George Müller

Delighted in God

Roger Steer

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781781910986

 

1

PRUSSIAN PLAYBOY

Half a century earlier, Wolfenbuttel’s medieval castle had been the favourite residence of a local noble family; by the early nineteenth century, although the royal visitors had departed, the little seventeenth-century town nestling in the hills of Lower Saxony had lost none of its charm. In one of the half-timbered buildings, clustered around the castle, a police officer looked up from his desk. Two soldiers stood guard over a handsome Prussian youth. The officer began his interrogation.

‘What is your name?’

‘George Müller.’

‘Age?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘Place and date of birth?’

‘Kroppenstedt, Prussia, September 27^th 1805.’

‘Is it true that you have been living in style at Wolfenbüttel, and that you are unable to pay the innkeeper?’

‘Yes, it is, but....’

‘Is it also true that you spent last week at another hotel near Brunswick, living in similar luxury, and that when asked for payment you were forced to leave clothes as a security?’

Müller could say little in his defence. He was penniless and in debt: after three hours of questioning, and with no indication as to when he could expect a trial, the two soldiers marched him away to prison.

December 18^th 1821: George Müller looked at the tiny cell where he was to spend his first night in prison. A narrow window covered with stout iron bars provided the only light and thick wooden partitions divided it from adjacent cells. That evening, Müller received some meat to eat with his bread, but he loathed the smell of it and left it untouched. This must have offended the chef who laid on no more special favours. On the second day he was treated to the same menu as his fellow-prisoners: for lunch, water and coarse bread; for dinner, vegetables and cold meat – and, beginning to feel distinctly underfed, he ate a little.

The warder locked Müller in his cell day and night and gave him no work and no exercise.

‘Could I have a Bible to read?’ Müller enquired in order to help pass the time.

‘No.’

On the third day he ate all his food, and after the fourth would always have been glad of more.

After some days, he discovered there was another prisoner in the cell next to him. He shouted through the partition and discovered that his neighbour had been imprisoned for stealing. Perhaps to keep the noise down, the governor decided to allow the prisoner to share Müller’s cell and they spent their time describing their adventures. Warming to his task, Müller began to invent stories which impressed his friend immensely; then after about a week of this, the two prisoners disagreed and for day after day refused to speak to each other. In the silence, Müller began to reflect on his life.

His earliest memory went back to January in 1810 when, at the age of four, his family had moved from Kroppenstedt to Heimersleben where his father was appointed collector of taxes. Before his tenth birthday, he had begun to steal government money from his father; and he remembered the day when his father had scored a tactical victory. Suspecting his son, Herr Müller had counted a small sum and placed it in the room where he was left. Left alone for a while, George had taken some of the money and hidden it in his shoe. His father returned and counted the money; George was searched and found out. He remembered being punished on this and other occasions, but recalled that his reaction to being found out was usually to consider how he might do the thing again more cleverly, so as not to be detected.

Herr Müller had hoped that George would become a clergyman: not that he might serve God, but in order that he should have a comfortable living. There in his cell, George reflected on his five years at the cathedral classical school at Halberstadt; and remembered – with some shame – a Saturday night, some two years previously, when, not knowing that his mother had been taken ill, Müller had played cards until two on the Sunday morning. Then, having quenched his thirst at a tavern, he had toured the streets, half drunk, with friends.

He remembered that on the following day he had attended the first of a series of confirmation classes. On returning to his rooms, he found his father waiting for him.

‘Your mother is dead,’ Herr Müller told him. ‘Get yourself ready for her funeral!’

Three or four days before he was confirmed, he was guilty of what he described in his journal as ‘gross immorality’; and the day before his confirmation, in a vestry to confess his sins, he defrauded a priest by handing over only one-twelfth of the fee his father had given him.

With nothing to disturb the routine of life in the cell, and with neither prisoner inclined to communicate, Müller continued to reflect on the past. He had taken his first communion in Halberstadt cathedral on the Sunday after Easter 1820. That afternoon and evening, in search of quiet, he had stayed at home while the young people who had been confirmed with him were out and about.

‘I’ll turn over a new leaf and spend more time studying,’ he had resolved.

But he soon broke his resolution and his behaviour grew worse rather than better. In the twenty months following his confirmation, he spent some of his time studying, but a great deal more time playing the piano and guitar, reading novels, drinking in taverns, making resolutions to improve but breaking them almost as fast as they were made.

On January 12^th 1822, the sound of the unbolting of his cell door interrupted Müller’s recollections.

