by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Hi Keith! Here’s a question about something that’s been bothering me for quite a while. I’ve been a minister for over ten years. For most of that time, I have felt very fulfilled even though I’ve worked really hard in the many roles of being a pastor, a preacher, a counselor, a visitor to the sick, etc. But for the past year or so, this feeling of resentment is creeping into my life, especially when I’ve had a really busy week and somebody asks me to add one more thing to my schedule. I’m praying about it to find out what it might mean, and I wanted to ask, have you ever felt similar feelings in your work?
Well, I’m glad you brought that up. I became aware that I had feelings of resentment toward people I’ve felt called to “serve” one morning while I was in another town (away from home), visiting a pastor friend of mine. It started very early that morning, when he came to my motel to pick me up.
“Good morning!” he said—too brightly, it seemed to me—“Did you get a good night’s sleep?”
I just looked at him for a few seconds as he walked past me into my motel room. He had to be kidding. This man had brought me back to the motel after midnight from the meeting with college kids, after the reception, after the big meeting in the church’s sanctuary…which had come on the heels of a small dinner party. I had arrived in town about five o’clock from an all-day flight, following some similar marathon-type church meetings the week before. Just before he said good night at the motel he had announced that at 6:30 the next morning he was picking me up to take me to an “informal breakfast” he had arranged where I was to speak to about forty men. I was so tired that I felt a little sick at my stomach.
Actually, I like the man who was standing there talking to me. He is a great guy and I think he is honest, courageous, and a deeply committed Christian minister. But something was definitely wrong between us. Then I recognized my feeling—resentment, raw resentment, and I had not even been able to admit it consciously. I was mad at myself, too, for letting him get me into all this. I recalled telling him over the telephone before I came that I was very tired and had three strenuous days of meetings immediately following my stop off with him and I was looking forward to a visit with him. He had called back and said he planned a gathering for me to get acquainted with a “few of the people” who had been involved in small groups in his church. But the real purpose of my stopping, as I had understood it, was so that the minister and I could have some time to hang out.
The intimate dinner party was pleasant, but there was a large crowd of more than a hundred people at the meeting after dinner. I was happy to speak with them since I have always tried to help small groups develop. Then after I spoke, there were thirty minutes of direct questions—followed by two later “unscheduled” meetings. To have refused to speak again would have seemed to me at that time to be un-Christian, even though I was exhausted. I guess I had expected him to “protect me” or say “no” for me, but since he did not, I was resentful and was mad at myself too. Why was I angry, though? Everything had gone well, and I am committed to witnessing, to giving my life to Christ and His people. We didn’t have any time to visit—which was what I thought was the purpose of our meeting. I woke up resenting this fine minister and the group of people I spoke to, and I was not sure why. And as I stumbled to the next city to meet with a group of pastors, I was still wondering why I was so upset since my purpose was to love people and help them.
During one session of the pastors’ conference the day after I left my friends’ marathon meeting, I asked each of the participants to write on a slip of paper their most pressing problem as a person in being a minister. Going through the slips, I was surprised to find that one of their main problems was resentment toward the people in their churches. Some felt that the members used them in thoughtless ways which they would not think of using a business associate. Some thought their people had tried to extract every ounce of work they could out of their pastor for the smallest possible salary. There were many other problems, but they added up to a feeling that they were not being treated as persons but were being used as religious equipment.
And then it hit me that although I was a layman in business most of the time, I was as much a professional religionist as these pastors, and I was getting a small taste of that which many ministers live with constantly. People—many of whom love the minister dearly—thoughtlessly make extra demands and set up situations in which he or she either has to participate or appear to be selfish and un-Christian. The pastor in this trap often goes along, wanting to be God’s servant. But because ministers become exhausted and the expectations are unreasonable, he or she begins to feel depressed—beyond mere physical exhaustion. And there may come a strange tightening in the stomach when additional meetings are called or added “duties” are dumped into his or her lap. What I had seen in my own experience was that these symptoms resulted from a repressed resentment of the very people I had flown a thousand miles to love for God’s sake. It was terrible but true.
I saw that my problem as a professional was that I was still too concerned with my own feelings of happiness and satisfaction. I realized that I lacked a sort of divine disinterest in how I am treated. But on the other hand, I saw that we laymen are often “people eaters” in our own churches in that we devour the personal life and creative love of our pastors and spokesmen by the way we use them and fail to think about them with the care we would a friend. And the strange thing is that we never know what we are doing to them on the inside. Some of them resent us for it, but because they have been trained that such resentment indicates self-centeredness in a Christian, they must repress it. So, many ministers become discouraged, burned out, sick (physically or emotionally), or leave the ministry. And they feel guilty and bitter. (Of course many others are evidently emotionally wired for ceaseless activity and find their fulfillment in going constantly.)
But I now realize that my problem, as a layman, is that I have not been aware of the suffering of ministers—which means I have not loved them enough to be sensitive to their needs.
In my own case, as a traveling speaker, I had to make a new beginning by confessing to God my resentment and frustration. I realized that a good bit of the problem that night was mine for not establishing concrete limits and boundaries ahead of time and staying roughly within them. This I can try to do in the future in order to have an intelligent ministry when I travel.
When I got home from that trip, I examined our attitudes in our home church and was appalled at what I saw. We seem to expect our ministers to run the church with fewer staff people than we would dream of allocating to an executive in a business venture of comparable size. We say we love our ministers and are very grateful for them. But somehow we often do not really look at their needs the way we do those of “normal people.”
It seems that I am so interested in my own hopes, dreams, and projects that I have used, unconsciously, other people to the limit—and yet I could not really recognize the extent of my own selfish tendency to use others…until it happened to me.
“Tell me how much you know of the sufferings of your fellow men and I will tell you how much you have loved them.[1]
Helmut Thielicke
Our Heavenly Father
“The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‘renouncing’ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ in the usual meaning of the words. Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worthwhile is action—faithful action, for the world, and in God. Before one can see that and live by it, there is a sort of threshold to cross, or a reversal to be made in what appears to be men’s general habit of thought; but once that gesture has been made, what freedom is yours, freedom to work, and to love! I have told you more than once that my life is now possessed by this ‘disinterest’ which I feel to be growing on me, while at the same time the deep-seated appetite that calls me to all that is real at the heart of the real, continues to grow stronger.”[2]
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Letters from a Traveller
Lord, forgive me. I was so intent on being treated well myself that I failed to see how thoughtless I have been in using the speakers I invite to visit our town because I want to share them with my friends. And I see in a hundred ways how I subtly use others to further my plans, and then send them on their way without realizing how they may feel. Thank You that it is not too late to look around and try to be more sensitive to the people with whom I work and live. Please give me the insight, the desire, and the strength to change. In Jesus’ name, amen.
