by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Prayer, Small Groups, Weekly Devotional
Keith, After I decided to surrender my life to God, how should I go about finding my vocation?
Good question. At first I didn’t know what to do. I was a land man for a major oil company. It was a good job but hardly considered to be a training ground for Christian disciples—which I definitely wanted to be after finally trying to turn my life over to God.
I prayed about what to do and at that time there seemed to be only one way for really serious players to go: go to theology school and become ordained to be a full time Christian minister. So I studied the Bible and theology and the history of the church and preaching under some good professors. Along the way I sat with my parents when my older brother was killed and with my father when he died of a heart condition and with my mother when she died of cancer—all before I was 30. All during this time I was praying and reading the Bible and the lives of the saints—the people in the past who had given their lives to God.
I decided that the playing field I was called to in which to help people find hope and real love was in the ordinary life I was trying to live as a businessman. I made a decision that God had my address. Instead of spending all my time “deciding what I would become for God,” I would treat my own ordinary life as a father and husband who commuted in a car pool twenty miles one way to work five days a week—that I would commit that life to God and to learning how to live for him all day long.
I made that decision because I simply didn’t know any ministers at that time who talked, preached or shared individually about having real problems in their own lives and relationships with their spouses, children, parents or fellow clergy. I was still in my thirties and just couldn’t believe that I was the only committed Christian who wrestled with lust, jealousy, and the many faces of fear of failure. None of these pastors seemed to have that terrible three-day silence warfare with their spouses or had to be right in arguments with a spouse or feel like a wimp, or worry at night about developing a retirement plan or squeezing in vacation time. In fact, since I did wrestle with all of these things, for a number of years I thought I must not be a good Christian.
But at another level I was learning that the way out of the fears for me was not courage, which I’d prayed for, but love. When I was worried, I discovered that if I helped someone else, my fear left me—and that maybe Jesus was right (J) when he said that it is “love that casts out fear.”
At twenty-two I had met a man who encouraged me to keep a journal about the things in which I was interested. He helped me write a small book of ballads. And after a few years of talking to lay people about the hope I was finding in an intimate relationship with the God Jesus called Father, I began writing books about the simple yet agonizing discoveries concerning what it might mean to try to live one’s whole life for and with God.
As I’ve written in blogs before, I kept trying to be open to finding out the truth about my own character defects. And that process has made me face many of the denied self-centeredness and control issues with which I had never before been confronted—either in church or school. But because I’d learned a lot about Jesus and his life, teaching and self-limiting love, I knew that when I learned about my sins and character defects, to confess them to some Christian men also trying to live for God. And I began to see how I’d hurt many of the people I love most.
The incredible thing to me is that in spite of my flaws—many of which didn’t surface until I had become a best-selling author and lecturer and had traveled in many foreign countries around the world, teaching about how God can change our whole perception of what it means to live intimately with him and other people. The bottom line about the discovery process is that I would have bet anyone that I would not do the immoral and hurtful things I wound up doing. And they happened to a man who was very disciplined and had “kept the rules” all his life. I was baffled. And when I faced and admitted what I’d done, it was too late to mend some of the fences I had charged through.
What does this have to do with finding a vocation? For me, a great deal. After having a number of best-selling books translated into many languages and having trained with and learned from many powerful and wealthy people as a young man, I finally realized I am just a person. And that I can sometimes love and help people who are struggling with the questions of life and who have discovered the hard way that they are powerless on their own to change their lives at a deep level.
I go to group meetings of people, some of whom I have known for twenty-five years, with whom I share the pain and joy of trying to live for God. When guests and new people come, we discuss our scariest and most fearsome problems. I was writing books and lecturing in different places in foreign countries, but for twenty years I didn’t find it helpful or necessary to tell them that I was a writer and lecturer. But lately, since many of the people who read my books are very old or deceased, I have told some of these people I love and meet with that my vocation is being a writer and a sort of talent scout for God—helping a few people discover the vocational dreams they buried along with their self-centeredness and control issues. That’s come to be the focus of my vocation.
