by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Last week I got a text message from a new friend: “Can you tell me what God is to you?” I realized how different a world we live in to try to communicate the Gospel (than the one I learned about God). Not that the question was bad in any way. It was a great question, but the expectation was that in using 150 characters I could tell another person what my relationship with God is and what it means to me.
Later the same day I was in a meeting of people who were (like me) on a spiritual journey and a similar question came up. “What is your relationship with God like?” And “How has it changed as you have gotten closer to God over the years?”
When my turn to speak came, I thought about my friend’s question and said something like the following:
When I first heard about God as a child, it was as if my life were a car I was given by God to drive through life. I put God in the car with my family and closest friends (with God in the back seat with my parents and my closest friends were in the front seat with me). And I learned to talk to God when no one else was in the car.
Then when I was an adult and the members of my family of origin had all died or were killed (before I was 30), I made a serious personal commitment of as much of my life as I could to as much of God as I could understand in the story of Jesus’ life, teaching and sacrificial death. (Looking back I didn’t understand as much as I thought I did.) But I was very serious, and so I moved God into the front seat next to me and put everyone else in the back seat.
My prayer life changed radically. Every morning I would wake up in the car, turn to God, and say something like, “Good morning, God. I love you and am grateful for a good night’s sleep and for all the good things and people in my life.” I’d tell God about my problems, confess a sin once in a while, and ask God to help me with my burdens that I couldn’t seem to carry. Things like that.
Then I’d start the car, and say something like, “God, I’m going to drive to Dallas on business and I will appreciate your help as I talk to some people about you, or about a new insurance policy, or investment, etc.” I began to live for God one day at a time.
Then, a bit later, I learned to add at the end of my prayers, “But Lord, not my will but yours—if you have other plans for me.” Someone asked me at that point, “What happened to your life with God in your car when you tried to surrender your entire life to God?”
“Whoa,” I thought. “Good question.” Then I slowly began to explain, “Well, although nothing changed about my circumstances, when I tried to surrender my entire life—everything—to God and to begin living each day as if it were my last, it was as if I had given God the keys to the car, transferred the title to Him… and let God sit in the driver’s seat.”
“How did that change things?”
“Well, it’s one thing to tell God where we are going and what I’m going to do, and then to ask God to help me do that. But it’s quite different to realize that it is God’s car and he’s in the driver’s seat and turn and speak to him about my day!”
“Different? How?”
“Well, I used to tell God where I was going and ask for his help to succeed or deal with any failures. But now if I am going to live each day as if it were my last, I get in the passenger’s seat and ask … “Where are we going today?” And that’s a whole new adventure.”
Lord, thank you that you give us ways to plan ahead (to make appointments and pay the bills, etc.), yet to fill most of today with doing the next right thing and trusting you with the things we can’t do today. As I can gradually learn to quit committing to do things that are about my self-centered need to be important and successful, and concentrate on loving you and the people I will see today, I feel more loved and fulfilled than I ever did in my feverish driving to multi-task my way through long frantic days of busy-ness. Help me to listen and plan today, and make other arrangements with those things and people I can’t tend to today, until I can learn to live a life-sized life with you, loving and listening to the people you put in my life this day and wherever you take me today. I love you. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“Take me by the hand;
Lead me down the path of truth.
You are my Savior, aren’t you?” (Ps. 25:5, The Message)
***
“My Lord god, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in face please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Recovery, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith,
I am in the process of working the Twelve Steps in a small group and am amazed at the challenge and healing it has already brought into my life. Though I have been a Christian for twenty years, and was raised in a wonderful church, I feel like a new person! I have lived my life, even as a Christian, as a fearful person, and attempted to control so many of my loved ones rather than actually loving them. God has revealed this sin in my heart, and with his help and a strong community of honest friends, I am rebuilding my relationships on new and free foundations.
But a problem has come up. A friend has asked me about the Twelve-Step process, then argued that it seemed like I was becoming addicted to God. He said that perhaps the Twelve-Step process I am working is just another attempt to control God, my ego, or the people around me. He equated it to a spiritual high people get after a rousing conference that produces false or short-lived change.”
Could you address these questions? 1. Can we become addicted to God? 2. Is working the Twelve-Step process a short-lived and false solution and really just a substitution of one type of control to another?
Thanks for taking the time to write me about this. Your friend has raised some interesting questions. I’m familiar with the Twelve-Step process and have adopted them as my primary spiritual guidelines for the past twenty-five years— not as a substitute for church, but as a supporting enhancement. Following this process has transformed my life enough to cause me to do research of all kinds in helping people all over the world to find God and peace and relief from their addictions.