For the minister in me:
“Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Philippians 2:3-11
For the layman in me:
“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ… Let him who is taught the word share all good things with him who teaches… So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.”
Galatians 6:2, 6, 10
[1] Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1960), p. 160.
[2] Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Letters from a Traveller (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1962), p. 160.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Our teenaged son went to a summer camp a normal, interesting kid who was only interested in football (and I assume, sex). But when he got home last week he was a religious freak, spouting Bible verses out of context with his eyes shining like his team had just won state. I’m a church going Christian and we’ve prayed he’d do the same. But as you once said to me, about another matter, we must have “over-prayed.” What can we do?
A funny thing happened years ago at our house. Kristin, our then teenage daughter, had been learning to drive. She has always been a very alert girl, always aware of where we are and where we are going when we are out driving. I am not. I often drive for blocks past a turn-off, with my mind a thousand miles away. But Kristin was the one who often sat beside me and whispered, “This next block is our turn, Daddy.” She knew our town with her eyes closed.
But when she got behind the wheel for the first time in traffic, it was as if we were in a new city: “Do I turn here, Daddy” . . . Is this the right street?”
I was amazed and thought at first she was teasing me. But then I saw that she was not. A town that she had known like the back of her hand as a passenger became a strange and foreign place when she became responsible for the minute-by-minute decisions of driving. She had to look for a whole new set of objects and distances. She had to see cars backing out of driveways, puppy dogs and children starting for the street, vehicles at intersections, all kinds of street signs, in addition to everything behind her in the rearview mirror. With all of these new things on which to focus—which had heretofore been only a part of the background—she felt as if she were in a different world.
I started to fuss at her and tell her to “Pay attention to what you are doing!” Then I realized that she was very serious and was paying attention. But she was experiencing a reorientation in the same situation because of trying to focus on different elements of her environment. So I said nothing and kept telling myself it was the end result of her training which was important.
As we drove along, I began to understand why it may be that newly committed Christians sometimes appear to be sort of “out of it.” For a while, they seem to be like new drivers behind the wheel—in a kind of daze in which the world they have known appears to be totally different. Because of accepting the responsibility of a new relationship with God and focusing on loving him and his people, they seem to be unaware of things and people to whom they once paid attention quite naturally. Many ministers or relatives are hurt and surprised when a church member gets “turned on” at some sort of non-denominational renewal meeting and begins paying less attention to them while focusing on new Christian friends. They suspect that the new commitment was to a cult of some sort of self-centered pietists. The temptation is to be very judgmental of people experiencing this reorientation.
I do not know how one really ought to handle this situation. But by the end of the week (in our car) I noticed that Kristin knew where she was again. And now she is a much better driver than her father and effortlessly includes both the old things she used to see . . . and the new things she needed to see to grow up and get on down the road.
When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is. When we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.
Goethe[1] as quoted in Psychological Foundations of Education
In training a horse, it is important not to break his spirit because it is his spirit, during and after the training period, which will determine his style and endurance. Does education, we may ask, allow for the expression of the wildness of vitality during the educational process, or does it repress vitality in the interest of form and conformity?
Reuel Howe, The Miracle of Dialogue[2]
A . . . peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which the world often appears to undergo. “An appearance of newness beautifies every object.”
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience[3]
Lord, help us to be patient with new Christians who seem to have lost their perspective as they have entered an “exciting new” relationship with you. If they become temporarily blinded to the ordinary responsibilities and to the old friends—and even to us as parents or pastors—around them, helps us to provide an atmosphere in which this new relationship with you can be tested and translated into deeper relationships with people and you. Help us in the church to trust you enough to let new Christians enjoy the excitement of discovery without our hypercritical judgment—even though there may be some anxious moments about their apparent (or even real) lack of soundness and responsibility. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others mocking said, “They are filled with new wine.” Acts 2:12, 13 NIV
You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. Matthew 5:8 The Message
[1] Morris E. Eson, Psychological Foundations of Education (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), p. 39.
[2] Reuel Howe, The Miracle of Dialogue (Greenwich, CT: The Seabury Press, 1963), p. 93.
[3] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: The Modern Library, 1929), pp. 452,453.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, my question is how in the world did the saints get their inner house clean of all the different inner voices of temptation that argue against doing God’s will, so they could be at peace? My problem is that my inner world has a bunch of different voices wanting me to sin and telling me things like, ‘it’s all right, everyone does this. Don’t be a pious nit-picker.’ When those voices win, I go ahead and make the sarcastic mark to shame my wife (and control her), or I gossip about some one just above me on the company ladder so I can get their job—or act out sexually (either actually or through pornography). My question has two parts: 1) Does every Christian have this problem of almost continual temptation or am I just especially evil and self-centered? And 2) how does a serious committed Christian find a way to clean house so he can have some peace as a Christian?
Wow! That’s a mouth full of question!
When I first became a Christian I was amazed at how hard it was for me to be the clean living, clean thinking person that I was told that really committed Christians were.
Fortunately, a wise older Christian mentor told me that he had wrestled with temptations all his life in despair—until his mentor had told him that there are at least two kinds of Christian.
The first kind seems to be blessed with seeing two choices at a time, praying for guidance and then making the right choice in an increasing number of times. But the second kind of Christian is like me and you, who seem to have all kinds of inner voices (rationalizing a selfish or immoral choice) trying to seduce him or her off the trail and away from God and His will.
The old guy who was telling me this thought a moment and then smiled as he said, “Every day I tried to marshal all the good voices in my head and get them to listen to reason—my reason. I prayed that they (the good voices) would all vote ‘no’ to the temptations I faced and I would avoid the sin that was tempting me. But in some areas involving sex and control in my relationships, I never seemed to get a wide majority of voices, yet I somehow managed to squeak by and avoid the major temptations.” My older friend said he got very discouraged because he could never get a 100% vote for God’s way even though he marshaled enough inner voices to get a majority vote. But one day his spiritual mentor advised him that “all you need to have in following Christ is a majority of one vote—just enough power to make the decision to do God’s will.”
My friend’s mentor told him that if his desire to be God’s person in a tempting situation won the battle by only one vote each day for twenty years, the person would be considered a saint! It’s not getting the negative voices totally subdued and quiet and getting a unanimous decision for God every day—as some Christians imply they do—just a simple majority of one can make any sinner into a saint. And he reminded me that even Jesus argued so hard with God near the end of his life not to go to the cross that he only gave in after sweating blood to make the decision—certainly not the sign of an easy win.
And as time went on, the old man told me, he began to trust that in each area of his life, each time he made a decision for God’s will, he felt more confident in his ability to live for God, and trust God to help him make decisions better in the future.
