The Cedar of Bristol

In 1836, George Müller opened his first orphanage in Bristol, England, with nothing but prayer and an empty bank account. He never once asked a human being for money. Every meal, every pair of shoes, every coal delivery arrived through what he called "the faithful hand of the Living God." Over the decades, he cared for more than ten thousand orphans — all funded by prayer alone.

What astonishes most people is what happened next. At seventy years old, when most men of his era were long retired or buried, Müller set out on a seventeen-year preaching tour that covered over two hundred thousand miles across forty-two countries. He preached to three million people. His journals from those years overflow with the same morning-and-evening rhythm the psalmist describes — declaring God's steadfast love at dawn, rehearsing His faithfulness by night.

When Müller died at ninety-two, a friend remarked that he seemed more alive in his final decade than in his first. He was, in the language of Psalm 92, a cedar of Lebanon planted in the courts of the Almighty — still green, still bearing fruit, still full of sap.

The psalm's promise is not that old age will be easy. It is that those planted deep in the faithfulness of the Lord will never stop flourishing. Their roots hold. Their branches reach. And their fruit declares what Müller's entire life declared: the Most High is upright, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.