It's unfortunate that George Mueller is not a household name, considering all the good he did for thousands of parentless children on the streets of London in the middle of the 19th century.   

The orphanages that God raised up through Mueller's faith were started with only two shillings (50 cents) but as he prayed - believe it or not without making his needs known - slowly but surely the buildings were built to feed and house orphans for sixty years.

How did this happen, you ask? Curiously, Mueller credits his habit of scripture reading.

I believe that the one chief reason that I have been kept in happy useful service is that I have been a lover of Holy Scripture.

It has been my habit to read the Bible through four times a year; in a prayerful spirit, to apply it to my heart, and practice what I find there. I have been for sixty-nine years a happy man; happy, happy, happy." 

Forget four times. Try once in 2012. Baby steps. Here are some questions to keep you focused and to increase your understanding of what you are reading.

1. What do these words actually mean?

2. What light do other scriptures through on this text? Where and how does it fit in the total biblical revelation?

3. What truths does it teach about God, and about man in relation to God?

4. How are these truths related to the saving work of Christ, and what light does the gospel of Christ throw on them?

5. What experiences do these truths delineate, or explain, or seek to create or cure? For what practical purpose do they stand in Scripture?

6. How do they apply to myself and others in our own actual situation? To what present human condition do they speak, and what are they telling us to believe and do?

From A QUEST FOR GODLINESS by J. I. Packer, page 105

I am standing in the wings of a theatre waiting for my cue to go on stage. As I stand there I can hear the play proceeding, and suddenly it dawns on me that the lines I have learned are not in this play at all, but belong to quite a different one.

Panic seizes me; I wonder frenziedly what I should do. Then I get my cue. Stumbling, falling over the unfamiliar scenery, I make my way on to the stage, and there look for guidance to the prompter, whose head I can just see rising out of the floor-boards.

Alas, he only signals helplessly to me, and I realize that of course his script is different from mine. I begin to speak my lines, but they are incomprehensible to the other actors and abhorrent to the audience, who begin to hiss and shout: "Get off the stage!" "Let the play go on!" You're interrupting!"

I am paralyzed and can think of nothing to do but to go on standing there and speaking my lines that don't fit. The only lines I know.

Now that you have a taste of his writing from volume one of his two volume set titled CHRONICLES OF WASTED TIME, you can get your  fill by searching used books online for anything the man wrote. Trust me, it will not be a waste of time!

Perhaps Muggeridge's way with words is most masterfully seen in his descriptions of the people he encounted. Take G. K. Chesterton of ORTHODOXY fame:

As a schoolboy my father took me to a dinner at a Soho restaurant at which G. K. Chesterton was being entertained.....as far as I was concerned, it was an occasion of inconceivable glory.

I observed with fascination the enormous bulk of the guest of honor...

One blogger lists Chesterton at 6’4" and weighing "about 300 pounds, usually with a cigar in his mouth, walking around wearing a cape and a crumpled hat, tiny glasses pinched to the end of his nose, swordstick in hand, laughter blowing through his moustache." You get the idea. Muggeridge continues....

...his great stomach and plump hands; how his pince-nez on a black ribbon were almost lost in the vast expanse of his face, and how when he delivered himself of what he considered to be a good remark he had a way of blowing into his moustache with a sound like and expiring balloon.

His speech, if he made one, was lost on me, but I vividly recall how I persuaded my father to wait outside the restaurant while we watched the great man make his way down in the street in a billowing black cloak and old-style bohemian hat with a large brim.

I only saw him once again. That was years later, shortly before he died, when on a windy afternoon he was sitting outside the Ship Hotel at Brighton, and clutching to himself a thriller in a yellow jacket. It, too, like the pince-nez, seemed minute by comparison with his immensity. By that time, the glory of the earlier occasion had departed.

Hilarious and "ouch" at the same time. Regardless of Muggeridge's seeming dismissal of the man, one can hardly deny the skill and deft of language with which Chesterton is dispatched.