Lesson 5 | Vocab
“This I Did with Prayer”
George Mueller, the famous prayer warrior, wrote that when he was about 23 years old, he was moved to begin ministry among the Jewish people. He wrote,
“About this very time, also, I became exceedingly fond of the Hebrew language, which I had cared about very little up to that time, and which I had merely studied now and then, from a sense of duty. But now I studied it, for many weeks, with the greatest eagerness and delight.”
—George Mueller, The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1868), 48.
And although his desired ministry didn’t come to fruition, he said that “[m]y earnestness in studying Hebrew, and my peculiar love for it, … continued.”¹
But did his love for Hebrew expel his love for Christ? No! He wrote,
“I now studied much, about 12 hours a day, chiefly Hebrew… [and] committed portions of the Hebrew Old Testament to memory; and this I did with prayer, often falling on my knees, leaving my books for a little, that I might seek the Lord's blessing, and also, that I might be kept from that spiritual deadness, which is so frequently the result of much study. I looked up to the Lord even whilst turning over the leaves of my Hebrew dictionary.”
A life of prayerful worship and diligent study are not contradictory! May our Lord enable you to do both during this course.
