42 Don Miller Quotes on Faith

Don Miller quotes on faith

1. I need more than a bedtime story, I need more than a youth group God.I am looking for a savior. A guide. An existential answer to my questions about purpose and meaning. I want true fulfilment in my Christian faith. I am looking for joy.

4. It gives me great confidence and pride to think that, had the Israelites been influenced by German engineering, Paul and Timothy might have journeyed in an old Volkswagen camping van.

7. Sometimes I think these self-righteous labors are attempts to impress myself rather than sincere strides toward God.

10. 'I guess I'm looking for what any guy is looking for. I want a companion, you know. Just someone to share life with. I want her to be my biggest fan and I want to be her biggest fan, too. I want us to raise kids in a home where they know their parents are in love with each other, with them, and with God. I guess that's all I want.'

13. Outside of God's perspective, even romance loses its significance. Not in riches or in romance do we find fulfillment, but in God.

14. The graves all are silent. The caskets are vacant. Stalin has no more wisdom for us. Nietzche is preserved in books, having forgotten to lift his casket lid and tell us he was right. Muhammad gives us the slip. So does Buddha. In is Christ alone who defeats the grave. Nothing is left in the tomb but echoes and cobwebs. And so we do well to listen to Him with the ears of dying men.

16. If worship is sustenance, then modern worship is fast food.

17. Worship is not just something we feel, it is something we sweat.

23. How does a person seperate true, personal religion from a religion of conformity? Christianity is not really as white and wealthy and judgmental as we might want it to be.

25. It is the process that is godliness, not so much the end result. A godly man will involve himself in the process of being godly. For godliness is not so much a place we are going as it is the going itself.

27. 'Don.' 'Yeah.' 'Why don't people believe?' 'Why don't they believe what?' 'In God.' 'I don't know. Not everyone has a Volkswagen.'

30. Life is, without a doubt, complex and confusing. My faith is my sanity. There are people who choose to live on the surface of things. I have yet to find the surface. And with all the beauty in the underneath, I am not certain I want to live on the surface should I find it. I stopped looking a long time ago.

31. The more I ponder God's way, the more I believe He changes a person, or molds a person, through enlightenment. He changes a person's mind.

32. When we ask ourselves if we are walking with Christ, I believe we need to ask oursleves this question: Has Christ changed the way I view the world lately?

33. 'I think that is a big problem with a lot of Christians,' Paul begins. 'We want to feel special. And there are times when it does, you know. But not all the time. Sometimes life just feels like life. We have to put ouf faith in God.

36. 'Well, a not of times we are looking for a signt that tells us we're godly. We want to preach, or be a missionary or whatever, all to help ouselves believe that God is using us. We look everywhere but to God to make us feel godly. We try to convince others we are godly so that we can convince ourselves we are godly. The botton line is that godliness is about relationship, not about image'

38. Poppycock religion is America's new faith. It is easy. It is quick. I allows a person to feel spiritual, seem intellectual, have a faith to follow, and have something interesting to talk about over cofee. Poppycock is the quick-fix diet of the spiritual industry. It sells. It rarely threatens or confronts the seeker, allowing each to forge his own individual 'religion.' The poppycock believer changes the rules as he goes. If he misses a basket, he will say that a missd basket is still worth two points. The poppycock believer does not serve his god, rather his god serves him. He has everything to gain and nothing to lose.

39. It is Christianity, I believe, that truly faces the facts of reality. The Christian does not try to create his or her own reality. Our search fot the truth leads us to Christ. Faith costs something (as all things of worth do) and obedience is hard, but God has poured out His love for us and given us the grace that empowers us to obey.

40. It is the occupation of a Christian to glorify God.

42. Many of us associate the Christian faith as a list of do's and don'ts, to be sure. But the Christian life is to be oriented in relationship, why is there so much talk of formula? Could it be that the reason we are more interestied in forumla than relationship is that we would like to deal with our need for religion without dealing with th complications of relationship? That even thought we have chosen the Christian faith instead of 'poppycock religion,' we ultimately want the same thing as the pagan? And what is that? Easy answers, comfortable sentiments, beliefs that make us feel good. So we go through the motions. We go to our churches, we read our self-help books, we watch our religious television, and we check each item off our to-do list as if we were doing work for pay. One thing I am sure of. This is not the kind of real-life faith I'm looking for.