The short answer to your question about choosing a vocation as a Christian is that since God seems to want loving representatives in every culture and every financial, political, educational and medical field, it doesn’t much matter what you do vocationally as long as you love God and surrender the center of your life to God. So I’d advise you to pray about it, ask God’s will, and then pick something that you really love to do. Then go and find out if you can do it.
Will there be pain and sorrow? Of course, but you will find that in the long run your ability to navigate through pain and still be loving will have more effect in spreading the Good News into other people’s hearts around you than all of the sermons you could preach and all the books you could write.
Lord, help me to keep listening for your voice in the pain of other people’s lives and in my own. And thank you that you let me fail enough to wake up and see that I don’t have to “win” to be the person you will love “someday,” but just to open my eyes and see your loving presence in Andrea, our families and the other people we get to walk with on your crazy adventure. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice.”
-Jesus to the Twelve in Matthew 10:42
“But I do more than thank. I ask—ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory—to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is he is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of this glorious way of life he has for his followers, oh, the utter extravagance of his work in us who trust him—endless energy, boundless strength!”
-Ephesians 1:18-19, The Message
“Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.”
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox—American Writer (1850-1919)
“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
-Theodore Roosevelt—26th President of the United States (1858-1919)
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, what does Jesus say about the fact that good Christians often have serious pain?
I don’t know where the notion came from that committed Christians shouldn’t have pain. But for me pain has been the most important way that I find my way back to God—again and again. I remember hearing Dr. Paul Tournier, a Swiss physician and author and also a Christian, give a lecture on this topic. A physician in the audience asked him a similar question: “Dr. Tournier, how do you get your patients out of their pain?” I was shocked at his answer, as was everyone else in the room.
“Oh, I don’t,” he responded. “Not until they know the meaning of it.”
For most of my life I was very anxious to get out of pain—that is until I tried to surrender my whole life to the God Jesus called Father. It had not occurred to me that personal pain is virtually a necessity for one who hopes to live as a serious citizen of God’s Kingdom/Reign. In fact, as I’ve said before (see this post), pain is like a fire alarm system to help us pinpoint issues we need to recognize and deal with.
There are many kinds of personal pain: pain that results from physical injury or various kinds of pain involving loss of self-esteem or from troubled or broken relationships.
When Jesus first drew his disciples apart from the crowds to teach them, he listed some of the most painful personal experiences or losses people can experience and said to them, “You’re blessed …
- …when you reach the end of your rope.
- … when you feel you have lost that which is most dear to you.
- … when you are content with just who you are, no more, no less.
- … when your commitment to God provokes persecution.
- …every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me…You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble. (Matthew 5, The Message)
I think he was saying that until the disciples and I realize that we are powerless on our own to control our lives, our circumstances and other people’s acceptance and approval of us, we will not really believe that we actually need to surrender our whole lives to God.
When I became a Christian, I surrendered my “overall” life early on with a statement to that effect. But as time went on my behavior (and my family) finally told me that first surrender had evidently not included my insistence on being right in arguments, and over time my ambition that caused me to neglect my family (although I made valiant attempts to make it up to them, etc.). But clearly I was powerless and hurt my family because I was over-focused on succeeding at everything I did—even as a Christian. And I failed as a husband and a father. Only then in the despair and rejection resulting from a failed marriage that I had caused did I hear Christ saying to me that unless I would go back to square one and become like a child in my relationship to God as my intimate Father. I could not see and change my life-long mostly unconscious compulsion to control circumstances and people to get them to act the way I wanted them to. I needed to recognize clearly that inside where no one can see, I am a little child calling out to his intimate Father (abba=daddy). I am asking Him to teach me how to live and relate to other people as loving siblings instead of getting them to be actors in the drama I am producing and in which I am the star.
