the Lord to teach me a truth,
irrespective of human instrumentality, as far as I know, the benefit of
which I have not lost, though now, while preparing the fifth edition for
the press, more than fourteen years have since passed away. The point is
this: I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and primary
business to which I ought to attend every day was, to have my soul happy
in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was 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 might be nourished. For
I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to
benefit believers, I might seek to relieve the distressed, I might in
other ways seek to behave myself as it becomes a child of God in this
world; and yet, not being happy in the Lord, and not being nourished and
strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended
to in a right spirit. 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 myself in the morning. Now, 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, that thus my heart might be
comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed; and that thus, by
means of the word of God, whilst meditating on it, my heart might be
brought into experimental communion with the Lord.

I began therefore to meditate on the New Testament from the beginning,
early in the morning. The first thing I did, after having asked in a few
words 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 the public ministry of the
word, not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon, but
for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul. The result I have found
to be almost invariably this, that after a very 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 into 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 on,