George Muller was not a likely candidate for faith. As a young man in Germany, he was a thief, a liar, and a heavy drinker. He stole from his own father, cheated his friends, and was even jailed briefly for fraud. When his father sent him to the University of Halle to study divinity, it was merely because being a pastor seemed like an easy living - neither father nor son had any genuine spiritual aspirations.
Of the nine hundred divinity students at Halle, Muller later estimated that maybe nine actually feared the Lord. He was certainly not among them.
A Saturday Evening That Changed Everything
Then in November 1825, a friend invited him to a Saturday evening prayer meeting at a private home. Muller hesitated - would these serious Christians accept someone like him? But curiosity won out.
What he found amazed him. "When I got there," he wrote, "a young man was on his knees, asking for a blessing... I had never seen anyone on his knees before."
They read the Bible. They sang. They prayed. Someone read from a printed sermon. "No sooner had I heard this," Muller later testified, "than it was to me as if I had found something after which I had been seeking all my life long."
The Turning Point of a Lifetime
That Saturday evening became the turning point of his life. "I have no doubt that He began a work of grace in me. Even though I scarcely had any knowledge of who God truly was, that evening was the turning point in my life."
From that transformed beginning, George Muller would go on to care for over 10,000 orphans in Bristol, England - all without ever asking anyone for money. He received over one million pounds through prayer alone, becoming one of history's greatest examples of radical trust in God's provision.