This stance of putting ourselves on center stage in our daily or professional lives and subtly or openly trying to get the others around us to be supporting actors in our drama is a powerful word picture of the self-centered Sin that we Christians believe only God can overcome. The problem is that God’s process of transforming us into the wonderful, loving and creative people he created us to be cannot, it seems, begin without our giving God permission (to the best of our ability) to teach us who we are and what our role in life will be that can bring happiness and fulfillment to other people and ourselves. And this evidently begins with awareness, confession and surrender.*
One of the greatest mysteries about God’s process of transformation is that we cannot see in our own lives and behavior that we are in fact trying to control the other people around us (however subtly and “lovingly” we may be doing the controlling). Some people who have the most serious problem of controlling their wives, husbands, children or siblings are consciously so “gentle and loving” with their hints and suggestions that they are astounded when accused of controlling. They may even cry or rage and say things like “Controlling?! Good grief! I’m only trying to HELP you!!” Or weep and say, “I’m trying to help you avoid making some terrible mistakes!!” And that may be how they experience their behavior. So solving these difficulties may take some counseling to unravel.
In my case, rejection by family member—when they couldn’t get through to me about my self-centeredness and control issues—caused me so much pain that I went to a treatment center, and there my denial finally cracked open. (I described how this happened for me in The Secret Life of the Soul.) Now I try to listen to the pain in my own life and see how I can relate to it as Jesus did and see what it may have to teach me about how to be more loving the way Jesus loved.
The experience of inter-personal pain is often a shock—whether it is experienced by being rejected by a person or group or the pain of a degenerating spine. The good news is that as I surrender the pain and my future to God I can learn how to walk through the pain of living and understand better how to love people as I’m going through it. And looking back I have realized that the areas of personal pain in my own life are like drawbridges I can put down into other people’s lives and walk with them as I learn how to take their hands and help them know at least one path through their particular kind of pain.
So it is often through our experiences of pain that we become “specialists” in helping people learn how to deal with their experience of that same kind of pain—or at least to know that it is possible to make it through that pain, because we made it through—or are still making it through.[1]
And my journey as a Christian has led me to realize that it is the experience of personal pain that can lead us to see new values in the world and to be more caring and loving to people who are alone in their pain. And since that is one of the purposes of citizens of God’s New Reign in Jesus—to love people and be a part of their healing, we can actually use our painful lonely experiences to become the loving people we were designed to be—if we can learn to look for and notice when other people are in pain…and when appropriate, to walk a few steps with them.
Dear Lord, thank you for realizing that the various kinds of secret pain in my life can be sources of wisdom as to how to love you and other people specifically when they are going through the loneliness of solitary pain. Help me to learn to listen and let people tell about their pain instead of rushing in with fixes and all kinds of “answers” (before they are even asking for help). Thank you that you didn’t promise us “answers” in the usual sense but said you would be present with us in our pain—and that would somehow transform us to learn how to love others in their pain. Help me to be willing to go and sit with people in their pain—as you have done through those who have visited me. In Jesus’ name, amen.
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.
-Romans 12:1, The Message
Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self.
-Mark 8: 35, The Message
Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth…and another way to put it: You’re to be light, bringing out the God colors in the world … (and the way you’re to be light is) to shine…be generous with your life. By opening up to others you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.
-Mt. 5:13-26, The Message
* I’m not being “Pollyanna” here. I still want to get out of pain as quickly as possible. But I’m not quite as frantic about having pain because I have realized that all I have learned by going through a good bit of pain has helped me to become more sensitive and loving to other people—and more aware of God’s presence in my real life.
[1] If you have had this experience, you might consider taking a look at Facing Codependence.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, as I have watched you from a distance for the past twenty-five years, you have not been a Christian who just made up his mind to be a Christian and just relax and be one. You seem to keep wrestling with the faith as if it is a continuous process after you are saved (or accepted by God). Why would you have to struggle with faith problems when you’ve been saved?
That’s a good question. It implies to me that you (or people you know) see Christianity as a transaction between God and a person like joining the YMCA or signing up as a Democrat or Republican. Once you’re in, you’re in. Of course you may have to pay dues, but the decisions are over once you’ve made the choice to join.
But for me, a serious relationship with God is more like a marriage than joining something. A marriage involves an initial commitment, but if one has a real marriage there is a commitment to ongoing communication and growth as the relationship deepens. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of how the life of faith has gone for me.
When I was a little my mother told me that God is real and taught me to pray. I continued to “say my prayers” at night, and prayed for help when I felt vulnerable or like I might fail or not get what I wanted.
