“Come, let us return to the Lord.
He has torn us to pieces;
now he will heal us.
He has injured us;
now he will bandage our wounds.
In just a short time he will restore us,
so that we may live in his presence.
Oh, that we might know the Lord!
Let us press on to know him.
He will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn
or the coming of rains in early spring.”
“O Israel and Judah,
what should I do with you?” asks the Lord.
“For your love vanishes like the morning mist
and disappears like dew in the sunlight.
I sent my prophets to cut you to pieces—
to slaughter you with my words,
with judgments as inescapable as light.
I want you to show love,
not offer sacrifices.
I want you to know me
more than I want burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:1–6 NLT)
Each Saturday during Lent, we will explore a story or profile of peace in action: people who are acting as shalom-bearers in a world increasingly in need of God’s peace.
When he was less than ten years old, George was caught stealing from his father. This was not out of character for the young man, and even after he was sent away by his father to attend school to become a clergyman, he continued in what he called “sinful practices.” This continued for some years, until, one day as a man of twenty years, George was invited to a house church by a friend. It was here that for the first time he met people for whom God was real, people who humbled themselves before their Creator and worshiped him not out of obligation but of joy.
As George began to walk in this new life, he felt within him grow a strong desire for international missionary service. After a few false starts, he was invited to London for a six-month stint as a missionary student. During this period, George came to understand both the power of Scripture and the importance of the Holy Spirit. As he established a congregation in a town on the southwest English coast, he began learning what it meant to fully rely upon God for his needs, whether he needed to choose a Scripture passage to teach from or he needed the funds to pay his bills. This full dependence upon God’s provision for his “temporal wants,” as George called them, continued as he married and subsequently moved north to the city of Bristol, England. Ultimately, it would be this deep trust that God would provide – that God cared enough about him and his well-being that he would not fail to meet his needs – that would mark the path of his life, including how he would be a bearer of God’s peace in a broken world.
It was only a few years after moving to Bristol that he opened his first orphanage. Though he did so out of a desire to be used by God to care for children left destitute and in need, his primary motivation was “that God might be magnified by the fact that the orphans under my care are provided with all they need, only by prayer and faith, without any one being asked by me or my fellow-laborers.” It wasn’t long before one home became two, quickly followed by three, then property outside of town where a full orphanage was built from the ground up. Ultimately, five such orphan houses would be built during George’s lifetime, all of them funded through faith, without asking directly for money or going into debt. Even today, this work continues as part of The George Müller Charitable Trust, which still works with vulnerable children, as well as training missionaries for the field and resourcing ministry through Bible classes.
George once wrote, “There was a day when I died, utterly died; died to George Müller, his opinions, preferences, tastes, and will; died to the world, its approval or censure; died to the approval or blame even of my brethren and friends; and since then I have studied to show myself approved only to God.”
(You can find more about George Müller in his autobiography, The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller, where much of this story was taken from.)
Michael Benson is the NAB communications director.