Paul E. Miller Quotes

The kingdom comes when Jesus becomes king of your life. But it has to be your life.

Suffering is the frame, the context, where we learn to love.

Don't try to get the prayer right; just tell God where you are and what's on your mind.

Our "in tune with my feelings" era believes that to be true to myself, to be authentic, means I need to act on my feelings. But the opposite is true. In fact, true authenticity means I maintain a trust through thick and thin.

Prayer is asking God to incarnate, to get dirty in your life. Yes, the eternal God scrubs floors. For sure we know he washes feet. So take Jesus at his word. Ask him. Tell him what you want. Get dirty. Write out your prayer requests; don't mindlessly drift through life on the American narcotic of busyness. If you try to seize the day, the day will eventually break you. Seize the corner of his garment and don't let go until he blesses you. He will reshape the day.

It is striking how many spiritual writers react to the specificity of real prayer. It runs deeper than Greek Neoplatonism and the influence of Buddhist spirituality. Frankly, God makes us nervous when he gets too close. We don't want a physical dependence on him. It feels hokey, like we are controlling God. Deep down we just don't like grace. We don't want to risk our prayer not being answered. We prefer the safety of isolation to engaging the living God. To embrace the Father and thus prayer is to accept what one pastor called "the sting of particularity."4 Our dislike of asking is rooted in our desire for independence.

Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life.

Prayer isn't meant to be a production or a problem... Prayer is meant to be the conversation where your life and your God meet.

Self-will and prayer are both ways of getting things done. At the center of self-will is me, carving a world in my image, but at the center of prayer is God, carving me in his Son's image.

Remember the point of Christinianity isn't to learn a lot of truths so you don't need God anymore. We don't learn God in the abstract.

What do I lose when I have a praying life? Control. Independence. What do I gain? Friendship with God. A quiet heart. The living work of God in the hearts of those I love. The ability to roll back the tide of evil. Essentially, I lose my kingdom and get his. I move from being an independent player to a dependent lover. I move from being an orphan to a child of God.

We don't know how bad we are until we try to be good. Nothing exposes our selfishness and spiritual pwerlessness like prayer.

If we separate our mundane needs (doing) from God's best gift, his loving presence (being), then we are overspiritualizing prayer. If we ask nothing of God, we are left adrift in an evil world. Such a position may feel spiritual because it seems unselfish, but it is unbiblical because it separates the real world of our desires from God's world. The kingdom can't come because it is floating. By discounting the spiritual and physical worlds, Neoplatonism did exactly what the Enlightenment did. The only difference was Neoplatonism valued the spiritual while the Enlightenment valued the physical. So the church is influenced by Neoplatonism (the physical isn't important), and the world is shaped by the Enlightenment (the spiritual isn't important). Both perspectives stifled honest, person-to-person praying in the church.

God is a person, and his universe reflects his personhood. The closer something is to the character of God, the more it reflects him and the less it can be measured. Things such as integrity, beauty, hope, and love are all in the same category as prayer. You can tell their presence and even describe them, but you can't define them, simply because they are too close to God's image.

Nothing clears out self-righteousness better than serving someone who is critical of you.

As we wait and pray, God weaves his story and creates a wonder. Instead of drifting between comedy (denial) and tragedy (reality), we have a relationship with the living God, who is intimately involved with the details of our worlds. We are learning to watch for the story to unfold, to wait for the wonder.

Two days later after the visit to CHOP, Jill wrote, "Give me the faith to leave this with you. Please help her to talk." Then the journal goes silent. It would be ten years before Jill would have the faith and the energy to write another entry in her prayer journal. It would be twenty years before Kim would begin to speak, at age twenty-five. God left Jill in confusion in order to grow her faith, her ability to connect with him. To become like a child, Jill had to become weak again.

We have an allergic reaction to dependency, but this is the state of the heart most necessary for a praying life. A need heart is a praying heart. Dependency is the heartbeat of prayer.

As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, "If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?" (Matt. 5:46). In other words, if I love only when I feel like it, then I've really not understood love.

The criteria for coming to Jesus is weariness. Come overwhelmed with life. Come with your wandering mind. Come messy.