Paul describes this inner battle in the 7th chapter of Romans. He surrenders by asking as you did, “Who could deliver me from this body of death?” And he answers, “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25)
The other thing I count on to help with the inner battle to do God’s will is the memory of friends in my present and past who have encouraged me—who have heard my worst and yet who love me, affirm me, and reward me for being honest instead of only for being perfect. These new positive voices have become reinforcements to support my own positive inner voices as they oppose my negative inner voices when I’m alone.
Historically, Christians have seen these positive inner voices as a heroic “cloud of witnesses” who love God and accompany us through history, affirming and loving us (see Heb. 12:1). The church has sometimes called such supportive people (living and dead) the communion of saints. And the late Carlyle Marney (1917-1978) spoke of these positive introjected voices as our “balcony people,” who, though physically absent from us, continue to speak to us and nudge us and motivate us. They are the people—like my men’s group and my wife and some saints who don’t even know I’ve put them in my balcony—who are always up there in the balcony of my mind, cheering me on, even when they may not be physically present. They counteract the negative inner voices, tempting me away from doing God’s will. And most days, with their help, God gets the nod.
Lord, thank you that you will always provide a possible way for me to come to the decision to do your will, even as my negative inner voices try to rationalize or justify the temptations that cross my path. Help me to remember to listen to the inner voices, who are your people, living and dead—my own positive ones and those of my balcony people—when I am seized by the urge to drift from your will. And I’m so grateful that when I fail and confess, that you are more than ready to forgive than I am willing to confess. In Jesus’ name, amen.
No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it. 1 Corinthians 10:13 (NIV)
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Hebrews 12:1 (NIV)
Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we’d better get on with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in. Study how he did it. Because he never lost sight of where he was headed—that exhilarating finish in and with God—he could put up with anything along the way: Cross, shame, whatever. And now he’s there, in the place of honor, right alongside God. When you find yourselves flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he plowed through. That will shoot adrenaline into your souls! Hebrews 12:1-2 (The Message)
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, I hesitate to write you about this problem because it seems so ridiculous. But as a Christian, I am bothered continually about whether I am unselfish or not. Several times a day I will ask myself, “Are my motives really pure or is there a little selfishness in this act?” It’s getting so that I hesitate to do and say even kind things because I don’t want to be a hypocrite and I’m not sure if my motives are unselfish or not. Help!
Once when I was going through a period of worrying about my motives, I was reading a book by William Law. In it he said something to the effect that if you don’t know your motives are selfish or not, assume that they are selfish and you will be right a very high percentage of the time. But the point is that my job for God is to surrender my whole life, impure motives and all, because everyone evidently has some impure motives that they can’t even see. We have to ask God to show us where we are ‘impure’, and then get about trying to listen and love people who are lonely, scared or confused and pay attention to them to let them know that God cares for them. Gradually, when I’ve tried to surrender my life to God and ask him to reveal to me where my motives need changing, He has shown me places where I need to change.
Since that time, I have learned that virtually all my motives are at least tainted with selfishness due to the human part of me that wants approval, that wants to “do it right,” and be admired. In fact this almost universal tendency among human beings to put ourselves in the center is one form of what the late William Temple called “Sin.”
Temple said that there is only one Sin (with a capital S) and it is characteristic of every person. That sin is putting one’s self in the center where only God belongs. All other sins (with a small s), like gossip, gluttony, envy, murder, rape, theft, adultery, (among many others), are things we do because we have put ourselves in the center through this Copernican shift. Even if we’ve never committed “sins” that are crimes, when we are in that central position (where only God should be) we become focused on how we “look” to others around us and it is in this place that I’ve found myself many, many times. I still catch myself “painting the best picture” of who I am and what I’m doing. I used to not understand that I was denying or not facing my self-centered motives. Then I read that Jesus confronted the Pharisees for the same kind of denial when he said they could see the tiniest speck of sin in anyone else’s life but couldn’t see the log of the same sin in their own eye.
Realizing that this condition called “Sin” (with a capital S) causes virtually all my motives to be tainted with selfishness, I still didn’t want that seemingly inevitable circumstance to get in the way of my attempts to love God and other people by causing me to hold back until I could act out of pure motives. While perfection is a great concept, and striving for it definitely has a place in clearing up problems in my life, actually achieving perfection in my human situation has been impossible for me. It seems to me that this state of affairs is one of the major reasons God sent his son—because we need to be rescued from our inevitable imperfection.
So although I don’t know about solving the mixed motives dilemma, when impossible questions or problems about my own motives surface, I stop and confess my condition of mixed motives to God. And having made that confession, I try to go on and love people, listen to them and help them, realizing that my motives are always mixed. This has saved me a lot of unproductive worrying time. And it feels better to me to go ahead and help people though not being sure of my motives, than not to help them in order to make sure I am keeping myself clean. So it’s just another leap of faith that I have to make on a regular basis. This is more, I realize, of a confession of having mixed motives rather than a “solution”. But it’s the best I can do right now.
God, I am a totally self-centered you-know-what. I confess it. My worry about my motives has shown me in a subtle way how self-centered I am. Thank you, God, that you sent your son to forgive and to love those of us who see our selfishness, and that you can use people like me with mixed motives to help in the loving and freeing of other people. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
It’s true that some here preach Christ because with me out of the way, they think they’ll step right into the spotlight. But the others do it with the best heart in the world. One group is motivated by pure love, knowing that I am here defending the Message, wanting to help. The others, now that I’m out of the picture, are merely greedy, hoping to get something out of it for themselves. Their motives are bad. They see me as their competition, and so the worse it goes for me, the better—they think—for them.
So how am I to respond? I’ve decided that I really don’t care about their motives, whether mixed, bad, or indifferent. Every time one of them opens his mouth, Christ is proclaimed, so I just cheer them on! And I’m going to keep that celebration going because I know how it’s going to turn out.
Philippians 1:15-21, The Message
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, why has there been so much emphasis in your work about living for Christ on things like relationships, feelings, the problems people have in trying to love God and other people, and in receiving love? In my day we dealt with the great theological ideas and doctrines of the faith. Don’t you think the “mind” and the doctrines have important places anymore?
Yes, I certainly do think training the mind and trying to understand what you believe are both important. But for over 350 years (since the work of French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who died in 1650) many of the scientists, philosophers and psychologists dealing with “man” separated human beings into two distinct parts—mind and body—as if the body and mind did not continually affect each other, either consciously or unconsciously. This was particularly true in the West where scientific determinism[1]has controlled so much of the development of modern medicine. We have practically worshipped abstractions and numbers and doctrines, and theories we consider to be logical but do not come from our experience and are verified by abstract logic. Many theologians brought this separation of the mind and body into their study of Christianity. But the writers of the New Testament did not make this separation. The after life was not a spiritual departure from the separation of the mind from the body. It was the resurrection of the body, mind included.
