Calvin Miller Quotes

Humanity is fickle. They may dress for a morning coronation and never feel the need to change clothes for an execution in the afternoon. So Triumphal Sundays and Good Fridays always fit comfortably into the same April week.

The best of sermons have never been a belch of information or piety.

The third question, "What do they know about God?" has for its answer, "Pretty much nothing.

What mature believer does not delight in seeing new converts talk with Christ? As we get older, we sometimes hurry past the ardor we knew as younger Christians. Hurried Christians beget hurried disciples. Hurried disciples become a hurried church - a hassled fellowship of disciples who serve the clock and call it God. But this subnormal Christianity has become so normal we don't see anything abnormal about it. In fact, we've come to believe that the most sincere Christians are supposed to be shallow neurotics. Yet the church holds only one possibility of relevance: Time itself must be surrendered to the pursuit of the depths of God.

The world is poor because her fortune is buried in the sky and all her treasure maps are of the earth.

Our problem is this: we usually discover him within some denominational or Christian ghetto. We meet him in a province and, having caught some little view, we paint him in smaller strokes. The Lion of Judah is reduced to something kittenish because our understanding cannot, at first, write larger definitions.

Define your times. Treasure your calling. Pray without ceasing. The terrors of the age are less than the grandeur of the Christ within you.

Teach me the wilderness simplicity.
Help me to point to you, honestly and joyously,
as the threshold of all that really matters.

The Bible never says those who believe in God will be saved; only those who believe that He had a Son who rose from the dead can be saved (Rom. 10:9). Talk about narrow doctrine; we who have accepted Christ as

Love is substance; Lust, illusion. Only in the surge of passion do the two mingle in confusion.

The lips know only shallow tunes

Terra has just one stone
To mark her great insanity:
Across her continents it reads:
HERE LIES HUMANITY!

Jesus always quickens artistic and literary imagination.

Just because the pastors have preached hundreds of sermons in one place does not give them the liberty of skipping the work of audience analysis for even one single Sunday.

Life found itself alive and somehow knew its opposite was death. We are ever being born, or dying, and the thrill of choosing is ours. Only once, must we be born without our own consent. Only once, must we die without our own permission

When we sin, we do not infuriate God, our Lover. We only hurt Him. We grieve Him!

We cannot make believers. Believers make themselves by voluntarily coming to faith, one at a time.

It is strange how oftentimes the air speaks.
We are sane as long as we hear voices when there are none.
We are insane when we hear nothing and worse we are deaf.

Still nobody knows better than those who preach that preaching is an art in which a studied, professional sinner tells the less studied sinners how they ought to believe, behave, and serve.

Donald Coggan's wisdom: "When true preaching takes place, the main actor is not the preacher, nor the congregation, but the Holy Spirit."15

Reputation is not a treatise you write on your own behavior. Other people write it, and other people keep it.

Most of these super-sovereigns feel that God can comment if he wants to, but God must avoid getting loud. While God is welcome to his opinions, he is only one voice, and he doesn't get extra points just for being God. The unstudied opinionated are prone to say, even to God, "Yes, but here's what I think." In such a world, classic apologetics has lost much of its force.

We have become the revisionist society. We rewrite history in favor of viewpoints. We rewrite ethics in favor of "what's right is what makes you feel good after." Political correctness puts Jesus and Buddha on the same low shelf. Gender inclusivity has us tied up in proper pronouns. Since God goes undefined, His expectations have been missing for some time, and sin is what you do that hurts others.

Application is what gets the Sermon off the Mount, and down in the valley where the toilers live out their days.

Do not God's visitations unnerve us? But why? Because He never comes to us without asking us to do something. We never know what He will ask of us, but we know that we will be overwhelmed by our feelings of inadequacy

The world is looking for answers. If you have some of them, for goodness' sake spit 'em out. The world is looking for servants of God whose yes is yes. How elementary, how refreshing.

Never lose the awe and wonder of having a personal God get personally involved in your life.

Comtemporary pulpits feel that to bring up dying is just not as relevant as telling people how to live, marry, succeed, relate, or become a winner.

One of the great things silence does, it gives us a new concept of God.

CHRIST'S LIFE ILLUSTRATES PLAINLY THAT THE CROWN OF VICTORY IS FORGED FROM THE GOLD OF OBEDIENCE.

Anytime our sermons become confessional, they become more powerful.

With what dread and apprehension we entrust important jobs into the hands of others. Imagine the love of a needless God who is willing to want our work.

Much of Christmas' beauty is in its sameness. The same traditions. The same meals. The same songs. The same story. Yet each Christmas is a little different.

Passion is the soul of intensity. The speaker who truly loves God may or may not lead others to believe it, but the speaker who doesn't is only a philosopher whose ideas are too bland to be important.

Audience analysis is also the most formidable work of the local pastor.

Bless your critics for their honesty. They do not criticize you to be a blessing to you, but the end product may be the same.

Axiom #3: When told how to apply sermons specifically, most people over-congratulate themselves on how biblically they already live while thinking of others who could really use the sermon.

Saturdays and Mondays were Sundays' bookends. On Saturdays preachers were neurotic planning what they would say, and on Mondays they were neurotic for having said it."7

Preachers, however eloquent they are, are rarely heard as readily as pastors. After all, shepherds are sheep lovers, and the sheep are dependent upon their shepherds, who love them even before they listen.

Tripping is embarrassing, but I have learned that where we stumble is the place we dig for gold - where we trip is where the treasure lies.

We humans are a hungry lot. We are driven by a craving to know who we are. Yet who we are is embedded in the heart of a holy God. Unless we seek for ourselves in the epicenter of God's grace, we will be forever condemned to walk the arid edges of self-understanding.

Great worship and great sermons contain a wonderful impending, a sense of "watch out, here it comes.

Beware, O earth, the prophet who claims to know the time but never wears a watch.

To get the job done preaching must be committed to two goals: first it should be passionate and second, fascinating.

Readers, on the other hand, have at least 7.5 books going all the time. Actually, the number of books a reader takes on is usually directly related to the number of bathrooms he has in his home and office. I am working on a survey that will show that, over a lifetime, readers are in bathrooms seven years and three months longer than nonreaders.