Yesterday was the 204th anniversary of the birth of George Müller (September 27, 1805–March 10, 1898). I haven’t read much of Müller, but I’ve come back to this section quoted in Desiring God (Amazon | Logos) many times.

While I was staying at Nailsworth, it pleased 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 . . . more than forty 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 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, whilst meditating, 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 or 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 awhile 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, 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 there is always a good deal of confession, thanksgiving, supplication, or intercession mingled with my meditation, and that my inner man almost invariably is even sensibly nourished and strengthened and that by breakfast time, with rare exceptions, I am in a peaceful if not happy state of heart. Thus also the Lord is pleased to communicate unto me that which, very soon after, I have found to become food for other believers, though it was not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word that I gave myself to meditation, but for the profit of my own inner man.

The difference between my former practice and my present one is this. Formerly, when I rose, I began to pray as soon as possible, and generally spent all my time till breakfast in prayer, or almost all the time. At all events I almost invariably began with prayer. . . . But what was the result? I often spent a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, or even an hour on my knees, before being conscious to myself of having derived comfort, encouragement, humbling of soul, etc.; and often after having suffered much from wandering of mind for the first ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, or even half an hour, I only then began really to pray.

I scarcely ever suffer now in this way. For my heart being nourished by the truth, being brought into experimental fellowship with God, I speak to my Father, and to my Friend (vile though I am, and unworthy of it!) about the things that He has brought before me in His precious Word.

It often now astonished me that I did not sooner see this. In no book did I ever read about it. No public ministry ever brought the matter before me. No private intercourse with a brother stirred me up to this matter. And yet now, since God has taught me this point, it is as plain to me as anything, that the first thing the child of God has to do morning by morning is to obtain food for his inner man.

As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time, except we take food, and as this is one of the first things we do in the morning, so it should be with the inner man. We should take food for that, as every one must allow. Now what is the food for the inner man: not prayer, but the Word of God: and here again not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts. . . .

I dwell so particularly on this point because of the immense spiritual profit and refreshment I am conscious of having derived from it myself, and I affectionately and solemnly beseech all my fellow-believers to ponder this matter. By the blessing of God I ascribe to this mode the help and strength which I have had from God to pass in peace through deeper trials in various ways than I had ever had before; and after having now above forty years tried this way, I can most fully, in the fear of God, commend it. How different when the soul is refreshed and made happy early in the morning, from what is when, without spiritual preparation, the service, the trials and the temptations of the day come upon one! (155–57)

Much good advice here.

In honor of Müller’s life, Logos Bible Software has put together a 12-volume collection of books by and about Müller. It’s available on Community Pricing, which means that users get to set the price. It could be a great way to pick up some quality out-of-print volumes on a man who modeled faith in a way that few have before or after. If enough people bid, the price for all 12 volumes could be comparable to one or two volumes in print.

Though most people don’t know (or care when told), the correct character to use for a range of numbers is the en dash (–), not the hyphen (-). Even if you’re committed to using en dashes between digits, hyphens are a tad easier to type,¹ making a find and replace necessary at some point. If you’re diligent and use the en dash faithfully, you will undoubtedly get a rogue hyphen in there somewhere if you do any copying and pasting from the internet or other documents that don’t consistently use the correct character.

A simple find and replace (- for –) would do the trick—if you wanted to replace all hyphens with en dashes. But you don’t want to do this, since hyphens in hyphenated words are correct. :) Alternatively, you could run that query but, instead of replacing them all at once, replace one at a time only the ones that appear between digits. But this could be time consuming on a large document like a dissertation. Another option would be to set up a query to find 0-0 and replace it with 0–0, then 0-1 with 0–1 and so forth, but that would require 100 different searches and probably take longer than the previous method! The previous method could probably be simplified by dropping the second digit since there aren’t likely to be any instances when you’d have a digit followed by a hyphen not followed by another digit. That would make only 10 find-and-replace queries. So this is as least doable, though still not ideal.

Fortunately, there is a better solution than any of these.

What we want to do is find any single digit followed by a hyphen followed by another single digit and replace the hyphen with an en dash, leaving the digits unchanged. I tried to use the special digit character, ^#, and came up with a query like find ^#-^# and replace it with ^#–^#, but this didn’t work because ^# is not valid in the replace field.

I knew there had to be a way to do it, but I couldn’t figure it out. So I went to Google and found my answer in just a minute or two.

Here’s what you do:

1. In the “Find what” field, enter ([0-9])-([0-9]).
2. In the “Replace with” field, enter \1–\2 (note that that’s an en dash, not a hyphen).
3. Check the box “Use wildcards.”
4. Click “Replace All.”

That’s it. Much easier than any of the other methods. See the article for more details and an explanation of the search syntax.

