What Faith Looks Like
George Mueller is one of my great heroes of the faith, though his life did not have the beginnings of a great hero. He was born in 1805 and grew up in Prussia, which is located in present day Germany. By age sixteen, Mueller was a thief, a liar, an alcoholic, and in prison. Yet, at age twenty, he met the Lord and dedicated himself to God’s service.
Seven years later, he moved to England. While there, he began to feel a burden for all the street children he saw wandering the cold and mean streets of Ashley Downs, England. Mueller believed that God was calling on him to start an orphanage.
Much to the surprise of everyone but Mueller, money for an orphanage started pouring in. Soon the orphanage was built and within two years it grew to one hundred boys. Mueller built another orphanage and then another and another. At one point, Mueller had five orphanages that were housing over two thousand children.
George Mueller kept a dairy for all of his adult life. It is one of the most fascinating and amazing pieces of literature in the world. In it, Mueller records over 50,000 answers to prayer. More than five thousand of those answers came on the same day that he prayed for them.
In the last of his ninety-three years of life, the Lord provided the following “gifts” for the support of the thousands of children in his orphanages. 7203 loaves of bread donated, 5222 buns donated, 44,669 pounds of apples; forty sacks of potatoes; twenty boxes of soap, nine tons of coal, twenty-six haunches of venison, 4013 lbs. of meat, 112 rabbits and 312 pheasants, twenty-six cases of oranges, five boxes of dates, and hundreds of other items. This does not even include the cash donations which enabled him to purchase much more!
On Muller’s tombstone are these words, “He trusted in God with whom nothing shall be impossible, and in His beloved Son Jesus Christ our Lord who said, ‘I go unto My Father, and whatsoever ye shall ask in My name that will I do that the Father may be glorified in the Son.’"
Who would have thought that a tombstone could be such a great testimony? It should make you wonder though. If your tombstone was going to contain the testimony your life up to this point, what sentence would be etched upon it?
Is that sentence you want?
