Open Your Mouth Wide

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.” — Psalm 81:10 (ESV)

By the mid-1830s, Müller was living in Bristol, a big industrial city, and he kept running into the same sad thing. Everywhere he looked, Christians he knew were exhausted and afraid about money. A man working sixteen hours a day too worn out to pray. Older believers terrified of ending up in the poorhouse. People stuck in jobs they couldn’t do with a clear conscience, too scared of losing their income to leave. They all technically believed God would provide. None of them lived like it.

Müller wanted to hand them proof. Not another sermon — proof they could see with their own eyes. And he had an idea for what that proof could be: he would care for orphans, one of the most desperate needs in that city, and he would do it entirely by prayer, asking no human being for a penny. If a poor man like him could feed and house parentless children with nothing but prayer and faith, then every doubting believer would have something visible to point to and say, God really does still answer.

He’s scrupulously honest about his own motives here, and it’s worth watching him check himself. He prayed for days that if this idea was really just his own ego dressed up as ministry, God would take the thought away entirely. He examined his heart again and again. He went to a friend and openly asked him to probe for any hidden pride or wrong motive. He wanted to be sure this was God’s idea and not George Müller’s ambition. Only when it survived all that questioning did he move forward.

There was a face behind the plan, too. Müller had heard of a poor orphan boy who’d been coming to one of his schools and seemed genuinely to be turning toward God — and then was sent away to a distant poorhouse, and grieved that he could no longer come. That boy stuck with him. It wasn’t only a grand theological point about faith; it was children with nowhere to go.

Then came the moment he built everything on. Reading his Bible in December 1835, he was struck by one line: “Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.” He took God at his word. He didn’t ask small. He asked for a building, for a thousand pounds, and for the right people to come and care for the children. A thousand pounds, when he personally had almost nothing.

Two days later, the first shilling came in. One shilling, against a thousand-pound prayer. Most people would be discouraged. Müller wasn’t, because the point was never the size of the first gift. The point was whether God had said to open his mouth wide — and he was sure God had.

Here’s what’s for you in this. Müller’s two instincts look like opposites but aren’t. He asked God for something enormous — and he interrogated his own heart ruthlessly to make sure he wasn’t just chasing his own glory. Big faith and brutal honesty about your motives belong together. Plenty of people dream huge dreams and never ask whether the dream is really about them. Plenty of others are so afraid of pride that they never ask God for anything worth mentioning.

One thing to do: write down one thing you’d genuinely ask God for if you believed he could do it — something bigger than you’d normally dare. Then do the Müller test: sit with it and ask honestly whether it’s about God and other people, or mostly about you. Keep it only if it survives the question. Then start asking.