Footnotes

1. To type an en dash in Word, you can either use the default key combination Ctrl + – (the one on the keypad) or create your own shortcut. My shortcut is Ctrl + – (the one on the main part of the keyboard). ↩

CrossOver Mac is one of the several ways to run Windows applications on a Mac. The advantage that it has over Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, or Boot Camp is that it doesn’t require a copy of Windows. The downside is that not all applications will work.

CrossOver Linux is a customized, commercial version of Wine, the popular software that allows you to run many Windows applications on Linux (e.g., Ubuntu, et al.).

On October 28, 2008, the folks at CodeWeavers are making either of these products—in its downloadable, professional version—free of charge for one day only (though I successfully downloaded it tonight at at 8:00 PM PST).

Here’s what they say,

We are giving away all of our software for free on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008. This is a fully working, fully supported copy of either CrossOver Mac Professional, or CrossOver Linux Professional. No hooks, tricks, timebombs, or gimmicks: it’s the real deal.

Here’s how to get it:

1. Go to http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/free/ and enter your email address. You’ll receive a serial number via email.
2. Go to http://register.codeweavers.com/ and enter your serial number. You’ll receive an email with instructions on how to log in and download your software.
3. Go to http://www.codeweavers.com/account/, change your password, and go to My Downloads and download the appropriate trial version of the software.
4. Install the trial software and unlock it within the application with your email address and password to upgrade it to the full professional version.

At the My Downloads page, you’ll read this note:

Due to high demand during the Lame Duck Free Day, we have temporarily disabled the unlocked builds normally available on this page.

At this time we are offering downloads of our trial version available from our world wide network of mirrors. Please be aware that the trial version can be unlocked to the full version from within the software itself. So you are not missing out on any features this way.

Once the traffic returns to normal levels you can return to this page at anytime if you still wish to download the fully unlocked builds.

I can verify that downloading the trial version and unlocking it from within the application does successfully upgrade it to the full professional version, though it took a few minutes for the registration to go through. Be patient.

Find out why they are giving it away and other pertinent details at The Unofficial Apple Weblog or in the official Codeweavers press release.

HT: Karl Kleinpaste

Google’s new audio indexing, GAudi, looks very promising. Finally the ability to find what you’re looking for in audio or video without listening to the whole thing! This has huge potential for sermons and lectures and could really make audio and video more accessible sources for academic research.

I wish I had access to this technology when I was running down this quote.

Check it out: http://labs.google.com/gaudi.

Read more:

• TechCrunch: “Google Launches Audio Indexing”
• ReadWriteWeb: “Google Audio Indexing: Keyword Searches for Political Videos”
• Google Blog: “Google Audio Indexing now on Google Labs”

I’ve seen several treatments of the problem of evil around the blogosphere recently.

• Interview with John Frame on the Problem of Evil
  Andy Naselli at Between Two Worlds
• The Logical and Emotional Problems of Evil
  Andy Naselli at his Theology blog
• The Problem of Evil, Suffering, and Pain
  C. Michael Patton at Parchment and Pen
• The Problem of Evil with John MacArthur
  Chris Larson at the Ligonier Ministries Blog

They all look worth a read or listen.

Dan Phillips, who blogs at Biblical Christianity and Pyromaniacs, emailed me about a month ago and asked me about making Henry Alford’s The Greek Testament: With a Critically Revised Text; a Digest of Various Readings; Marginal References to Verbal and Idiomatic Usage; Prolegomena; and a Critical and Exegetical Commentary available for Libronix. In that email he told me that “John Piper names it as the one he always consults.” Recently I asked him if he knew the source for Piper’s statement. He didn’t, but said he’d do some hunting. He asked his blog readers for help, and it was Pilgrim Mommy to the rescue.

I think it might be . . . during the Q&A at the end of Piper’s talk on John Owen.

I just listened to the end of Piper’s biographical lecture on Owen, and here’s what he says in the Q&A in response to a question about commentaries that he finds helpful:

When I’m stumped with a . . . grammatical or syntactical or logical flow [question] in Paul, I go to Henry Alford. Henry Alford . . . comes closer more consistently than any other human commentator to asking my kinds of questions. (John Piper, “John Owen: The Chief Design of My Life—Mortification and Universal Holiness,” 1:30:11–1:30:31.)¹

Mystery solved. Thanks, Pilgrim Mommy.

If you like Alford and would like to have it in the best digital format, you can pre-order it for only $129.95. It’s out of print, hard to obtain, and will cost you 2 to 3 times that much for the print volumes.

Also, his The New Testament for English Readers is available on Community Pricing and with enough bids could go for $16 or less.

Read Dan’s post at the Pyromaniacs blog for more on Alford.

Footnotes

1. I actually have three different versions of this audio, all of which are different lengths. The time above is from the latest version of the audio on the Desiring God website. ↩