Both medicine and psychology have since developed a growing conviction that the separation of mind and body does not fit the data. And we know that anxiety can produce stomach ulcers and headaches, etc. It seems that a person’s relationships, feelings, and the sometimes baffling problems of loving and receiving love profoundly affect his or her physical and spiritual health and well-being. Humankind, it seems, does not have a separate mind that “decides” what he or she will believe and then can dictate to the body how he or she will act. One’s entire personality, mind and body, must be in agreement concerning his or her decisions and behavior, or that person may find that the body rebels—he or she cannot sleep, or gets diarrhea, or a knotted stomach, heart trouble or one of a hundred other ailments.
There were many of us who were committed to Jesus’ God who came to believe that this rejection of the separation of the mind and body constituted a great reawakening, since the biblical view of humankind is also that a person is one and not a spirit or mind that inhabits the body. The whole idea of the resurrection of the body seems to be saying that we cannot be “divided” into mind and body separately.
And since Jesus said again and again that our integrity, our behavior in relationships and not our words will truly tell others what we believe, I think that the emphasis on how we Christians live our ideas and doctrines in our relationships is really a return to basic Christianity.
In other words, I think the super emphasis on intellectualized doctrine in the Christian Community that was so prevalent in the early part of the Twentieth century was partly a result of the error of the Descartes split. People thought that if the knew the correct doctrines concerning God and the historical life of Jesus and believed that Jesus died for their sins, they were good Christians. But again and again, Jesus, Paul and the other major players in the gospel story said in different ways that a good Christian is one who puts into practice in his/her life and relationships the love that the scriptures and doctrines describe. And if one claims he is a Christian, but doesn’t love his brothers and sisters, he has missed true Christianity.
I hope that this split is being healed so that we can, under God, become people who can feel and love again as we are in the process of learning to know the content of our Lord’s message.
Thank you for raising this question. Doctrine is important, and I believe either the emphasis on ideas and doctrine on the one hand or feeling and behavior without the other is only a half truth.
Dear Lord, Thank you for the marvelous way you knit each individual together, body, mind and soul. Even as I study Your word, help me to gain knowledge not only of theological ideas and doctrine, but also of how to give and receive love, as you commanded us to do. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love.
1 Jn. 4:7-10, The Message
If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.
1 Cor. 13:1-2, The Message
[1] The philosophical view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by prior events.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Honesty, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith, I am having real trouble. Some time ago I heard you speak about honesty and realized that I have been phony all my life. So I decided to change my ways and began to confess to everyone exactly what I feel regarding them and life. My husband was horrified at some of my past actions (which I confessed) and now we are not speaking. I am telling the truth, compulsively, in fact. But everything is cratering. Please send suggestions!
I am not sure what you heard me say when you heard me speak about confessional honesty, but let me tell you what I intended to say. In the first place, confession of old sins may be healthy and not harm anyone. But there are ways in which thoughtless confession can be very destructive to a relationship. Compulsive confession is a bit like vomiting on someone—it may make the confessor feel good—but it doesn’t do much for the recipient.
Some years ago I spoke about the lack of honesty in my own life at a church group meeting. After the meeting an older man came up and said very thoughtfully, “You really spoke to my condition. I’ve been dishonest for years and I’m going to change.” He seemed to be deeply moved about his decision.
About a month later I got a call and as soon as I picked up I heard two hostile words from the other end of the line: “You bastard!” I was dumbfounded. “Who is this?” I had to ask. It was the man from the meeting. He had gone home and confessed to his wife (among other things) that he had often committed adultery over the years. (A fact she had never suspected.)
“Now,” the voice said, “she’s under the care of a psychiatrist in a mental hospital. Got any more ideas about Christian honesty, Keith?!”
As a result of that encounter I realized, in a way I’ll never forget, that raw honesty is not the highest value in the Christian life and in fact that “honesty” can be a very selfish thing, or even a way to clobber people under the guise of being a good and honest Christian. The highest values for Christians are love and concern, and it may be that one may have to confess some things to God before his pastor or a close Christian brother or sister… and not his or her mate (even though there are things which one can confess to his mate in time which will not destroy the relationship). Alcoholics Anonymous has a marvelous plan to the effect that one confesses his sins to a third party he trusts (not the party he has harmed), and makes restitution to the offended party except when making restitution would hurt that person or someone else.
So although I believe in the therapeutic value of confession before a trusted fellow Christian, I try to be careful not to hurt other people just to “get it off my chest.” And I’ve made plenty of painful mistakes even trying to follow that rule.
Dear Lord, thank you for James’ explanation of why I am to confess my sins—so I can be in helpful and healing relationships with you and with others in my life. Help me to be more loving and sensitive to the feelings of other people with regard to my confessions, so as not to needlessly hurt them just so that I can feel better or “keep the rules.” In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.
James 5:16, The Message
Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.
John 13:35, The Message
God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us.
1 John 4: 17-18, The Message
![How Much is Enough?]()
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith, how much ambition is normal? I have been raised always to be ambitious, to use my talents and abilities to the max and “make something of myself.” But recently someone told me I am focusing too much on getting ahead, and that I’m an overachiever—maybe to the point of being self-destructive. If ambition is normal sometimes, when does it become excessive?
I think that a certain amount of “ambition” is necessary to get anything done beyond a mere survival level of existence. Jesus evidenced considerable ambition to do God’s will as perfectly as He could—sometimes paying a great price to do so. So did Paul. Dr. Rollo May, a very perceptive psychologist in the 20th century, said that normal ambition “proceeds from strength, is a natural function of the living being, and is not necessarily anti-social.”
But “normal ambition” becomes excessive and, in my opinion, sinful, when it satisfies itself through controlling, or climbing over, other people, shaming them, or when it is directed toward evil ends. In other words, I think it is natural and Christian to want to accomplish things as long as those things are not (1) bad things for the person as a follower of Christ. (I.e. As long as the goals are not counter to the purposes of God as Jesus revealed them), and (2) as long as the means one uses to accomplish them are not deceptive or destructive to other people.
And for me as a serious follower of Christ, “Ambition” is particularly dangerous, because it is so easy for me to hide the fact from myself that my ambition is often to accomplish things that will make me look good, smart, and exceptional—even when the things I am doing are helping other people. The reason this is particularly difficult is because all motives are mixed, so I must always have the courage to risk being selfish and trust God and my fellow Christians to keep my eyes—and ambitions—focused on God’s will.
