by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, you write about problems you’ve faced and what you’ve done about them. At this stage in your life, what is the most difficult problem you are trying to face and overcome? And how are you trying to deal with it?
Since I believe that God is in the business of transforming lives, and I have given God permission to transform mine, I have tried to share the kinds of things that I have discovered during the process of God working in my life. A good number of things have changed, but it seems there is always something new—since nobody is perfect. So I’ll share a couple of things I’m dealing with at this 83-year-old time in my life. These two problems are ones I’ve never dealt with in the same way before.
One is facing my own mortality. Andrea and I are in the process of co-authoring a book, which we have been working on for about four and a half years. Our hope is that it will help people not to be so afraid of surrendering their whole futures to God—so they can become the people they may have wanted to be since childhood.
The problem I’m dealing with is that I am old and am getting a little “rickety.” And the spiritual problem that poses for me is to have the faith to trust that I’ll live long enough and have good enough health to finish my part of the book—the basic writing of the complete draft.
The other problem I will share is one that has plagued me since I was a small boy. It has disrupted almost every close relationship I’ve had. But I have never before had the courage to deal with it. And that is my difficulty with being on time.
I can still hear my father’s voice shouting at me when I was in grade school, “If you don’t get in the car in three minutes you are going to walk the four miles to school!” And I can see me running around in circles inside the house trying to find my coat, or my notebook, or my lunch money and finally running out to the car with all of these things in a jumbled wad, clutched to my chest.
If there were space in this blog, I could tell you dozens if not hundreds of times I have walked into church, school, or work late, filled with shame and good excuses.
Much later when I tried to surrender my life to God on a road side in East Texas, I began to deal with my part of issues in all my relationships. But there were issues like being more honest in all my close relationships, not being so judgmental and trying not to control people, events, and outcomes regarding other people’s behavior.
But finally, because of my old age I made some significant life time discoveries that finally led me to be able to hear God telling me that if I’d change a “little” thing or two he’d be able to help me discover some “little” things that would transform my entire life.
About two and a half weeks ago I got the strong feeling that I should deal with the fact that I am almost always late to a meeting I’ve gone to several times a week for the past twenty-five years. I realized that I was doing the same frantic circling, ritualistic “dance”—looking for my wallet, keys, papers I was going to need after the meeting, etc. etc.—every day.
And by the time I started the car I was either already late or had to make several crucial stoplights to make it with what I decided was an acceptable tardiness.
But that morning I committed the matter to God and told him if he’d guide me I’d give it my best try (realizing that I was powerless to do this on my own—after almost 80 years of trying to.)
As I was praying the novel idea came to me: start getting all your things together one half hour before you would have to get in the car to make the meeting. (I realize that you may think I am an idiot, but this is the hardest truth I’ve ever told you.)
Anyway, to my amazement, I was calm as I arrived at the meeting ten minutes early—for the first time in twenty-five years!
When I was on time the second day something happened that was a little shocking to me. As a friend was speaking at the meeting, he happened to glance over at me already sitting in my place sipping my decaf. He stopped in the middle of his talk and said out loud across the room to me: “How in the world did you make it to the meeting on time?” And the room exploded with a roar of spontaneous laughter.
Smiling, I replied, “It was a miracle!” When the laughter broke out again, a thought crossed my mind, “They’ve noticed—all these years!”
So after my friend sat down I told the group about God finally getting through to me about my ubiquitous tardiness, and my growing awareness that this being late everywhere had become a character defect that had inconvenienced and hurt my wife and children, my friends and business associates (although my survival needs had helped me to be somewhat better about being on time to business events such as speaking engagements.)
But I told the group (that day that my friend blew my cover) how it felt inside to trust God enough to tell them what I was trying to do—to break a “small” lifelong habit that had caused so much pain. I added that I had a great deal of fear about telling them because I knew they would raise their eyebrows and/or kid me when I was late again—which I knew would happen sometimes because I’d never been able to deal with this habit.
But I told them in spite of my fear because I had told God that I was willing to have him remove this defect of character because I had finally realized that I am powerless over it.
That was two and a half weeks ago. And I have only been late to one meeting. I got hung up on a business call and by the time the call was over I realized I’d missed half the meeting if I went to it. I prayed about going and decided to go—and not use the valid excuse I had.
Come back next week and I’ll tell you what happened at that meeting—and how agreeing to let God help me change this one sinful and shaming lifelong habit had a ripple effect and brought into my life new courage—courage that I had to find to finish writing the book Andrea and I are writing (the title of which is ironically, The View From Square One.)