I have come to see the Twelve Steps as the opposite of a control strategy because they ask the follower to give up control and surrender one’s life and will to God as one understands God very early in the process—in the first three steps. The fact is that if someone is not willing to surrender his or her life and will to God, then this program won’t alleviate an addiction or transform a life.
Working these Steps with a group of people also trying to live by this process is another basic necessity, because the primary symptom of all addictive diseases is denial. That is, we cannot see our own destructive behaviors by ourselves even though we can pinpoint them clearly in other people. I couldn’t see that I was controlling people. I thought I was just trying to help them. But by listening to other people in a group talk about their discoveries of control in their own lives, I could see what my family had been trying to tell me—that I had controlled them for years and that I just couldn’t be wrong—I had to be right all the time.
Also I have learned what to do about the relationships that were/are harmed by my destructive controlling and my intense need to be right: to confess and make amends. This is advised by James, who says “Confess your sins to one another and pray for each other so that you may live together whole and healthy.” (James 5:16)
So as to question number one, let’s begin by looking at what an addiction is. Webster defines an addiction as “a persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful.” But you have found that as you work the Twelve Steps your relationships are getting better. You’re trying not to control people. You’re loving them instead of trying to fix them. This is the evidence in your life that this is real. Surrendering to God and loving God and other people is not harmful if you are not trying to control them. As a person is able to surrender more and more to God, he or she becomes more loving and helpful toward other people. This is the opposite of what an addict would do. An addict gets into a smaller and smaller world as he or she focuses on getting satisfied from the addiction, getting in control or having people agree or getting enough of a pain-relieving substance such as alcohol or a drug.
There is one qualification I want to mention: if someone uses what he or she is learning form the Twelve Steps to try to control or convince other people that they should also work the Twelve Steps, it seems to me that some addictive controlling behavior is leaking into the person’s process of recovery. As I understand it, working the Twelve Steps is for our own transformation, and improves our ability to love other people just as they are, with less and less control, correction or advice.
I’ve noticed that people, even Christians, who have never faced themselves have a hard time understanding why anyone who was a “good person” would want to face “horrible things” about themselves—and then talk about them in a group. Many Christians seem to think they are not sinners if they’ve never committed murder or adultery or stolen anything. But the Twelve Steps indicate that when we put ourselves in the center instead of God, or put anything or any person in the center instead of God (such as an addictive substance, being a success in a career, being attractive, or pleasing a spouse or parent), then that substance, goal, behavior or person is our god. We make our decisions on the basis of satisfying or meeting the demands of this thing or entity that is in the center of our lives.
Here’s another definition of addictive behavior that may clarify this.
“Any process that relieves intolerable reality can become an addictive process. Substances or behaviors that relieve our distress become a priority in our lives, taking increased time and attention away from the other important parts of our lives. And eventually the relieving substance or behavior can lead to harmful consequences that we often choose to ignore since we don’t want to give up our pain reliever. We can learn to medicate our unwanted reality through one or more addictive processes. But these processes become destructive forces with lives of their own.”
(Pia Mellody, Facing Codependence, p. 55. My wife, Andrea, and I wrote a 12-week study course for small groups using this book and DVD’s.)
I was fascinated to realize that the Twelve-Step process is the same process that Jesus taught people to live by. Many people in the church have never been through this process. I wrote a book called A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth about how the Twelve Steps bring biblical principles of faith to bear on the pain of contemporary people in a way that leads sufferers into a close living relationship with God. Anyone who wants to find out what they may be putting in the center of his or her life instead of God can use the Twelve-Step model to identify such a god (with a small “g”) and begin to surrender it to God.
And as for question number two, whether the results in your life are short termed or not, you can ask your friend to wait and see, and then you can continue to pray, work the Steps and meet with your fellow adventurers on the journey into the life Jesus offers us all.
