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.
