It can be fun to traffic in the abstract, but sooner or later I want something that’s actually going to make an impact.

So here it is – – – > the most practical, relevant, and vital thing you must do every day:

*The daily reading, pondering, praying through, tasting and digesting the Word of God is VITAL! Cultivating an addiction to the Word of God is indispensable to the preservation and cultivation of human life. You must feed your soul on Scripture daily or else your soul will suffocate on self-obsession. To live without the Word of God would be like a marathon runner attempting to run 26.2 miles without food, water, or air.

Satan will attempt to distract us from the plain, simple, and staggeringly profound truth – that habitually glutting our souls on Scripture is the most important activity we engage in as human beings.

This fact was recently solidified in my heart and mind via the last portion of chapter 5 – of Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (by John Piper), where there is a lengthy quotation by George Müeller on the all-important habit of daily feeding your inner man on Scripture (i.e. SOUL FOOD!).

Here is an excerpt from the Müeller quote:

“As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time unless he eats, so it is with the inner man. What is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the Word of God. Not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe. No, we must consider what we read, ponder over it, and apply it to our hearts.  The vigor of our spiritual life will be in exact proportion to the place held by the Bible in our life and thoughts. I see, with ever-increasing clarity – that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day is, to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about is not, how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man may be nourished…I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it. …In what way shall we attain to this settled happiness of soul? How shall we learn to enjoy God? How obtain such an all-sufficient soul-satisfying portion in him as shall enable us to let go the things of this world as vain and worthless in comparison? I answer, This happiness is to be obtained through the study of the Holy Scriptures. God has therein revealed Himself unto us in the face of Jesus Christ.” ” 

More from Müeller:

“Oh, this is a reality, not a fable, that the Lord Jesus Christ is our friend. And we should not be satisfied till we are brought to this.”  #1Pet.1:8

“When sight ceases, it is the time for faith to work. The greater the difficulties, the easier it is for faith. As long as human possibilities for success remain, faith does not accomplish things as easily as when all natural prospects fail.”

“As to the other means of grace, I would say, I fell into the snare into which so many young believers fall, the reading of religious books in preference to the Scriptures. I read tracts, missionary papers, sermons, and biographies of godly persons. I never had been at any time of my life in the habit of reading the Holy Scriptures. When under fifteen years of age, I occasionally read a little of them at school; afterwards God’s precious book was entirely laid aside, so that I never read one single chapter of it till it pleased God to begin a work of grace in my heart. Now the scriptural way of reasoning would have been: God himself has consented to be an author, and I am ignorant about that precious book, which his Holy Spirit has caused to be written through the instrumentality of his servants, and it contains that which I ought to know, the knowledge of which will lead me to true happiness; therefore I ought to read again and again this most precious book of books, most earnestly, most prayerfully, and with much meditation; and in this practice I ought to continue all the days of my life. But instead of acting thus, my difficulty in understanding it, and the little enjoyment I had in it, made me careless of reading it; and thus, like many believers, I practically preferred, for the first four years of my divine life, the works of uninspired men to the oracles of the living God. The consequence was, that I remained a babe, both in knowledge and grace.”

“I have reason to believe, from what I have seen among the children of God, that many of their trials arise either from want of confidence in the Lord as it regards temporal things, or from carrying on their business in an unscriptural way.”