‘You are wanted at the police office,’ said the warder. ‘Follow me.’

‘Your father has sent the money you will need for travelling expenses, to pay your debt at the inn and for your maintenance here in prison,’ the police commissioner told him. ‘You are therefore free to leave at once.’

Herr Müller celebrated his reunion with his son by severely beating him; he took him home to Schoenebeck, near Magdeburg, where he had held another government appointment since the summer of 1821. George tried desperately hard to regain his father’s favour and began to tutor pupils in Latin, French, German grammar and arithmetic. He made progress in his studies, became popular with everyone – including after a time, his father. But he later admitted that he was ‘still in secret habitually guilty of great sins’.

When he was just seventeen, Müller entered the gymnasium (pre-university school) at Nordhausen, one of the oldest towns in Prussia. Despite his enthusiasm for study, and attempts to reform himself, Müller still found it almost impossible to make ends meet. On one occasion, after receiving an allowance from his father, he purposely showed the money to some friends. Then he deliberately damaged the locks of his guitar case. A few minutes later he ran into the director’s room with his coat off.

‘All the money my father sent me has been stolen!’ he announced breathlessly.

Everyone was wonderfully sympathetic. Some of his friends clubbed together and managed to give him as much money as he had lost, while his creditors agreed to extend their loans. However, the director – older and wiser – was suspicious and never fully restored George to his confidence. And for his part, Müller never again felt at ease in the presence of the director’s wife, who had acted like a mother to him during an illness.

Müller’s great ambition was to enter Halle, the famous university founded in 1694 by Frederick III of Brandenburg who later became King of Prussia. Most important for Müller’s later development, Halle was a seat of Pietist theology and practice. Pietism had breathed new life into the religious life of Germany in the seventeenth century; when the insights of Luther and the reformers had hardened into rigid formulas, the Pietist revival had emphasised the importance of the new birth, personal faith in Christ and the warmth of Christian experience as a spur to effective evangelicalism. Müller fulfilled his ambition in the Easter of 1825.

Halle is built on a sandy plain on the banks of the River Saale. The central market square in the inner town is overlooked by a fine medieval town hall, and the Gothic Marienkirche – where Handel learnt to play the organ. On arrival at the University, Müller resolved yet again to live a better life; and this time he really meant it. He knew that no parish would ever choose him as its pastor if he carried on in his current state. And even if he were accepted, he would need a good knowledge of divinity to obtain a comfortable living which in Prussia depended on the standard of a man’s university degree.

But the freedom of university life offered too many temptations, and George Müller yet again found it impossible to manage money. Before long he had to pawn his watch and some clothes; he began again to borrow extensively. He felt utterly miserable: worn out by his constant unsuccessful attempts to improve himself.

In one of Halle’s taverns (where he once drank ten pints of beer in a single afternoon), he thought he recognised a young man from his old school at Halberstadt. They hadn’t been close friends, for Beta had been quiet and serious, but it occurred to Müller that if he struck up a close friendship, it might help him to lead a steadier life. He picked his way across the crowded Bierkeller and shook his old friend warmly by the hand.

‘Beta! How are you? How nice to see you after so long!’

Beta welcomed his friendship because he thought it would enliven his social life.

Müller loved travel and made a suggestion to his friends.

‘Why don’t we make a trip to Switzerland?’

‘But we have no money and no passports.’

‘Leave that to me,’ said Müller. ‘This is my plan. Forge letters from your parents which entitle you to passports. Sell all you can, especially books which fetch a good price, so that we can raise enough funds to make the journey. Let me have the money and I will buy the necessary tickets.’

The party, which included Beta, left Halle on August 18^th 1825. They travelled to Erfurt and then westward to Frankfurt and south via Heidelberg, Stuttgart and Zurich to the heart of Switzerland. There before them, set between steep limestone slopes and a rising mist, lay Lake Lucerne. They climbed to the top of the Rigi and the view took Müller’s breath away. He looked at the mountains which thrust themselves into the lake: Burgenstock, Seelisburg and away to the south-west, Pilatus, all so irregular but magnificent.

‘Now,’ he thought, ‘I have lived!’

They travelled home via Lake Constance and then east to Ulm and medieval Nuremberg in Bavaria arriving back in Halle at the end of September. None of Müller’s friends discovered that the man they had trusted with their money had cleverly arranged things so that he himself paid far less towards the cost of the trip than any other member of the party.