Then by the time I was twelve or thirteen I decided that “God is real”—not symbolic like Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny. So when asked to, I stood with a bunch of other young people in front of the huge congregation at Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa and “said the words” that the Methodist church had for a commitment to Christ. I was doing what I had been told was the next right step. And according to the Church, I was officially saved and going to heaven. And I am not doubting the validity of the churches confirmation rite. But for me, inside my mind, I was to experience a lot about which I hadn’t been told.
That was when puberty hit. I began having two kinds of consciousness. I had my usual mind that dealt with schoolwork and how to be better at sports, etc. But when I was tempted to do things I was pretty sure God wouldn’t encourage us to do (like masturbate, think about girls and sex, etc.) I stepped out of the “God room” in my mind and into an empty windowless film room. Having a secret space to go where God was not invited didn’t seem like that big a deal for a long time since I’d never been told that God would “get me” if I wasn’t good.
Then life brought devastating situations that I could not change or make sense of by myself. My only brother was killed in WWII. A few years later I walked beside Dad as his damaged heart weakened, then killed him. I sat with Mother (taking the night shift in the hospital) a few short years later as cancer took her life, an inch at a time.
I began to ask questions I’d never asked, like “What is death?” and “Why do people hurt and kill each other?” I read serious books about what it might mean really to know God and learn how life was designed to be lived—since I believed he was its creator. I knew that I didn’t know God as I knew other people.
I had married a beautiful and very intelligent young woman. We were in love and I went to work to start fulfilling the American dream of raising a family and “becoming successful.” But when my mother was dying I realized that life wasn’t what I’d thought it would be. And then one day on a roadside in a car I had a deep intuitive knowing that I needed to surrender my whole life to God, and that he would guide me into the truth about life.
When I started to live out my commitment (to this God Jesus called Father) in every area of my life, I began to write books about the journey. The books succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I studied theology and then psychology, writing and lecturing in many places across the world about what I was discovering. Before I knew it, I had been given more affirmation and success than I could ever have predicted.
The experiences about which I’ve written might be seen by some people as struggling with faith. But to me it as been more like a struggle between myself and God over who would be in charge of my life.
Sometimes I wish it were as easy as I’ve heard people say it is for them—easy just to surrender, keep out of the driver’s seat of my own life and allow God to be in control all the time. It has not been so for me. At each stage of my learning, I was being asked to face personal issues that came up. I would pray and finally realize that I was putting something ahead of God. And after much prayer and counsel, I would see what I needed to give to God, finally surrender that and have a new burst of freedom.
Somewhere along the way—after some years of notoriety and the deference that comes with it—life lost its joy, and I was bewildered. I became aware of “something” about myself that was totally resistant to surrendering to God. I didn’t learn exactly what it was for years. But I was baffled at the uneasiness and frustration I was experiencing—while living a life of effectiveness and glamor caring for many people everywhere I went. I was really confused, but could not see what the matter with me was.
People close to me sensed that somewhere very deep in my life I was not the unselfish person whom people seemed to experience in relating to me. (The person whom I consciously was much of the time.)
Eventually a little beer or wine morphed into a lot of Scotch whiskey. Even several years of prayer and psychological and spiritual counseling did not uncover what the problem was. My behavior deteriorated and I acted out some of my fear and frustration in very self-centered and immoral behavior leading to a divorce and to the crash of the great life and work I’d been given to do.
Finally my misery led me to a treatment center where I learned that the thing I would not surrender to God was so deep and so well defended that I’d even repressed it from my own sight and sincerely thought God was driving my life. I came to the place where I saw no other way, no other solution than to agree to surrender whatever it was that I was hiding, if God would show it to me, as frightening as that prospect was. And at last I saw that it was my self-centered need to be in charge of my life and to make sure that I could get my own gigantic need for love and attention met. Facing and surrendering that was the most frightening experience of my life. I felt that if I surrendered my future, I might be nothing. (I have described the experience in a book.) The morning after facing my deep self-centeredness and my unconscious need to control even God, I realized that the self-centeredness and need to control had been my underlying denied problem all my life.