Lord, thank you that you can transform our lives, but only if we realize we are powerless to change and ask you to change us. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.” – John 16:23-24, NIV
“This is what I want you to do: Ask the Father for whatever is in keeping with the things I’ve revealed to you. Ask in my name, according to my will, and he’ll most certainly give it to you. Your joy will be a river overflowing its banks! – John 16:23-24, The Message
To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself? – C S Lewis
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Recovery, Weekly Devotional
Although I am a committed Christian, I have realized that I am also a compulsive “fixer.” After my family rebelled against my attempts to help them I started working almost constantly in ministry. I can’t seem to take time off just to live. My fear is about losing touch with my family, and feeling lonely and resentful that no one seems to care about me any more.
I can certainly relate to your feelings and to being so involved in ministry it feels like there is no time left for you just to live. At one point in my life I got burned out trying to serve God and minister to people. I went to a counselor and discovered a mystery, a secret about myself that had been hidden behind my confident smile and attempts to be God’s person. Much to my surprise I saw that crouching behind my compulsive religious working and overachieving was a lonely and starved self, like a lost child—which in one sense I’d felt like all my life. That was true even though I had caring parents and a brother and we lived in a “Christian home” and I had won all kinds of honors in school.
I saw that I was almost completely focused on getting love and attention. I used everything I had—all my talent and energy—to manipulate the people and things around me, often “for their own good,” but really so they would love me and think I was a great person. I saw, in short, that I am an almost completely self-centered person, one who puts himself in the center and tries desperately to control his world and the people in it—traits I have always abhorred in other people. Since this had not been conscious, I’d never faced these behaviors and when I made a serious commitment of my adult life to God I began to build a life and a ministry trying to solve this need to feel okay.
As I began to face myself at this new level I was horrified to see that this self-centered grandiosity, this playing God, I’d been involved in was “addictive.” I could somehow hide it from myself, but despite all my resolve, I couldn’t stop it. I realized that this compulsive, driving busy-ness as a Christian to be enough, do enough, to please people (to get their attention, approval, or love),to lead them to Christ and/or fix them in order to become okay myself, operated like any other addiction. I had an uncontrollable compulsion to repeat these self-defeating behaviors that was disastrous to me. Sometimes I felt as though I must be crazy not to be able to change simple habits I wanted to be rid of.
For example, I kept getting snarled up with people close to me. I would promise not to tell them what to do or try to run their lives. But then, against my own will it seemed, I would catch myself doing the very thing I had promised myself (and them) I would never do again. I was like a drug addict promising not to use chemicals and then going right back out and doing it. I could decide I was not going to give people close to me unsolicited advice or try to influence their decisions, yet at the end of every phone call or visit with certain people in my family I would see that I’d done it again—and again. I could hear the anger and discouragement in their voices.
I discovered that I used work, intensity, alcohol, and religious activities to cover and blot out the feelings that would have revealed to me that though I might look like a humble Christian (and truly want to be one), I was playing God in people’s lives to get the attention and approval I needed so desperately from them and/or even from God.
These may not seem like important issues to you unless you have made resolutions—to change your eating habits, exercising habits, or drinking habits, to get rid of resentments or fears, or not to do things that are irritating to those around you. But I tried to change some of these things and was baffled when I could not. I saw that what I was doing was Sin* and I also saw that it was addictive.
It dawned on me with an awesome certainty that when people speak of themselves as being “sinners in need of God’s healing,” they are actually talking about being in the grips of the addictive spiritual disease that the Bible portrays in connection with Sin. I realized that this disease can disrupt our everyday lives and relationships and never be seen to even be connected to Sin. And I saw that this Sin-disease may well be the matrix for all compulsive, manipulative, and controlling behavior. In an instant of clarity I saw that what we have always called Sin just might be the source, the breeding ground, of all other addictions and for the irrational destructive and addictive behaviors that are destroying our lives and institutions across the world—even our churches.
My counselor had told me that the best program ever devised for recovering from compulsive behaviors and addictions of any sort was the Twelve-Step program originally devised for alcoholics but now used by those addicted to food, people-pleasing, drugs, gambling, sex, religion, and many other compulsive habits and relationships. I saw that I was compulsive in several areas.
As I began to work through the simple twelve steps many years ago, I realized that here was a profound program of spiritual and physical healing that got at issues of spiritual sickness I had never been able to reach or even see through the traditional theological and psychological methods I had learned in seminary, in graduate courses in psychological counseling, and during over thirty years of studying the lives of the saints. Although those things had helped significantly and had led me to where I was, they did not deal directly with the repressed and compulsive behaviors of the Sin-disease I was now confronting.