2

‘CONSTRAINED BY THE LOVE OF JESUS’

‘For some weeks I have been attending a meeting on Saturday evenings at the home of a Christian,’ Beta told Müller in the middle of November 1825. He paused, wondering how George would react.

‘And what happens at this meeting?’

‘They read the Bible, they sing, they pray, and someone normally reads a sermon.’

‘I should like to go with you this evening.’

‘I’m not sure you will enjoy it.’

George had made up his mind: ‘I am most anxious to go.’

‘Then I will call for you this evening.’

Müller felt sure Herr Wagner, at whose home the meeting was held, wouldn’t welcome him. On arrival, he apologised for coming. Herr Wagner smiled.

‘Come as often as you please; house and heart are open to you! Now come and join the others.’

They sang a hymn and then Herr Kayser – later to become a missionary in Africa with the London Missionary Society – knelt down and asked God to bless the meeting. Müller had never before seen anyone on his knees; he’d never himself knelt to pray.

Herr Kayser read a chapter from the Bible and then a printed sermon. Prussian law at that time made the extempore exposition of Scripture an offence unless an ordained clergyman were present. At the end of the meeting, they sang a hymn and Herr Wagner closed the meeting with prayer. While he prayed, Müller thought, I could not pray as well, though I am much more educated than this man.

‘All we saw on our journey to Switzerland, and all our former pleasures, are as nothing compared with this evening,’ he said to Beta as they walked home.

It was the turning point of his life; and that night he lay peacefully and happily in his bed. The next day and on several days during the following week, Müller returned to Herr Wagner’s house to study the Bible. Writing about this time later he wrote:

It pleased God to teach me something of the meaning of that precious truth:

‘God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ I understood something of the reason why the Lord Jesus died on the cross, and suffered such agonies in the Garden of Gethsemane: even that thus, bearing the punishment due to us, we might not bear it ourselves. And, therefore, apprehending in some measure the love of Jesus for my soul, I was constrained to love Him in return. What all the exhortations and precepts of my father and others could not effect; what all my own resolutions could not bring about, even to renounce a life of sin and profligacy: I was enabled to do, constrained by the love of Jesus. The individual who desires to have his sins forgiven, must seek it through the blood of Jesus. The individual who desires to get power over sin, must likewise seek it through the blood of Jesus.

In January 1826, six or seven weeks after becoming a Christian, and after much prayer, Müller made an important decision and went home to see his father.

‘Father, I believe God wants me to become a missionary. I have come to seek your permission as is required by the German missionary societies.’

His father shouted his reply.

‘I’ve spent large sums of money on your education. I hoped that I could spend my last days with you in a parsonage. And now you tell me that this prospect has come to nothing. I can no longer consider you as my son!’

Then Herr Müller began to cry.

‘I beg you to reconsider’ he pleaded.

But George had made up his mind and believed that God gave him the strength to stick to what he saw as His call.

Müller returned to Halle, and although he still had two years of study ahead, he made up his mind never to take any more money from his father. It seemed wrong to do this, now that his father could no longer look forward to seeing his son become what he had wished – a clergyman with a good living.

Müller was now faced with the problem of how to live without his father’s support. Would he be able to honour his resolution? It soon became clear that he would. For a number of events followed – the first of many during his remarkable life – which demonstrated to Müller, and later to the world, that ‘there is no want to them that fear Him’ (Ps. 34:9).

It came about in this way. Shortly after he returned from visiting his father, several Americans arrived in Halle to study, three of whom were lecturers in American colleges. Their problem was that they didn’t understand German. However, Halle now had a new Professor of Divinity, Dr Tholuck, a Pietist, who made a suggestion to his new colleagues.

‘I have a student who would I believe make an excellent tutor in the German language.’

The Americans were delighted.

‘The student’s name is George Müller,’ said Tholuck.

The Americans paid Müller so well for his tuition that, in the absence of his father’s support, he had enough money to look after himself and some left over.

He now embarked on the task of proclaiming his new-found faith with the energetic dedication which was to become such a characteristic of his life. He circulated monthly about two hundred missionary papers in different parts of the country; he often stuffed his pockets full of tracts so that he could give them to people he met on his walks; he wrote letters to his former friends pleading with them to turn to Christ; and for thirteen weeks he visited a sick man who eventually became a Christian.

Not all his early efforts at evangelism were entirely successful. ‘Once I met a beggar in the fields, and spoke to him about his soul. But when I perceived it made no impression on him, I spoke more loudly; and when he still remained unmoved, I quite bawled in talking to him; till at last I went away, seeing it was of no use.’