So the answer to your question, “Why have I continued to struggle with God and faith if I were truly saved or converted when I first committed my whole life to God” is this: In my conscious experience I gave all of my life I could see to as much of God as I could understand, asking him to show me what to do. And as God began to shed light on what I might do for him, that same light revealed things I needed to surrender in order for me to be able to do what he gave me to do. My struggle has been to recognize, confess, and be willing to give up each character defect he showed me—and then ask God for the power and the courage to live and love people, trusting Him with the outcome of my efforts.
Twenty-six years ago I began a new adventure of faith by seeing and confessing my deepest sin of wanting to control my destiny. On the new adventure, I have been learning more about how to think about other people and their adventure and to help those who are seeking to find the dreams God has put in their lives—and to help some of them accomplish those dreams.
***
I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.
– Galatians 5:4, The Message
Cultivate your own relationship with God, but don’t impose it on others. You’re fortunate if your behavior and your belief are coherent. But if you’re not sure, if you notice that you are acting in ways inconsistent with what you believe—some days trying to impose your opinions on others, other days just trying to please them—then you know that you’re out of line. If the way you live isn’t consistent with what you believe, then it’s wrong.
– Romans 14:22, The Message
The person who lives in right relationship with God does it by embracing what God arranges for him [or her]. Doing things for God is the opposite of entering into what God does for you.
– Galatians 3:11, The Message
Lord, thank you that you have been so loving and patient with me as I have struggled to see not only your will for my life, but also as I have struggled to learn to live each day asking what your priorities are for me today, right now. And thank you that my job is not to try to change other people—especially family members—but just to love them as you have loved me. In Jesus’ name, amen.
by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Prayer, Recovery, Weekly Devotional
Keith, what if we have let God in our lives and into the driver’s seat and nothing happened? I still have the same struggles that I have always had. Is there ever a way out? I am really wondering and feel as though I am constantly in a spiritual battle between God and the devil. Thanks, R.
This is a question that most Christians don’t have the guts to ask. And yet for anyone who has consciously and seriously tried to put God in the driver’s seat of her or his life, it is the question to ask.
There are a couple of times Jesus dealt directly with that question. “What’s necessary to put God in the driver’s seat where the decisions are made?” One is recorded in Matt. 19. A rich young man came to Jesus and told him that he wanted to quit being a listener and start being one of Jesus’ committed disciples—which in terms of our conversation would be saying, “I am ready to put the God you call Father in the driver’s seat of my life.”
Jesus said in effect, “Great, “If you want to enter the life of God, just do what he tells you.”
The young man said, “What in particular?
Jesus said, “Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie, honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as you do yourself.”
(R., can you say that you are following what Jesus says? I suspect you are from the tone of your inquiry.) Anyway, the young man said in effect, “I’ve done all that.” (I’ve put God in the driver’s seat and am willing to keep all his commandments.)
Then Jesus must have looked at the man and said, “This young man is a serious player.” But then Jesus says something completely of the wall. He asked the young man to give up the thing that was really most important to him that wasn’t even a “bad” thing, but was the thing that bottom-line motivated and determined his most crucial decisions (what was really in the driver’s seat of his life—but he had never seen it that way.) Jesus told him that if you really want to trust God with your whole life, then, “go sell all your possessions; give everything to the poor. All your wealth will then be in heaven. Then come follow me.”
What I think Jesus is saying to the young man, and what I heard him saying to me (that for years stopped me in my tracks) was that I already had a god sitting in the driver’s seat of my life—in fact several as it turned out–and until I was willing to see and admit that something or someone who was not God was the most important thing in my life (“in the driver’s seat determining my private decisions”), I could not really surrender my whole life to God at all.
The young man in the story’s response was: “That was the last thing the young man expected to hear. And so crestfallen, he walked away. He was holding on tight to a lot of things, and he couldn’t bear to let go.[1]”
What Jesus does still, it seems to me, is to help us see that when we come and want to follow God totally, we already have a god we do not realize is a trump card to our attempts to put God in the driver’s seat (or maybe several gods that we obey when they call.) The young man’s god was his money, or possessions. And until we see and admit that these gods which unconscious to us are already in the driver’s seat, we are not free to surrender our whole lives to God and are baffled that we are constantly in internal battles we don’t understand.