After about a year of being in recovery I started to connect the sanity and security I was experiencing with the peace and joy that were such an integral part of the experience of the early Christian church.
I wondered if perhaps the simple spiritual program that was changing my life and the lives of thousands of people “right now” wasn’t pretty close to the early church’s clear recognition of sin and the gospel’s remedy for it.
If this was true, then countless numbers of people might find their way to freedom… and to God, using the spiritual process underlying the Twelve Steps.**
Dear Lord, thank you that your healing Spirit that was revealed in Jesus captured the hearts of some of your addicted servants and through them provided a way of healing and wholeness for millions of Christians whose lives and relationships have been bruised and broken though the same controlling compulsiveness that set up addictive drinking and acting out. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
God’s Word warns us of danger and directs us to hidden treasure. Otherwise how will we find our way? Or know when we play the fool? Clean the slate, God, so we can start the day fresh! Keep me from stupid sins, from thinking I can take over your work; then I can start this day sun-washed, scrubbed clean of the grime [and unreality] of sin. These are the words in my mouth; these are what I chew on and pray. Accept them when I place them on the morning altar, O God, my Altar-Rock, God, Priest-of-My-Altar.
– Psalm 19:11-14, The Message
***
O to grace how great debtor daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.
– Hymn lyrics by Robert Robinson
1735-1790
* Sin with a capital “S” being to put myself in the driver’s seat of my life where only God should be if I wanted to live as he made me to be. Sins (with a small “s”) are things I do as a result of putting myself in the center of my life.
** See A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Prayer, Weekly Devotional
Recently I was reading in the gospel of Matthew and ran across Jesus’ first teaching to the disciples. He starts it out this way: “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope because then there is less of you and more of God and his rule.” What in the world does that mean? I mean, it sounds crazy. I thought you were blessed when you succeeded or things went well. What is Jesus trying to say here?
Good question. In fact, I believe an essential question for any Christian who would like to see his or her life transformed. I think the basis underlying this experiencing “powerlessness” as “blessedness” is that Jesus came to announce and inaugurate a new Kingdom of God (or Reign of God) in the people’s lives. The people had tried to have a geographical kingdom through military conquest and they’d tried political conquest. And Jesus was saying, “No, the Kingdom of God is going to be within you, inside your mind.”
If the Kingdom of God is going to be within our minds where nobody can see it, then before the kingdom can come we’ve got to establish God as king there. But our difficulty is that our dominant problem is Sin (with a capital “S”); that is, we put ourselves in the center where only God belongs. And we can’t see ourselves surrendering the driver’s seat (throne) to God. So we try to live our lives using our own happiness, fulfillment and way of doing things as the sovereign criteria for all of our decisions.. And when we’ve tried everything in our power, and we can’t prosper, can’t get what we’re trying to get, or be loved the way we want to be loved—we may get to the end of our rope. But it’s at that point we may get tired enough or lonely enough to be willing to surrender to God, asking God to help us become what we were meant to be as human beings. Also at that point we’re open to the possibility of letting God be in the drivers’ seat of our lives to help, teach, and guide us, since we’ve realized that we don’t know how or don’t have the power to fix our situation.
Jesus says we’re blessed when that happens because “then there’s less of us (and our self-absorbed ways of doing things) and more of God and his rule.” To me, that means that when I get to the place where I can’t handle life and hit a wall, then I can detect a doorway in that wall, with a handle on my side. And if I decide to trust God with my whole life, I can step through that doorway into the Kingdom of God.
Jesus goes on to list other circumstances we encounter when we try to run things under our own power that can be doorways to wholeness.
For example, he says “You’re blessed when you think you’ve just lost that which is most dear to you, because only then can you be embraced by the one most dear to you.” I did lose my success, my minor fame that seemed to major to me, and I had to face the fact that I couldn’t control other people’s opinion of me. I’d screwed up my life in a pretty big way, so I knew that I didn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of being perfect. At that point, I came to the place once again where I was willing to say, “Lord, I surrender my life to you—because it’s now clear to me that I can’t handle it. I am powerless to do this. I want to start over, and be your child. Teach me how to be loving, and how to be culpable.” And he has done these things, at least to a larger degree than I ever dreamed could happen.