Dear Lord, guide me in my daily life and work so that I remember that loving you, and others (as well as myself) is more important than whatever I may achieve or acquire. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Do you want to be counted wise, to build a reputation for wisdom? Here’s what you do: Live well, live wisely, live humbly. It’s the way you live, not the way you talk, that counts. Mean-spirited ambition isn’t wisdom. Boasting that you are wise isn’t wisdom. Twisting the truth to make yourselves sound wise isn’t wisdom. It’s the furthest thing from wisdom—it’s animal cunning, devilish conniving. Whenever you’re trying to look better than others or get the better of others, things fall apart and everyone ends up at the others’ throats.
James 3: 12-14, The Message
30-33“If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.
Mt 6:30-33
46-48They started arguing over which of them would be most famous. When Jesus realized how much this mattered to them, he brought a child to his side. “Whoever accepts this child as if the child were me, accepts me,” he said. “And whoever accepts me, accepts the One who sent me. You become great by accepting, not asserting. Your spirit, not your size, makes the difference.”
Luke 9:46-48, The Message
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Over the years many serious, committed Christians have asked me questions about how to come to grips with such painful topics as sickness, handicaps, accidents leading to permanent injury or death, and other such matters. Devastated parents, husbands, young adults, when faced with the loss of someone on whom they depend, and whom they love deeply, begin to wonder what part God has in it all.
“Why was our child born with birth defects?”
“Why did my wife get cancer at 34 with four young children to raise?”
“Why was my father killed in a head-on collision by a drunk driver?”
“How could God let these things happen?”
These questions from the drawn, haunted faces of grieving, frustrated Christians keep coming back to me in the quiet of my study. Why indeed?
I have faced questions like these in my own life before and after trying to make a serious commitment of my life to Christ. I have cried, prayed, read, asked, and thought about the meaning of sickness and death.
When I was eighteen, I walked through the grief of a war telegram announcing the death of my only brother in a plane crash and saw what this did to my parent’s lives. I saw my mother have a nervous breakdown and then sat by her as she died of cancer in a few years. My father had ulcers and then a heart condition which combined to kill him when I was twenty-three. And in the midst of these sicknesses I broke my neck in a car wreck, and the doctor thought I might be paralyzed.
As each member of my family died I planned funerals and tried to console the ones who remained. As each one “disappeared,” I spent a lot of time as a young man thinking about sickness and death. I watched how they affected us all—the bad things and the good. And I remember looking up at the stars late the night we heard of my brother’s death and crying out, “Why?”
Since I have become a Christian I have seen that this scream is a way of asking probably the deepest and most perplexing question that faces a person who believes in the God of Jesus Christ: “If God is all powerful and also good, why does he allow evil and pain to plague his people?”
This was one of the first questions my mind went to after my conversion. Out of their uncertainty, people have come up with three basic notions about sickness—with dozens of variations. Some say, “Sickness is God’s will; therefore we must bear it patiently.” Others say, “Sickness is of Satan. And if we pray and have faith, God will root it out and heal us.” Still others believe that “out of sickness can come understanding, noble character and achievements which would never have been.” But having studied the Scriptures and having read many books on sickness and the whole problem of “undeserved” evil, I have not found any theoretical solution which satisfies the pain of the human soul in its agony and tells us “why.”
How then do we Christians face sickness when it strikes us or the people we love, or deal with the death of someone we love?
In God’s Good News—expressed in the drama of the life choices and experiences of a Person (not a reasoned theory about those choices and experiences), Jesus gives us something which is more valuable than intellectual answers to the deepest problems of human life. With his unique self-limiting love (he chose not to use his power to save himself or even to save his cause) he provides a paradoxical offer of freedom for all of us self-centered humans to transcend even our fear of death, to risk all of our lives in order to find the blessedness of God. Since our imaginations can absorb and be transformed by a love of us that does not demand a price in return, God gives us a choice of whether we want His gift of life in our experience that allows us to transcend and even utilize the circumstances that have us blocked. But to incorporate Jesus’ “answers” in our lives, we must move beyond the question of “why illness?” to “what can I learn from this illness?” and “How can I love others better in the midst of sickness and failure.
One person learns patience, understanding, and almost unimaginable compassion for others; another becomes an unbearable, complaining, hyper-sensitive and self-centered block to the healing power of love in the culture he or she inhabits. The choice can be ours. The question is, “will we choose to be wedded to Life and Love or to move into and be carriers of death’s darkness while still alive?”
But if the losses and tragedies of life can be valuable, then is sickness a good thing? The Gospels and the Church answer a resounding, “No!”
Here we have another of the many paradoxes of life and faith. Although disease, accidents and undeserved tragedies can bring great transformation of character, including the Christ-like qualities of compassion and the love of seemingly unlovable enemies to some, these horrible experiences of unexpected illness and early death can also destroy all a person’s values.
Christian physicians are right, I think, in giving their lives trying to snatch people from sickness and death, as Jesus did. For it certainly seems obvious that Jesus entirely rejected the idea that sickness was sent by God as a punishment. And as Louis Cassels (in The Real Jesus, page 26) points out, Jesus did not encourage the belief that the sufferer ought to remain ill in order to acquire courage or learn patience. In fact, the Gospels report nineteen specific instances, and allude to hundreds of others in which Jesus healed sick people by a word or gesture.
So Christ anticipated modern medical science by recognizing that all illness is to some degree psychosomatic—involving the mind as well as the body. And his conversations with the sick always show a concern for the mind and the spirit as well as the body.
But Jesus did not give those being healed, or his disciples, rational closure or a theory of sickness. He gave them a way to do what they could to help love those who were sick or lost. And today, by surrendering our lives to the Father and walking with those in pain we can be part of the love God offers to those at the end of their own ropes so that they can be open to experience God’s love and a way of life that can transform their sickness and even death into renewing life with the Father and his family.
God, forgive me when I blame you for allowing evil and pain, sickness and death, into our lives. Show me how to learn from suffering, and help me to let you show me a way through the suffering and pain, a way that leads me closer to you and toward becoming more like the loving person I now see that you always wanted me to become. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us.”
1 John 4:17
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith, I’ve been troubled a lot with anxiety lately and seem to be having more problems with my relationships recently. I have made a commitment to Christ and asked God for the filling of the Holy Spirit and I have done everything my friends have told me to do to get rid of this anxiety and these problems. I have gone back to reading the Scriptures and praying regularly and I’ve gone to several people for counseling, but I still seem to have these problems. Do you have any idea what this might mean?
You sound as if you think anxiety and problems are bad things and that you should do things to improve your spiritual life so these problems will go away.