I was absolutely shocked when I tried to see what was really most important to me—because consciously God was number one. Some of the things I have had to admit were keeping me from surrendering my whole life were—at different times—financial security, sexual fantasies or actions, the love of my wife or one of my children (more than anything), my vocational success, drinking too much, my reputation as a fine Christian man, and my writing and speaking ministry. A mentor helped me realize that each of these things was at times more important than God, when I would spend time thinking about and doing one of them to the detriment of my clear duties as a father, husband, and Christian man “surrendered wholly to God.” Many of these things were not even “bad” things, but they kept my focus on me and what I wanted, instead of what I knew was the priority of God for me, and were detrimental to my growing up to be the man God had in mind for me to become.[2]
But after many years of meeting with other men and women wanting to follow Jesus and be his people, I finally realized that although I can’t just “put God first,” I can tell him that I am willing to, and give Him permission to show me those things that I have consciously and unconsciously put in the driver’s seat of my life and relationships. In fact working with individuals and small groups to help them –and me—to discover, confess and commit God those other hidden gods, so that together we can uncover and achieve the dreams and vocations God has for each us—this became my life’s work for God.
These positive changes in direction came about when some bad decisions I made because of obeying some of the competitive gods I had not faced caused me such pain that I became willing to surrender my entire life to God, realizing that only He could give me the courage and insight to even want Him that much.
But the other part of what happened when I specifically set out to give God permission to sit in the driver’s seat in my life was that I agreed to start doing the disciplines that could help me learn how God wants me to live. For me this has entailed learning all I could about what Jesus said the Father wants us to do in the new Kingdom (Reign) of God in his people’s lives. I read the scriptures, concentrating first on the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1-2), the parables, and the teachings of Jesus describing the character and purposes of God, realizing that God wants us to live out of these same characteristics. That includes loving the poor and marginalized people, but also Jesus said people will know we are his followers by the way we (Christians) love each other. (John 13:35) And I prayed almost every day about what I was learning, asking God to show me where my life needed to be different, and to help me to stop clinging to my old ways of running my life as I learned how to let God be in control.
And when I saw how Jesus said God wants us to live, I examined my life and saw not only the false gods in the driver’s seat, but also self-centeredness everywhere. And when I discovered I had hurt someone I had to learn to confess to God, then go and confess to the person I had harmed and make amends to that person. All of this became part of a running conversation with God about the life of loving I was discovering that I’d always wanted to live but was afraid to try because I might look “pious” or “holier than thou.” Now I don’t care. I just want to love people and learn how to use the gifts God has given me in the process.
And all I can tell you is that what has happened to me has made me more loving, aware of my good traits as well as those which derail my best intensions and conscious motivations.
I started not to tell you all this, but since I found that God accepts us the minute we come to him in as complete trust as we have, I have discovered the life I always suspected might be out there somewhere for me. I am still only a child trying to obey his intimate heavenly “daddy.” But I also care enough about you to tell you these things, whatever you may think me. And that—as anyone who has known me many years will tell you—is a real miracle.
“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 13:34-35
The Message
“I am talking about a revolutionary way of living. Religion isn’t something to be added to our other duties, and thus make our lives more complex. The life with God is the center of life, and all else is remodeled and integrated by it. It gives singleness of eye. The most important thing is not to be perpetually passing out cups of cold water to a thirsty world. We can get so fearlessly busy trying to carry out the second commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” that we are undeveloped in our devoted life to God as well as neighbor”
Thomas Merton
A Testament of Devotion
“We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence…. To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and the true center is outside the world, this is to consent…. Such consent is love.”
Simone Weil
Waiting for God
“If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which use to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.”
Alcoholics Anonymous
Third Edition, page 83-84
P.S. If you want to check out a way a Christian or group of Christians can use the 12 Steps as a guide to spiritual wholeness see A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth.