As I began to live this way, I gradually began to relax, and eventually saw that I really was blessed, because now I didn’t have to prove anything to anybody (although sometimes I still catch myself trying to do these things). All I had to do was to be honest and culpable about myself and make what amends I could and do the next right thing in my personal and vocational lives. And I have this awareness that God is willing to help transform my life now if I will just come to him and surrender the outcome of my life to him and listen to his guidance concerning my decisions, my wife and children, to him. Then when I fail in any of these areas, he’s there at the end of my rope to guide and teach me, giving me some things to do, and teaching me how to have more integrity and to love and care for other people whether they love or care for me or not. These are things I never could have imagined doing naturally without God—and strangely this way of life has already made me happier and more loving than I ever thought I would be.
Jesus goes on to say that “You’re blessed when you are content with just who you are, no more, no less.” I’ve learned that when I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of my life, I want to be number one. I want to be the best at whatever I do. If I’m going to be a Christian I want to be the best Christian around. If I want to be a businessman, I want to be rich and successful. And I have lots of ideas I want God to help me perform and implement.
But there is a different set of values in the Kingdom of God. Evidently the reason that Jesus came to announce and inaugurate this plan is so we could live in an intimate relationship with the God Jesus called Father, let him transform our lives, teach us how to love other people and tell them about him and his reign. When I’m content with just who I am, then I’m not all the time agitating for something more or better or different. Although I don’t like everything that I am, I’m content with who I am right now. And I want to be whatever God wants me to be. And that’s a switch.
Jesus goes on and says “You’re blessed when your witness to me elicits persecution. Because this persecution will drive you deeper into my Reign and my way of life.” Sure enough, it’s been true. It’s paradoxical that even when I’ve had church officials reject me, I have been calm as I try to hear them and love them because for me this is part of living in the Reign of God.
One little thing I’d like to add. It’s important for me to live in the present moment if I want to cultivate this intimate relationship with God. When I’m at the end of my rope or have lost something very dear to me, or can’t achieve the success I want, then I’m not concerned with little unpleasant things. I’m almost totally focused on the threatening situation that’s going on in the present moment. Somewhere along the way somebody told me that God never did anything in the past or the future. God operates only in the present. Anything that happened in the past was—at the time it actually happened—in a present moment. And so if I want the Kingdom of God and his Reign to be the dominant motivational purpose in my own mind and lived out in my life, then I’ll have to learn to live more in the present moment—instead of filling my present moments with fears about the future or regrets about the past. Whenever I see that I can’t do something in that moment, I can bring it to God and ask if it’s even the right thing to do. If it is, I ask for God’s power; and if it’s not the right thing to do, then I let it go and try to discern something else God wants me to do instead. This has given me a sense of enormous freedom.
I’ve come to realize that God made me in a certain way with certain gifts (and that each person is unique with certain gifts). And the more that I’m willing to surrender to God, the more I’m inclined and able to use these gifts for other people—to love them without trying to make them see and do what I see and do. I ask God to help me to quit counting to see how many good deeds or how many people I’ve helped or who have helped me. This is a freedom to me, and a sense of peace that I never had before because I was so restless and driven and prone to keep score.
These days I am loving the work I’m doing. I realize I’m not the best in the world to do it, and sometimes I feel like God’s made a mistake in having me do this particular kind of work because he could get a lot better people. But he’s let me know somehow that, although I was not necessarily the first choice, he’s chosen to guide me in it because I said “Yes” and am trying to do it. And when I fail and confess that failure or sin to God, he has let me experience his forgiveness and lets me begin again.
So I’d just say to you, Jesus is trying to describe a different, deeper more significant kind of “being blessed” than just having success or enough material goods. The question I’ve had to face was, “are you willing to surrender your life to God and let him be in the driver’s seat of your inner mind and life, to show you who you are and what to do? At that moment when you are ready, you are really blessed—because he’ll do it. At least that’s been my experience so far.
***
God said, “Heads up! The days are coming when I’ll set up a new plan for dealing with Israel and Judah…. This new plan I’m making with Israel isn’t going to be written on paper, isn’t going to be chiseled in stone; This time I’m writing out the plan in them, carving it on the lining of their hearts. I’ll be their God, they’ll be my people. They won’t go to school to learn about me, or buy a book called God in Five Easy Lessons. They’ll all get to know me firsthand, the little and the big, the small and the great. They’ll get to know me by being kindly forgiven, with the slate of their sins forever wiped clean.
– Hebrews 8:6-13, The Message
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Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way.
Thou art the potter, I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after Thy will
While I am waiting, yielded and still.
Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Hold o’er my being absolute sway!
Fill with Thy spirit, ‘till all shall see
Christ only, always, living in me.
– Hymn by Adelaide A. Pollard, 1907
P.S. If you are interested in learning how it might feel to actually take God this seriously, the story of how Keith began to take God consciously into the different parts of his ordinary everyday living and working lives is recorded in The Taste of New Wine.