I believe that problems and anxiety are not necessarily bad things. I think any time we are anxious, it is like a fire alarm going off warning us that there is something not being faced either in our relationship with God, another person, ourselves, or with our work. Some people, for instance, are overworking terribly and suddenly become anxious “for no reason at all.”
What I do when I become anxious or have a problem in a relationship is to stop and ask God, “What messages are you trying to get through to me?” In other words, instead of praying that the anxiety will go away, I am learning to ask God, “What is the anxiety signaling that might help me get closer to You and to live more sanely as your person?” Most often, the problem or the anxiety I am experiencing is merely a signal that something is wrong. Rather than trying to get the signal to stop, I find it’s better to locate the fire or the difficulty that is causing the anxiety or the problem in the relationship. When I discover the real problem, and address it (which usually requires me to change some unacceptable behavior) then often the anxiety disappears.
For example, one day I woke up anxious, afraid, and feeling very insecure—all adding up to a frightening loneliness and doubt about the reality of my Christian commitment. I hated to admit it, but my Christian friends began to get on my nerves. They seemed to be so untroubled, and I knew intuitively that some of them must have similar problems—but they just didn’t talk about it. So I started faking it, without even being conscious of it. Someone would call and say, “Hey, buddy, how are you feeling?” And I would reply, “Fine, things couldn’t be going better,” when in reality I was dealing with something serious or was worried sick.
Don’t misunderstand, I am not for telling everyone about your every ache and pain in order to be scrupulously honest, but sometimes I think we hide our less than joyful feelings because we believe that it is a denial of Christ to be miserable. Consequently I, and some of my friends, being human, were left alone and guilty in our times of misery.
Then I began to see that this position of hiding our humanity is that of the “whitewashed sepulchers” Jesus spoke of, smiling on the outside and rotten with guilt, anxiety, and incompleteness within. (See Mt. 23:23–28)
As I struggled with this problem, I had to take a new look at my humanity—the humanity of a man who wanted with all his heart to be God’s person and yet found himself anxious and restless inside. Why would I have vague feelings of unhealthy dependency and incompleteness, just when I seemed to be living a disciplined, outgoing life?
At last this search sent me to my knees, beginning again like a child. God had used my anxious sense of incompleteness to drive me back to the place where I would again put my life in his hands. The “fire,” in this particular case, was expecting myself to live up to some kind of image of what a “perfect Christian” would look like and hiding from myself the fact of my own humanity.
For me then, anxiety and restlessness as a Christian were not necessarily bad, but, like physical pain, they could be a warning signal—warning me that something was out of balance in my life, that I was somehow ignoring God—even while I was doing religious disciplines to “earn” some peace and quietness. And because of the signal that anxiety provided, I could stop and do something before I destroyed myself and the work I was trying to do.
At about that time, I remember being asked to speak to a men’s group on the subject “The Christian Life.” I went to the meeting and spent five or ten minutes telling the men very honestly that I was feeling weak and miserable. I was tired of speaking to groups and of being a Christian, and had even considered not coming that night. Then I told them that I had realized that whatever else had meaning to me besides God was so far back in second place that I had decided to come and tell them that I was a Christian almost by default—that is, there seemed to be no other way to find any purpose or meaning in my life at all. I had come to the meeting on the chance that some of them might live with misery and incompleteness too—that some of them might be looking for a Way that could give purpose and meaning even to a life that included anxiety and restlessness and the accompanying lack of confidence in themselves.
I thought that my honest and specific confession of my miserable restlessness and self-centeredness would compel these men to reject me and any message I might have to give them. Instead, I found a room full of brothers, of warm, struggling fellow human beings, who also needed a second touch from their Lord, even though many had been committed Christian ministers for years.
I have found that committing my life as wholly as I can to God and receiving the reassuring sense of his presence does give me a deep and ultimate security my humanity has longed for. And, when I discover that I am again anxious, I remember that Jesus counted on his disciples having troubled hearts and told them he was sending the Holy Spirit to comfort or “strengthen” them when they did (see John 14). And not only that, but I now believe that restlessness and ultimate dependency, like pain and evil, are woven into the fabric of life perhaps to become the motivating power to drive us toward fulfillment in God as he is revealed in Jesus Christ.
Understanding this, however, has not changed the fact that I find it very unpleasant to be anxious, restless, discouraged or afraid. It is all very well to understand that God will teach me something from the inexplicable and anxious periods and bring me closer to himself, but during these times I feel very lonely, and I still resist surrendering control of the people or situations to God in order to find God’s way. Only now, I can remember faster that when I’ve held out and refused to surrender, I have experienced long and unproductive sessions of introspection and discouragement.
My prayers come with this for you. It has not been easy for me to accept the fact that I can even hide things from myself that I don’t want to face. This may not be true of you, but based on my experience it’s what I have to offer you at this point.
Dear God, thank you that you have given us an “alarm system” for discovering things we cannot see about ourselves. Help us to pay attention when the alarm signal goes off, and to begin to change any behaviors, thoughts or situations that have triggered the alarm. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Psalm 139:22-24 NIV
Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.
James 5:16, The Message
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, not long ago a good friend, someone I like and respect, complimented me on some design work I’d done. I knew he meant it and at one level I was very pleased—especially since we work in the same field and he’s very good at what he does. But I was also, sort of… embarrassed, and felt like he could spot the defects and might just be buttering me up. So I laughed and shook my head and said, “I was lucky they even accepted it! I tossed it off in about thirty minutes from an idea I had in junior college.” Actually, that wasn’t true. I worked for days on that design. My friend looked at me as if I’d hurt his feelings, nodded his head and walked off. Why would I do that? Have you had a similar experience?
Good question. This is how I recorded my experience years ago in Habitation of Dragons: Squelching a Word of Love, page 118.
***
“That was a great job, Keith!” The man who was speaking is a person whom I deeply respect and love. I had just given a talk in our church, and he was enthusiastically and sincerely affirming me.
“Thanks, but I’m afraid I was too direct,” I replied. “I was tired and felt a little hostile.” He looked at me strangely, and I went into the educational wing to get ready for Sunday school.
While walking away, I realized what I had done. I had very subtly and unintentionally devalued him as a person. He was trying to tell me that I had done a good job, and he had really meant it. But instead of thanking him for his affirmation, I had told him in effect, “Actually, you aren’t really very smart. I heard some negative things about my talk that you didn’t hear.” Although I had not said that, I saw that my negative reply had in some way rejected him and his kindness in complimenting me in the first place.
Thinking about what had happened; I realized how often I turn people off when they try to say something nice to me. If I happened to make a high score on an exam in college, for instance, and someone said, “congratulations,” I might have laughed and come back with something cute like, “As much time as I spent studying for that one, an orangutan would have done well.” I seemed to turn attention away from their attempts to affirm me, thinking somehow that I was being humble.