Imagine a husband who really loves his wife. He is attentive to her needs. He listens to her heart. He is her best earthly gift. How would she react if he said to her, "Don't ask me for anything. I'm your best gift." When I've said this at our prayer seminars, everyone bursts into laughter. The husband's love for his wife is not disengaged from responding thoughtfully and generously to her requests. If we separate our mundane needs (doing) from God's best gift, his loving presence (being), then we are overspiritualizing prayer.

According to Jesus, acknowledging our neediness opens the door to genuine and lasting happiness. Religions usually talk about what a person has to "do", but Jesus talks about what we "can't do". He says that our weakness, not our power or what we bring to God, enables us to know God.

Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming. Everything you do affects those you love. All of life is covenant.
Imbedded in the idea of prayer is a richly textured view of the world where all of life is organized around invisible bonds or covenants that knit us together. Instead of a fixed world, we live in our Father's world, a world built for divine relationships between people where, because of the Good News, tragedies become comedies and hope is born.

The only way to know how prayer works is to have complete knowledge and control of the past, present, and future. In other words, you can figure out how prayer works if you are God.

Remember the point of Christianity isn't to learn a lot of truths so you don't need God anymore.

Cynicism creates a numbness toward life.

Cynicism begins with a wry assurance that everyone has an angle. Behind every silver lining is a cloud. The cynic is always observing, critiquing, but never engaging, loving, and hoping.

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To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being "in the know," cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit.

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Cynicism begins, oddly enough, with too much of the wrong kind of faith, with naive optimism or foolish confidence. At first glance, genuine faith and naive optimism appear identical since both foster confidence and hope.But the similarity is only surface deep.Genuine faith comes from knowing my heavenly Father loves, enjoys, and cares for me. Naive optimism is groundless. It is childlike trust without the loving Father.

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Optimism in the goodness of people collapses when it confronts the dark side of life.

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Shattered optimism sets us up for the fall into defeated weariness and, eventually, cynicism. You'd think it would just leave us less optimistic, but we humans don't do neutral well. We go from seeing the bright side of everything to seeing the dark side of everything. We feel betrayed by life.

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The movement from naive optimism to cynicism is the new American journey. In naive optimism we don't need to pray because everythin

Until you are convinced that you can't change your child's heart, you will not take prayer seriously.

Prayer is a moment of incarnation - God with us. God involved in the details of my life.

Learning to pray doesn't offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart. In the midst of outer busyness

All of Jesus' teaching on prayer in the Gospels can be summarized with one word: ask.

Because prayer is all about the relationship, we can't work on prayer as an isolated part of life.

If you wait, your heavenly Father will pick you up, carry you out into the night, and make your life sparkle. He wants to dazzle you with the wonder of his love.

Releasing control of something I loved opened the door to communion with God.

The praying life is the abiding life. Many Christians hit a wall when they connect abiding with asking. They freeze, thinking, If I were abiding, then I would get my prayers answered. Abiding feels elusive, like a spiritual pipe dream. Abiding is anything but disconnected from life. It is the way life should be done, in partnership with God.

A thankful heart is constantly extending grace because it has received grace. Love and grace are uneven. God poured out on his own Son the criticism I deserve. Now he invites me to pour out undeserving grace on someone who has hurt me. Grace begets grace. This

To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being "in the know," cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to a creeping bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit ...
A praying life is just the opposite. It engaged evil. It doesn't take no for an answer. The psalmist was in God's face, hoping, dreaming, asking. Prayer is feisty. Cynicism, on the other hand, merely critiques. It is passive, cocooning itself from the passions of the great cosmic battle we are engaged in. It is without hope.

Why is hesed love so important? Because life is moody. Feelings come and go. Pressures rise and fall. Passions ebb and flow. Hesed is a stake in the heart of the changing seasons of life. Words of commitment create a bond that stands against life's moodiness.

We're trying to be spiritual, to get it right. We know we don't need to clean up our act in order to become a Christian, but when it comes to praying, we forget that. We, like adults, try to fix ourselves up. In contrast, Jesus wants us to come to him like little children, just as we are.

Oddly enough, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God.