In August 1826 a schoolmaster who lived in a village near Halle approached Müller with a request.

‘Would you be prepared to preach in my parish?’

‘I have never once preached a sermon,’ Müller replied, ‘but I believe that if I could commit a sermon to memory I might be able to help you.’

It took him nearly a week to memorise the sermon and early in the morning of August 27^th 1826, in a small chapel, he got through the sermon but didn’t enjoy it. He repeated the same sermon word for word later in the morning in the parish church; in the afternoon he planned to use the same sermon a third time. But when he stood in the pulpit to face his congregation, something seemed to tell him to read from Matthew 5 and to make whatever comments came into his mind.

As he began to explain the meaning of the words ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’, he felt that he was being helped to speak. And whereas in the morning his sermon had been too difficult for the people to understand, he noticed in the afternoon that the congregation listened with great attention. He seemed to be understood, and actually enjoyed the work.

From then, he preached frequently in the villages and towns surrounding Halle. On Saturday evenings he enjoyed going to the meetings in Herr Wagner’s house. On Sunday evenings a group of students from the university met together, and from Easter 1827 these meetings were held in Müller’s room.

In August 1827 the Continental Missionary Society in England decided to send a minister to Bucharest. They asked Professor Tholuck, at Halle, to keep his eye open for a suitable man. Müller thought and prayed about it, and found that his father didn’t disapprove of the idea.

‘I believe that this is the opportunity for service I have longed for,’ Müller told Tholuck. ‘I should like to go to Bucharest.’

As he waited to hear more details from London, he counted the cost of going to Bucharest and prayed earnestly about his future work. At the same time, oddly because it had nothing to do with the planned move to Bucharest, he developed a passionate interest in the Hebrew language and began to study it out of sheer enjoyment.

At the end of October 1827 an unexpected but welcome visitor turned up at one of the Sunday evening meetings in Müller’s room. Hermann Ball was a missionary to Jews in Poland, whom Müller had first met in the Easter of 1826.

‘Because of poor health at the moment,’ he told Müller, ‘I will have to give up my work among Jews.’

As he listened to Ball, Müller felt what he described as a ‘peculiar desire to fill up his place’, but he didn’t think seriously about the matter in view of the Bucharest assignment.

In November, Müller called on Professor Tholuck.

‘Have you ever wanted to be a missionary to the Jews?’ Tholuck asked. ‘I am an agent for a Missionary Society in London which works amongst them.’

Müller was startled and told Tholuck about Ball’s visit.

‘But it surely wouldn’t be right for me to think any more about the matter as I am going to Bucharest,’ he said.

Tholuck agreed.

Next morning, however, Müller felt that he had lost all his longing to go to Bucharest and thought this very self-indulgent.

‘Dear God,’ he prayed, ‘please restore to me my former wish to work in Bucharest.’

His prayer was answered immediately, but his love for Hebrew continued.

Towards the end of November, the Continental Missionary Society wrote to Tholuck: ‘Owing to the war between the Turks and the Russians, the committee has decided for the time being to abandon the idea of sending a minister to Bucharest.’

‘Have you thought any more about becoming a missionary to the Jews?’ Tholuck asked Müller.

In response Müller prayed; he reflected; he talked to his friends and invited them to probe his motives; and at last he gave Tholuck his reply.

‘I cannot say for certain that it is God’s will that I should be a missionary to the Jews. But I believe I should offer myself to the committee and leave it with the L...

Table of contents

• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Prussian Playboy
• 2. 'Constrained by the Love of Jesus'
• 3. England, 1829
• 4. Training by the Teign
• 5. The Bell Tolls
• 6. A Visible Proof
• 7. 'Whose is the Gold and the Silver'
• 8. A Change of Air
• 9. 'A Bank Which Cannot Break'
• 10. Looking to His Riches
• 11. A Just Complaint
• 12. Stronger Through Turmoil
• 13. Müller's Secret Treasure
• 14. When the South Wind Blew
• 15. Indescribable Happiness
• 16. 'No Place Ever Seemed So Dear'
• 17. Safe to Glory
• 18. Return to the Rigi
• 19. To the White House
• 20. Simply by Prayer
• 21. The Scent of Honeysuckle
• 22. Loved by Thousands
• 23. Admiring His Kindness
• 24. Precious Prospect
• 25. Rebuking Sceptics
• 26. New Foundation, Same Foundation
• Christian Focus