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.
Interpretation
A lack of engagement with spiritual texts and practices leads to diminished desire for them.
George Muller's quote suggests a cyclical relationship between reading the Word of God and the desire to engage with it. When individuals neglect to read scripture, their interest in doing so wanes, which in turn affects their prayer life; this pattern illustrates the importance of maintaining spiritual habits to foster a deeper connection with faith.
In practice
During a sermon about the importance of prayer, this quote can highlight the necessity of consistent spiritual practice.
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 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.
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.
Through the Rosary the faithful receive abundant grace, as though from the very hands of the Mother of the Redeemer.
Missionary work isn't the only thing we need to do in this big, wide, wonderful Church. But almost everything else we need to do depends on people first hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ and coming into the faith. ... With all that there is to do along the path to eternal life, we need a lot more missionaries opening that gate and helping people through it.
It has come to be a dreadfully common belief in the Christian Church that the only man who has a βcallβ is the man who devotes all his time to what is called βthe ministry,β whereas all Christian service is ministry, and every Christian has a call to some kind of ministry or another.
Germany has an established and well-furnished Catholicism, often with employed Catholics who handle the church like a labor union. For them, the church is simply the employer.
To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule- it is a failure to treat God as God.
I am a Christian. He who answers thus has declared everything at once-his country, profession, family; the believer belongs to no city on earth but to the heavenly Jerusalem.
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