Dear Lord, you taught us that to love you with all our heart, mind and intelligence and other people as well as we love ourselves is how we were made to live. But having free will makes it so easy to love something or someone more than we love you, and to make choices that bring frustration and pain and cause separation between us and you and between us and other people. Thank you that you have made a way for us to return to you again and again, through surrendering once more to you, facing our own wrongdoing, acknowledging it and allowing you to transform us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come! 2 Corinthians 5:17
It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on. This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom. Galatians 5:19, The Message
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 1:8-9 The Message
“God continually turns this “walking through the pain of life” into demonstrations of faith that are remarkable. And perhaps that is why this may be the fastest-growing spiritual movement in America today.” J. Keith Miller, A Hunger for Healing, p. 213
“…in the Twelve Steps, where people learn about God through their experiences with him, there is no attempt to “persuade” with theology or verbal arguments. We let pain do the persuading, because we know that it is only through pain that the hunger for healing comes that will make us ready to admit our powerlessness. We know that until the pain of our lives was greater than the fear of swallowing our pride and going for help, we were not hungry enough for healing to go for it through the Twelve Steps.” J. Keith Miller, A Hunger for Healing, p. 199
“People change because they have paid the price in their vulnerability and willingness to surrender to God, to pray, to do the steps, go to meetings, read the Big Book, clean up their pasts and their relationships, and offer their whole lives to God so he can change them.” J. Keith Miller, A Hunger for Healing, p. 166
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith: I’m a new Christian. I’ve recently been talking to some of my atheist friends, who agree with some atheist scientists who are very brilliant men who say that surrendering to God is very naïve intellectually since neither the existence of God nor the “characteristics” of God can be proven scientifically. . The question I have to ask you is, do I have to check my brains at the door when I go into a church, or is it intellectually in the ball park to believe in God?
Good question. But it seems strange to me for people who claim to be scientists to assert with great confidence that there is no God, because the non-existence of God cannot be proven for the same reasons. In my experience, there is a lot more evidence in favor of there being a God than that there is no God. Although it will be impossible to explore this matter in any depth in a short blog, I’m going to suggest an alternative way to check the validity of a serious “faith-in-God” journey.
Basically, there are two kinds of science. Theoretical science involves applying mathematical methods and concepts in theoretical modeling. It is amazing what has been done through this sort of scientific thinking in the material world that occupies so much of our time and effort.
But another branch of science is experimental science. These scientists use what is known as the “scientific method,” that consists of forming a hypothesis and developing an experiment to either prove or disprove the hypothesis. Their conclusions are based on deductive reasoning.
For example, a doctor’s reported experience with the healing properties of a certain herb might lead an experimental scientist to hypothesize that eating a certain amount of this herb will cure a known disease. The experiment might be set up using two groups of people who have been diagnosed as having similar symptoms of the disease. Everyone in one group takes a medicine made from the herb in a certain prescribed way over a period of time. Everyone in the other group also takes a pill, following the same regimen. But the pill given to members of the second group does not contain the herb or any other medicine—it is a harmless “neutral” substance.
If the first group (taking the herbal medicine) has a significant number of people who either are healed or show significant improvement, and members of the second group (taking the harmless pill) show no improvement or get worse, then there is some evidence that the herb is, in fact, doing some good. At that point the herb has begun its journey toward becoming an approved treatment for the disease. However, if the group that did not take the herb also shows improvement or healing, this would cancel out the evidence from the improvements in the health of the people in the group taking the herb.
But even experimental science is not what many people think it is. Since the conclusions are based on deductive reasoning, one must evaluate the validity of the reasoning being done by the scientists.
For example, even though the herbal remedy experiment may support the fact that it can heal or alleviate symptoms of a certain disease, in a majority of cases, there may be some bad side effects from the herbal remedy in some people. This past year after some surgery I warned the surgeon that I am allergic to narcotics. So he chose a new non-narcotic pain pill which was administered after the surgery. My body swelled up with edema, and I was miserable and in much pain until I was given a diuretic. Even though I lost eight pounds of fluid in first nine hours, it took a long time to get rid of the rest of the swelling and the serious pain. Then because of complications with the first surgery, I had to have a second surgery soon after that. I warned the physician to be sure to give me a different pain medication, but the second new drug had the same effect. These medicines had been tried and used successfully by thousands of people, but just didn’t work for me. Notice how many of the advertisements for the sale of medicines on TV warn the buyer about side effects, and about conflicts with other medications or other physical conditions (i.e. high blood pressure, impotence, heart attacks or even death).
What I’m saying is that “exact science” is not exact, in that it makes claims that are not a hundred percent applicable. And a “tested” medicine may injure or kill certain people. So when people observe abusive or antisocial behavior in men and women who call themselves Christian without testing the behavior of thousands of Christians whose influence is quietly beneficial to millions of people all over the world, it causes me to suspect that such observers and critics have not been scientific in their investigation of a serious life of faith in God, since Christianity is not a theoretical idea about God that can be proven by applying mathematical methods and concepts.
By its nature its validation must be “scientific” in that one must take the hypothesis that God is real and experiment in one’s ongoing life. And with Christianity, these additional hypotheses should be taken:
1. Jesus Christ was conveying the love of God in a way that we could understand and incorporate into a way of living in response to that love.