[1] If you want to see a case in which Jesus did the same kind of helping someone see the ‘god’ that was already in the driver’s seat of her life, but upon seeing that god was ready to put Jesus’ God first, see the story of the woman at the well—and what happened to her life when she made the decision to put God before her secret god (i.e. Relationships with men—or sex.) See John 4.
[2] R. – I am not suggesting that you have any particular ‘gods’—just sharing what happened to me when I faced this very question.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Prayer, Weekly Devotional
With elections just completed and Thanksgiving creeping up on us, we are in the midst of the screamers on the radio and television talk shows warning us of the “crooks” running for office, or the “blindness and the incompetence” of our elected representatives, and of the failings of our leaders in virtually all fields. However, I want to tell you that we Christians have a deep well of strength, hope, and confidence from which to draw a toast to the future this Thanksgiving in the country in which we live that has more freedom and opportunity than any place the world has ever seen.
By the time I was 28, I had buried all the family I grew up with and I’d broken my neck in a car wreck—which ended my hope to be a basketball star. These events made me realize I am not the center of the universe. I also realized through these losses, some other failures in my life and the resulting fears were more than I could handle by myself.
But it was due to the chaos, pain and doubt of those days and nights that I was driven to the end of myself and wound up parked on a lowly roadside in East Texas. There I made my first attempt to surrender my future, my family’s future, and the future of the world I lived in to the God Jesus called Father.
I drove that stake into that East Texas soil as deeply as I could at the time. I was a helpless little 28 year old boy inside. And that day I turned from surveying the inner turmoil in my life, looked in a different direction—and saw a rim of light on the horizon. It was the beginning of a sunrise I had not known would ever come. I had been facing and living every day a “sunset” of all my hopes for my life. And when I turned my focus around, I realized that God is alive beyond mountains and oceans of my fear if I can but turn around right where I am each time the mountains or oceans threaten to overwhelm me.
Whatever happens outside us, God will be with us and give us the courage and strength to deal with our losses, failures, fears, and difficulties, one day, one hour at a time, as individuals and as a nation.
God has changed my life so much that I am spending my life pointing over my shoulder to tell you there is real solid hope to stand on. Right now—where ever you are!
So for the next few weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I am focusing on all that I have for which to be thankful, including renewed hope that comes from the realization that God knows where each of us is and will never give up on us.
God bless you and Happy Thanksgiving (and the weeks of preparation that are leading up to it).
“Just think—you don’t need a thing, you’ve got it all! All God’s gifts are right in front of you as you wait expectantly for our Master Jesus to arrive on the scene for the Finale. And not only that, but God himself is right alongside to keep you steady and on track until things are all wrapped up by Jesus. God, who got you started in this spiritual adventure, shares with us the life of his Son and our Master Jesus. He will never give up on you. Never forget that.” (1 Cor. 1:7, The Message)
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, I’ve recently become a Christian. Everybody says I’ve got to be willing to let God into my life, and to let God guide my life. So I finally am willing, but nothing has happened. Can you help me?
This is an excellent question, maybe the best anyone could ask who wants to lead a spiritual life. My problem is that most of my life I’ve lived in my head, that is, in my thoughts. If I thought of something, I thought I’d done it. But Jesus seemed to be teaching that everything we commit to do in our heads has an appropriate behavior in the real world to accompany it. In other words, if you commit to loving God, then you’ll do certain things that God would have you to do. The questions are: what are those things, and how do we get these things out of our heads and out into our real, behavioral world.
I guess what I’m saying is that willingness is the true beginning. But willingness means that you move toward actually doing the things that God wants you to. And as you begin to do them you experiment with how to do them, what your style is and how it works for you.
To find out where that guidance is accessible, I began to look in the scriptures for the kinds of things that would help me change my life. The Apostle Paul spent a good bit of his time teaching people how to do these things. At one point, he said that we’re supposed to surrender our everyday ordinary lives—our eating, sleeping, walking around, going to work lives to God. (Romans 12:1)
So I said, “Okay, I’m willing to do that.” But then someone pointed out to me that I needed to start doing it. So I began to think about God when I went to work at the office. At the end of the first day, I realized that I forgot about God as soon as I got out of the car in the parking lot. So how did I get God from inside my head out into actions at my work place?
