If honest of heart and uprightness before God were lacking or if I did not patiently wait on God for instruction, or if I preferred the counsel of my fellow-men to the declarations of the Word of God, I made great mistakes.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of integrity, seeking divine guidance, and prioritizing spiritual truth over human opinion to avoid mistakes.
George Muller highlights the crucial alignment of honesty and uprightness in one's heart with the direction from God. He warns that neglecting these virtues and choosing human advice over divine instruction can lead to significant errors in judgment. This statement reflects the broader principle that true wisdom comes from a sincere relationship with the divine and a commitment to moral integrity over societal pressures.
In practice
During a church sermon about trusting divine guidance over human advice.
A child rightly trained may be a world-wide blessing, with an influence reaching onward to eternal years. But a neglected or misdirected directed child may live to blight and blast mankind, and leave influences of evil which shall roll on in increasing volume till they plunge into the gulf of eternal perdition.
The longer I live, the more I am enabled to realize that I have but one life to live on Earth, and that this one life is but a brief life, for sowing, in comparison with eternity, for reaping.
The less we read the Word of God, the less we desire to read it, and the less we pray, the less we desire to pray.
The Lord never lays more on us, in the way of chastisement, than our state of heart makes needful; so that whilst He smites with the one hand, He supports with the other.
I desire many things concerning myself; but I desire nothing so much, as to have a heart filled with love to the Lord. I long for a warm personal attachment to Him.
The vigor of our spiritual life will be in exact proportion to the place held by the Bible in our life and thoughts.
Things that I felt absolutely sure of but a few years ago, I do not believe now. This thought makes me see more clearly how foolish it would be to expect all men to agree with me.
Don't fool yourself that you are going to have it all. You are not. Psychologically, having it all is not even a valid concept. The marvelous thing about human beings is that we are perpetually reaching for the stars. The more we have, the more we want. And for this reason, we never have it all.
If I'm an ass, I should say so. If I don't, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them.
You have to trust yourself, not research. Not testing. Testing helps, but you have to trust your own taste. If your taste says something isn't any good, don't let research rationalize that out of its own truth.
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.