2. The Bible contains what God is said to have instructed his people to do to have a good life that is loving, honest and less self-centered than a life based on materialistic values.
So if I were a scientist and was interested in finding out if God is real, I would take these hypotheses, bet my life on them, and conduct an experiment.
I’ve been a Christian for over fifty years. I have tested the faith as if it were an hypothesis in every area of my life that I could think of. Early on I had some horrible relationships and was depressed and unhappy because of my self-centeredness. But by taking the hypothesis that God is real and that the biblical record contains sound and healing ways to live and relate to other people and to the inevitable changes and challenges of living, my relationships and state of mind today are different and much better.
I remember making a comment during a lecture I gave at Baylor University years ago that, although I was as committed to God with my whole heart as I could be, I still had arguments with my wife. Afterward, a very self-confident young woman came up to me and said, “Mr. Miller, I don’t think that’s right. I think you can have a life of marriage without arguments if both people are Christians.”
I asked, “Are you married?”
“No,” she answered, “but I’m just about to get a Ph.D. in Marriage and Family.”
I said, “Well, I don’t want to be disrespectful, but I know more about marriage than you do as far as how the intimate relating is experienced when negotiating the adjustments of the parties to each other and married life. If you are not married, I do not believe you can really know the pressure that happens within a marriage.” She left, somewhat upset, but our conversation helped me see that unless a person is willing to risk taking an hypothesis and entering an intimate long term relationship like marriage or a life of faith in God, that person will always be intellectually naïve and far from knowing the inherent and life transforming possibilities of either.
So how would an experiment work that would test the hypothesis that God is real? This is one experiment: Give as much of your life as you can to as much of God as you know, in Christ. Then you do the things he said to do. For example, you love God and other people, you pray every day, you confess your mistakes, you thank God for the blessings in your life. You enter and share the experiential journey with a small group of others who are also surrendering their lives to God. You refrain from doing things that are against the way of life that Jesus portrayed, such as murdering, stealing, and so on. But you also don’t take advantage of people, you become interested in those who are disadvantaged. And you try to eliminate habits and goals or activities that keep you from loving God and other people. Jesus said that he would meet us through those people that we try to love, and particularly through reaching out and caring for those who can’t care for themselves. In fact our lives will be evaluated not on the numerical quantity of our devotionals or what we have accumulated, but by the way we have loved.
Some people who have been mentors to me personally and in their writings, such as C.S. Lewis and Elton Trueblood and Paul Tournier, were very intelligent people with advanced degrees. They committed their lives to God in Christ and their lives changed. And two of these three went to great lengths to love me and guide me as a young man. People I’ve known who did not share their lives and love with others (who are seeking to know God) often find their old age miserable and boring by comparison.
The last thing I’d suggest for anyone trying to verify the reality of a life centered in God is to check with some people who have tried this experiment and are positive, loving and happy. And as I’d suggest not evaluating the validity of marriage by interviewing people who have never been married, but rather by talking to people who are happy, loving and happily married. In other words, find someone who has a strong faith and talk to him or her—or read books by people like those I’ve mentioned. For example, I read Mere Christianity when I was struggling with this years ago and it helped me enormously. I later wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine which is about beginning the experiment of committing as much of your life as you can and how this can affect your life in business and your family and various areas of your life.
This intimate relationship with God is a lifelong adventure that for me has transformed the experience of living. If somebody tells you that it is naïve to believe in God, my experience and study would indicate that that person is not personally well informed about the transforming power and healing nature of a relationship with God—or at least is a person not willing to risk taking the hypothesis and probably not personally living an experiment of faith in his or her own life..
There is more than I have time to discuss in this brief blog. But if any of you want to ask other questions about the issue or difficulties you’ve had when considering a life aimed at being intimately connected with God while discovering God’s character and purposes, I’d be happy to share from the sixty-year experiment I’m still on.
Dear Lord, thank you for giving me the freedom to choose to surrender my life to you or not, to question, to wonder, to open or close my mind. Without this freedom of choice there would be no “surrender,” and there would be no experience of love, but only a robot-like conformation to your will. Grant me the strength, will and grace to continue to risk surrendering my life to you in this ongoing experimental journey of faith in you. 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. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” (Romans 12:1-2, The Message)
“Because science says that it cannot handle a certain aspect of life, scientists or onlookers have no right to say that therefore it does not exist. That is either confused thinking or willful blindness, and the fault is not that of the science, but of science so-called.” Nels F. S. Ferre, “Faith and Reason”
“Who can sense the mind—hear it, see it, taste it, feel it? Yet who says it is not real?” Nels F. S. Ferre, “Faith and Reason”
“Our problem is not lack of knowledge to conceive of God, it is lack of power to commit to him and the life we instinctively feel must be available to man in his ordained fulfillment.” St. Augustine
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith: About a year ago I started going to church again. I was raised to believe that after a real commitment and surrender to God, we can live a moral life and have good relationships. I’m still having strong temptations that are a real struggle to resist, and I get into arguments with my wife and children a lot, too. I guess I didn’t really make a total commitment, and I want to know how to do that so these struggles and painful encounters in my relationships will go away. Any ideas?