I created some personal reminders. For example, I wrote on an index card, “Listen to this person. God may have a message for you.” Then I put this note card in the lap drawer of my desk. Every time someone walked into my office, I’d open my lap drawer, take out a pencil and pad and put them on the desk. And as I did that, I’d see the note card with the reminder on it. I began to listen to people better, and as I got to know them I could pray for them.
When I went to get a drink at the drinking fountain down the hall, I’d pray silently for the people as I passed them. These were some ways I began to bring my willingness to have God in my life out into actually doing things in my real life, without making a big sanctimonious show of it.
As I read scripture, I found that Paul described very simply one way this life is transmitted to others. He said, “Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard, and saw, and realized. Do that and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.” (Phil. 4:8) In other words, if you’re willing to get worked into God’s plans, then he said to the people following him:
1. First put into practice what they heard. They heard Paul say that Christ lived in him and had changed him from “the chief of sinners” into someone who was willing to risk talking about and living for Christ.
2. Then the next thing is “what they saw.” After people heard Paul talk about risking his life, they saw him do it. For example, they saw him get arrested for believing. They saw him take chances of all kinds with his real life, his vocation, everything.
3. And then, after they’d heard and seen him, they realized, “I could do this too.” Something clicks over in one’s minds when he or she actually see someone else taking the risk of really trying to live for Christ in ways the beginner is afraid to do. Christian mentors don’t have to talk about the life they are trying to live all the time. They just live their life in line with what they teach and witnesses to. But it’s obvious that God is always a part of what they’re doing and being when one is with them.
When people asked Paul how to change the inside of one’s mind so these outward behaviors would follow, he said in effect, to change the content of what you put into your mind. The only way into your mind is through your senses, your eyes and ears and so forth—what you listen to and what you watch. You have some control over that. You can choose what you watch and read and listen to. Is it porn? Is it the market place? Is it football? What is it that you put into your mind?
Paul’s advice was to put good things in there that will replace the bad things. You don’t try to ferret out the bad things. You put the good things in and there isn’t room for any more, so something has to go. You can ask God for guidance about which things to eliminate when you put in prayer, meditation and reading the scriptures and other helpful books. Paul said it this way. “Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling and gracious. The best, not the worst, the beautiful not the ugly, things to praise, not things to curse.” (Phil. 4:7)
It also helped me to tell some people (e.g. my mentor, or people in the small group I’m in) that I’m willing to be God’s person. And then I began to do some of these things and share what happened to me—good and bad—when I tried to change the habitual content I’d taken in. And they had heard me talk about this, and then they saw me doing it, and then they started asking the real questions, like you’re asking. So I became a Christian who likes to help people find out who they are and what God may have for them to do with their lives.
Another change I made came when I had trouble sleeping. Twenty years ago I began to memorize certain prayers and scripture passages about what I wanted to be. These passages include the two that I just mentioned and two other passages on love: 1 John 4, and the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians. I also memorized the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. So when I couldn’t sleep at night, I would lie in bed and repeat these things, putting these things into my mind instead of the terrors of the night or my fears or anxieties about the future. After I got them memorized, I wouldn’t have to get up and turn on the light (which often got me out of my funk) and I would go back to sleep. I would replace the sleep-depriving thoughts with these great statements about how to live for Christ.
Almost all the great heroes of the faith have wound up seeing and telling the people to whom they wrote that loving people and God both in their minds and in their behaviors is the goal of the life Jesus offered us in God’s name.
“We cannot help conforming ourselves to what we love.” Francis de Sales
Lord, thank you that you do not try to make us pious, “successful” looking people we are not, but that you offer us a way to live and love that fits us and can release us from the fears and limitations that keep us from being the honest, free and loving people we’ve always hoped we could be. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“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 13:34-35 The Message
“My beloved friends…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. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him.” 1 John 4:7 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. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.” 1 John 4:17-18 The Message
Keith mentioned ways that he has moved from “willingness” to “action”. Share your experience with this and have you encountered any blocks that have kept you from doing things you believe God would have you to do? If so, what are they?
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
