, God led George Muller to
reverse this rule and reserve only the most frugal sum for personal needs that
the entire remainder might be given to him that needeth. An utter
revolution in our habits of giving would be necessary were such a rule
adopted. Mr. Muller’s own words are:
"My aim never was, how much I could obtain, but rather how much I could
give." Yet this was not done in the spirit of an ascetic, for he had no such
spirit.
HIS
STEWARDSHIP
He
kept continually before him his stewardship of God’s
property; and sought
to make the most of the one brief life on earth and to use for the best
and largest good the property held by him in trust. The things of God were
deep realities, and, projecting every action and decision and motive into
the light of the judgment seat of Christ, he asked himself how it would appear
to him in the light of that tribunal. Thus he sought prayerfully and conscientiously
so to live and labor, so to deny himself, and, by love; serve his
Master, and his fellowmen that he should not be "ashamed before Him at
His coming." But not in a spirit of fear; for if any man of his generation knew
the perfect love that casts out fear it was he. He felt that God is love and
love is of God. lie saw that love manifested in the greatest of gifts His only
begotten Son; at Calvary he knew and believed the love that God hath to
us; he received it into his own heart; it became an abiding presence manifested
in obedience and benevolence; and, subduing him more and more,
it became perfected so as to expel all tormenting fear and impart a holy
confidence and delight in God.
FAVORITE
TEXTS
Among
the texts which strongly impressed and moulded Mr. Muller’s habits
of giving was Luke 6:38: "Give, and it shall be given unto you; good
measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men
give into your bosom."
He
believed this promise and he verified it. His testimony is, "I had given, and
God had caused to be given to me again, and bountifully." Again he read,
"It is more blessed to give than to receive." He says that he
believed what
he found in the word of God and by His grace sought to act accordingly,
and thus again records that he was blessed abundantly and his peace
and joy in the Holy Spirit increased more and more.
It will not be a surprise, therefore, that, as has been already noted, Mr. Muller’s entire personal estate at his death, as sworn to, when the will was admitted to probate, was only 169 British pounds, 9 shillings, 4 pence, of which books, household furniture, etc., were reckoned at over 100 pounds, the only money in his possession being a trifle over sixty pounds, and even this only awaiting disbursement as God’s steward.
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