Well, for me there has been good news and bad news about inner conflict (struggle with temptation) and problems like pride, envy, lust, and controlling of people with whom I am in relationships. First the bad news: these things don’t automatically go away because we have surrendered to God. But here’s the good news. They can be diminished because we have given God permission to transform us—to change our attitudes and thoughts—the culprits behind our inner conflicts and painful relationships.
When I first decided to surrender my life to God as I saw God in Jesus, I found that I still had inner conflicts and difficulties. Wanting to learn, I looked for books that dealt with having problems after becoming a Christian, but I couldn’t find any. The writers of the books at that time (1956) seemed to assume (as you were taught) that once a person makes a serious commitment to God, his or her only problems are learning how to read the Bible and pray. The unspoken (or spoken) assumption was that the problems and temptation I had would melt somehow because I read the scriptures and prayed. It seemed to me that the point of most of the books I read was that “real” Christians don’t have problems with moral issues and relationships. The common thread was, “I used to have horrible problems. But since I accepted Jesus (bless the Lord and give him all the credit), I don’t have such struggles anymore.”
But when I shared my experience, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell my newly converted friends (or even imply) that the truly committed Christian is relieved of all his or her problems simply because of making a sincere verbal commitment. If they heard and believed that, they might feel their commitment must not have been valid because they still had to struggle with the ethical and moral issues of control and self-centered behavior in their personal and business/professional worlds.
As I read the story of the apostle Paul in the Bible, it seemed to me that he never ever got over his pride and some of his other problems. And I remember feeling very relieved when I noticed that. So I said, in effect, “Since I became a Christian, I love God very much. My deep intention is to love the Lord Jesus Christ with my whole heart, and my life is consciously committed to God. But I still have problems. I’m still selfish, I’m still greedy. I still want to be inordinately successful. I’m still resentful. I have lustful thoughts. Yet, I love God with all my heart and I’m finding hope and meaning—and my wife says I’m a lot more fun to live with.”
Almost ten years after I began my search for a book about living a Christian life that included dealing with problems I wrote a book about my own experience, called “The Taste of New Wine”. I described becoming a Christian and still having to struggle with difficulties. To my amazement, the book sold more copies that any of us could have imagined. That led me to realize that many people identify with our struggles in the midst of our hope and joy as we live out our stories. We are brothers and sisters, not at the level of our piety and religious achievements, but in our insecurity, pride, and fear.
Yet we Christians tend to tell about our conversion experience but leave out many of the agonizing problems we still have inside. But when we leave them out, we lose the point of identification with people: their felt need for hope in the midst of problems.
So if this is true, why don’t we acknowledge and talk about our real lives, including the struggles and failures? Before I became a Christian, my fear was that if I commit my future to Christ and become vulnerable by letting other Christians walk into my real life, they’ll see my imperfections and pride and judge me or avoid me. Or, if I tell the people closest to me that God is really changing me, they’ll still be as they were and will reject me for changing.
I think that almost all of us have this fear that if we reveal the broken fragments of our lives to one another, we won’t be loved.
But I’ve come to believe that God can use those broken pieces as part of a beautiful mosaic as he fits the pieces of our lives closer to himself and each other. In fact Jesus told the disciples that they were supposed to be light. He told them that “by opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:16 (The Message)
Dear Lord, I give you permission to infuse my heart and mind with your love, so that I can begin to see my awful, ingrained habits of pride, selfishness, control, and all the rest, and finally trust you with everything in my life… so you can furnish the power for me to change. Show me how to live and love people enough to open my life more to other people and live like you would have me live. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Jesus heard about it and spoke up, “Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? I’m here inviting outsiders, not insiders—an invitation to a changed life, changed inside and out.” Luke 5:31 The Message
“God is kind, but he’s not soft. In kindness he takes us firmly by the hand and leads us into a radical life-change.” Romans 2:3 The Message
“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so you can live together whole and healed.” James 5:17
