I've been doing a lot of thinking about the non-public worship life of the worship leader. It's so easy for anyone who leads in any dimension of public ministry to develop a highly functional approach to scripture and prayer. (i.e. I approach them with an immediate need to get something out of this for someone else, etc.) The challenge is to move from what I call an "extraction" to an "immersion" paradigm. How do we encounter Word and Spirit in a deeply immersive fashion? I like the way George Mueller gets at it in this quote.

“Before this time my practice had been, at least for ten years previously, as an habitual thing, to give myself to prayer after having dressed in the morning. Now, I saw that the most important thing was to give myself to reading God’s Word, and to meditate on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed….

This first thing I did, after having asked in a few words of the Lord’s blessing upon his precious Word, was to begin to meditate on the Word of God, searching as it were into every verse to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of public ministry, but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul.

The result I have found to be almost invariably this, that after a few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication; so that, though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less to prayer. When thus I have been for a while making confession or intercession or supplication, or have given thanks, I go on to the next words or verse, turning all, as I go, into prayer for myself or others, as the Word may lead to it, but still continually keeping before me that food for my own soul is the object of my meditation. The result of this is that…my inner man almost invariably is even sensibly nourished and strengthened…”

The Journal of George Mueller

Spring 1841, Bristol England

ht to worship frequency blog for the quote.