But now I am beginning to see that instead of humility, this inability to accept praise or affirmation is really an insidious form of pride and insecurity. Further, it represents a completely thoughtless attitude toward the needs of the one trying to offer congratulations. If a person is sincere with a compliment, he or she is going out on a limb to identify with me. The person is reaching out to say, “I, too, feel as you do or appreciate life as you do.” Or, “In some sense we are related or I would not have responded to what you said.” But my reply of supposed humility has turned the attention away from the person giving the compliment and toward me and my cleverness. I have devalued the offered love by joking or saying in effect, “No, we are not alike, because you misinterpreted my performance.” Or, “Your perception is faulty.” Or, “If you are like me, you are really a dummy, because any dolt could have done what I have.”
My dear friend Bruce Larson finally confronted me one day about squelching a compliment by saying, “Keith, you are a good giver of affirmation, but you’re a stingy receiver!” It was clear to me in that moment that with all my apparent willingness, as a Christian, to love other people, I fail to love them when I refuse to hear their attempts to love me. I suppose I reject their love because I’m afraid it is unreal, and I cannot risk being hurt—in case they do not mean it—or sometimes I evidently want to appear humble, if they do mean it. So I protect myself from being hurt or from looking proud by dismissing as insignificant any attempts people make to say affirming things to me. Never before had I realized fully the negative, squelching effect of refusing to accept another’s kind word.
Since making these discoveries, I am going to try to look people in the eye and say simply and warmly, “Thank you,” if they try to say something positive to me. At a deep level I know that anything worthwhile I have is from God. And somehow, by letting people express positive feelings to me through a handshake and a few words, I think something is completed in the attempt to communicate the love of God in human terms.
“Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power. By words one of us can give to another the greatest happiness or bring about utter despair. . . . Words call forth emotions and are universally the means by which we influence our fellow creatures. Therefore let us not despise the use of words. . . .”
Sigmund Freud
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis[1]
Thank you, God, that You are willing to receive my stumbling and often half-sincere attempts to praise You. Since You showed us in Christ that it is important for us to be able to receive, please give me the grace I need to do so. I am grateful that You take these praises of mine seriously rather than rejecting me with a denial or a joke, which would leave me alone and sorry I tried. Help me to learn how to love. But, O Lord, give me the serenity to risk receiving from other people . . . love, which I fear may not be real.
It is hard to receive:
Peter said to him, “You shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!”
John 13:8, 9
[1] Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York: Washington Square Press), 22.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, I keep running into people who can’t seem to believe there really is a God—and honestly I don’t know if I do. These scientists are almost making fun of people who believe that God is real! And if God is real, they ask, how can he change the basic character of people who believe in him? Could you help me with this?
This is an excellent time to be asking those questions. With regard to the reality of God—think about all the brilliant men and women who have claimed that they have had a relationship with God (e.g. C. S. Lewis, St. Francis, Luther, Augustine, Martin Luther King, Jr. and scientists like Blaise Pascal, not to mention all the men and women who were not writers but the witness of whose lives changed the generations in which they lived. They wouldn’t all have to be right for there to be a God who interacts with people—if only one person in all of history was right about having a personal relationship with God, then God is real, and interactive.
There are all kinds of philosophical arguments for and against the hypothesis that God is real, but Christianity is about a God who has a “personality,” that is, a God who can be “known.” And the New Testament makes the claim that if a person wants to know if God is real, the only way that person can know is to take the hypothesis that God is real and commit his or her life to God and to the discovering and doing of God’s will in that person’s whole life.
I understand that you are saying to take God that seriously is to take a big risk. And of course that is true. But even scientists have to take risks and face rejection sometimes when they take an idea and assume that it is true (when they take a hypothesis) and then scientists (and people on spiritual journeys) make experiments in the real world to see if the idea holds up in relation to things and situations the scientist already believes are true.
So how would you prove for yourself that God is real?
When I came to that place in my life, I was frightened. I was afraid that if God were real and I surrendered my real life to God and to trying to live according to the principles attributed to God, then God might change me into some sort of pious religious nut that my family and friends wouldn’t want to be with.
But when I finally decided I had to know if God were real, and surrendered my life, my future, to God, that was when I began to realize that the life that God offers people who are in relation to him was the life I’d always been trying to find, to discover by becoming successful and prominent somehow.
A long time ago, a wise Christian told me that God doesn’t change us into something that we are not already. Rather the truth is that we have almost from birth been adding unreal things to our lives, personal characteristics. For instance, I tried to appear to be a strong, self-confident Western male—stronger and smarter than I really was. It was as if I was wearing life like a suit two sizes too large, hoping I’d grow into it.
When I decided to surrender my whole life to God as I saw God revealed in the Biblical story, and began to do the disciplines of prayer and helping other people in ways I felt God would want me to do those things, it was more like taking old ill-fitting clothes off and discarding them. Because I didn’t need the exaggerated characteristics in order to feel that I was enough.
As I met some strong beautiful Christians with integrity and humility, I realized that what God offers to do for me is not to transform me into something I never have been but rather to help me remove things I and the culture I live in have added to my natural self that I had used to cover up, to hide the person God made me to be. And the unconscious fear of being revealed as the imperfect person I really am, tainted all my relationships—particularly my close relationships.
So the big news for me is that when I am being the loving child that God designed me to be, I am free not to hide or pretend to be more than I am. And that means that I could learn to be myself and risk being rejected when I set out to become the authentic human being who was in one sense always inside me, waiting to get free enough to live and be happy being who and what I am.
That’s why I began to learn how to write as a vocation and finally left the oil exploration business—not because the oil exploration business is evil somehow, but because I was a writer hiding inside the life of an oil business entrepreneur. This has not been an easy or trouble free journey, and may not be one that you should take. But I thank God every day that I decided to trust God in this way.
It’s a long trip to the Beginning—clear back to Square One.
Lord, thank you that we already have everything we need to be the people you designed us to be. Help us to learn how to remove the extra characteristics we have “put on” trying to be happy and successful, and to gradually discover and, where appropriate, reveal ourselves the way you meant for us to be. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
“For an answer Jesus called over a child, whom he stood in the middle of the room, and said, “I’m telling you, once and for all, that unless you return to square one and start over like children, you’re not even going to get a look at the kingdom, let alone get in. Whoever becomes simple and elemental again, like this child, will rank high in God’s kingdom. What’s more, when you receive the childlike on my account, it’s the same as receiving me.”