54. I associated much of Christian doctrine with children's stories because I grew up in church. My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

57. The magical proposition of the gospel, once free from the clasps of fairy tale, was very adult to me, very gritty like something from Hemingway or Steinbeck, like something with copious ammounts of sex and blood. Christian spirituality was not a children's story. It wasn't cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into the dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment. Perhaps, I thought, Christian spirituality really was the difference between illusion and magic.

58. Early on, I made the mistake of wanting spiritual feelings to endure and remain romantic. Like a new couple expecting to always feel in love, I operated my faith thinking God and I were going to walk around smelling flowers. When this didn't happen, I became confused

59. What was more frustrating than the loss of exhiliration was the return of my struggles with sin. I had become a Christian, so why did I still struggle with lust, greed, and envy? Why did I want to get drunk at parties or cheat on tests?

63. Your problem is not that God is not fulfulling, your problem is that you are spoiled.

64. I realized in and instant that I desired false gods because Jesus wouldn't jump through my hoops, and I realized that, like Tony, my faith was about image and ego, not about practicing spirituality.

66. I feel like I am constantly saying things I don't mean. I tell people they should share their faith, but I don't feel like sharing my faith. i tell people that should be in the Word, but I am only in the Word because I have to teach the Word. I said to a guy the other day, 'God bless you.' What does that mean? I have been saying that stuff all my life, but what does it mean? Then I started thinking about all the crap I say. All the cliches, all the parroted slogans. I have become an infomercial for God, and I don't even use the product.

67. The days and weeks before a true commitment to Jesus can be terrible and lonely. I think I was feeling bitter about the human experience. I never asked to be human. Nobody can to the womb and explainted the situation to me, asking for my permission to go into the world and live and breathe and eat and feel joy and pain. I started thinking about how odd it was to be human, how we are stuck inside this skin, forced to be attracted to the opposite sex, forced to eat food, and use the rest room and then stuck to the earth by gravity. I spent an entire week feeling bitter because I couldn't breathe underwater. I told God I wanted to be a fish. I also felt a little bitter about sleep. Why do we have to sleep? I wanted to be able to stay awake for as long as I wanted, but God had put me in this body that had to sleep. Life no longer seemed like and experience of freedom.

68. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart.

69. I know a little of why there is blood in my body, pumping life into my limbs and thought into my brain. I am wanted by God. He is wanting to preserve me, to guide me through the darkness of the shadow of death, up into the highlands of His persence and afterlife. I understand that I am temporary, in this shell of a thing on this dirt of an earth. I am being tempted by Satan, we are all being tempted by Satan, but I am preserved to tell those who do not know about our Savior and Redeemer. This is why Paul had no questions. This is why he could be beaten one day, imprisioned the next, and released only to be beaten again and never ask God why. He understood the earth was fallen. He understood the rules of Rome could not save mankind, that mankind could not save itself; rather, it must be rescued, and he knew he was not in the promised land, but still in the desert, and like Joshua and Caleb he was shouting, 'Follow me and trust God!'

70. My most recent faith struggle is not onw of intellect. I don't really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it's about who is smarter, and honestly, I don't care.

71. And that's when I realized that believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is like making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.

73. Satan, who I believe exists as much as I believe Jesus exists, wants us to believe meaningless things for meaningless reasons.

76. The problem with Christian belief--I mean real Christian belief, the belief that there is a God and a devil and a heaven and a hell--is that it is not a fashionable thing to believe.

80. The churches I attended would embrace war metaphor. They would talk about how we are in a battle, and I agreed with them, only they wouldn't clarify that we were battling poverty and hate and injustice and pride and the power of darkness. The left us thinking that our war was against liberals and homosexuals. Their teaching would have me believe I was the good person in the world and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught that we are all bad and He is good, and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more importatnt than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus.

85. 'I mean that to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can't accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people,' Paul says. 'That is why God tells us so many times to love each other.'

90. Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in fron of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Lonliness is something that came with the fall.

94. It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, look out from within our reality, that is would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater that reality, or it would not be reasonable.

95. Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God that the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.

96. Here's what I've started thinking: All the wonder of God happens right above our arithmetic and formula. The more I climb outside my pat answers, the more invigorating the view, the more my heart enters into worship.

97. I think we have two choices in the face us such big beauty: terror and awe. And this is precisely why we attempt to chart God, because we want to be able to predict Him, to dissect Him, to carry Him around in our dog and pony show. We are too proud to feel awe and to fearful to feel terror. We reduce Him to math so we don't have to fear Him, and yet the Bible tells us fear is the appropriate response, that it is the beginning of wisdom.

98. Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.