Matthew 18:2-5, The Message
Note: For a clear account of what actually happened when Keith made this beginning in his everyday life as a husband, father, and young business executive see the newly republished The Taste of New Wine.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, I’m not a pious person and have never liked doing things that sound like they will look more “religious.” But I was fascinated to hear that God wants to transform me into the person God designed me to be. Can you suggest an approach to spiritual transformation that has its feet on the ground?
Great question. In my case, before I could begin a serious journey toward the radical transformation that they said would follow the daily disciplines of living a new life, I needed to clear my path of the pitfalls and snarling vines growing out of the past that kept tripping me up, and also to inventory the assets and gifts I had.
When Jesus said specifically to “worry about the beam in your own eye,” (Mt. 7:4-5) I think he was referring to whatever is in my life that prevents (or hinders) God from working within me to transform me. For me these blocks seem to come from the virtually universal tendency to put ourselves in the center where only God should be, which is Sin (with a capital “S”). And in my case, all the other “sins” (lower case “s”) stem from that one act. And these dishonest, petty or terribly destructive habits or controlling acts in relationships are what block God’s transforming work in me.
I needed to see clearly what was in my life now (and in my past history) so that I would have nothing mysterious (denied) to hide that could jump up and scare me; because by this time I knew that my Sin would use anything that “pushes my buttons” to threaten me with: the specter of failure, fears, guilt, shame, rejection, and spiritual death. For me it was crucial to make as clean a beginning as possible if I hoped to stay close to God.
So I was helped to begin by confessing what I could see of how I have hurt others. I learned that when I began to think about these things, the natural response was to feel sadness and/or guilt about what I had done. But as I kept focusing on the damage my controlling and self-defeating behavior had caused, the resulting sadness began to produce the motivation to turn away from a particular sin and confess it to God, asking for his power and help not to repeat the harmful behavior. So I had to confess not only the act of putting myself in the center where only God belongs (Sin with a capital “S”) but also make explicit (in detail) as many of the shadowy deeds and thoughts as I could see at the time. I was told to make a list of all people my behavior had injured. This act of confession of what I could see brought a number of hidden sins and unconscious self-centeredness and habits out of my unconscious and into my memory and helped expel them and their destructive power from my heart.
I had to find a small group of men on this spiritual journey to find the courage to even see much less confess before another person. But I discovered that was evidently normative behavior for the early Christians (e.g. “Make this your common practice. Pray together and confess your sins to each other so you can live together whole and healed.” James 5:16, The Message).
Over the years as I confessed to God all the specific sinful acts I could recall, the past felt clean and not as painful. I began to realize (and it took a number of years and different groups and mentors) that I am forgiven. I could embrace the gift of a new chance at life. It is as if God has erased the black board on which the sins I had confessed had been listed and handed over a piece of chalk and said, “Here, you can write a new chapter for your life.” The peace, joy and motivation to live for God that come from these actions is incredible to me: one’s spiritual life can come alive! But it has not felt like I was getting more religious, but rather more caring and sensitive—and real somehow—than I had ever been both to God and to the other people in my life. And in looking back, I realize that the transforming work of God had begun to occur in my life.
In addition to the gift of a new life, God has given me the security of his love and forgiveness. As a forgiven person, I don’t need to hide my Sin from God. On the contrary, I can afford—and want to see even farther—even behind walls of delusion and denial—and begin to have a clearer and deeper view of the harmful behaviors and attitudes that have been brought on by Sin. Then I pray sincerely for God to remove them. I never thought I could do that. Most of the things I’ve discovered about my selfish attitudes and behaviors were not even conscious to me when I began.
But how do we do this specific housecleaning today when everyone seems to be embarrassed by the idea of confession and horrified at the prospect of revealing anything that might make them look inadequate or sinful? The saints have given us an answer to this dilemma regarding the exhuming of our buried sins—as a bathing and cleansing of the infectious self-destructive material. But this course of action is so terrifying that many of us in contemporary religious denominations have discarded it as too severe a remedy—“exaggerated” by the writers of the past to pressure their disciples. But this very attitude of thinking that they exaggerating their “righteousness” was an example of my projecting my own Sin of pretending to be better than I am. And this hiding my own Sin by doubting the saints’ sincerity is just another universal habit that is part of my Sin that has kept me from growing and finding the freedom and courage to receive and give love.
This is one way it works: we begin cleaning out the debris of the past by making a thorough examination of our own lives and bringing what we find out into the light (see 1 John 1:5-9). We face these character defects and moral transgressions as thoroughly and honestly as we can—and go back and make things right where possible. (See Matthew 5:23)
And we also need to include the positive character traits and abilities that God has given us along with our list of sins. Because these are some of the assets through which he will work to transform us into the people he designed us to be.
When we seriously commit our lives to God, it’s as if we are agreeing to transfer to him all the assets and liabilities of a business we own. If we were doing that, we would take an inventory of the damaged goods and the valuable assets that are stored in the warehouse of the past. And to transfer to God these things we must make the inventory very specific.
For instance, for years I would, on occasion, do something helpful for someone that might cost a significant amount of money or time. I would tell myself (and sometimes the one “helped”) that I didn’t expect anything in return. But if the person I’d helped did not express what I considered to be “reasonable” gratitude, I resented him or her—a lot. I finally realized that my real motive was not just to be loving, but that giving of my help had been sort of an “investment” for which I expected a dividend: to feel like and look like a good Christian. My dishonesty about my expectations also set me up to resent people I wanted to help. So my failure to clean my own house made me into a “generous” Pharisee.
This may sound bizarre to you. It did to me for years. But I was fortunate enough to get caught in a serious moral failure and that destroyed and/or almost destroyed my deepest relationships. I hope you won’t have to do that to find the life, love and settledness about who you are and what you’re “designed” to do and be in your life. Thanks for asking that question. It made me feel closer to you, and my prayers come with this for this new chapter in your adventure with God.[1]
Lord, thank you that you forgive us our Sins, especially when we can become aware of them and confess them to you. Help us to allow you to transform us into the people you designed us to be. And Thank you for such an incredible opportunity. In Jesus name, amen.
“This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters. If you enter your place of worship and, about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering, leave immediately, go to this friend and make things right. Then and only then, come back and work things out with God.” (Matt. 5: 23-24) (In other words this kind of honesty takes precedence for Jesus even over public worship.)
“If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins—make a clean breast of them—he won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing. If we claim that we’ve never sinned, we out-and-out contradict God—make a liar out of him. A claim like that only shows off our ignorance of God.”
1 John 1: 8-10 The Message
[1] If after reading this piece you would like to examine an in depth approach that uses the principles expressed here, you might want to read the book A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth (Or study the twelve-week DVD course by the same name.)
