Paul E. Miller Quotes

#1. 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.

Paul E. Miller

#2. Sometimes when we say "God is silent," what's really going on is that he hasn't told the story the way we wanted it told. He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

#4. 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.

Paul E. Miller

#5. 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.

Paul E. Miller

#6. God doesn't like to be experienced. He wants to be known.

Paul E. Miller

#7. When you realize that death is at the center of love, it is quietly liberating. Instead of fighting the death that comes with love, you embrace what your Father has given you. A tiny resurrection begins in your

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

#9. 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.

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

#11. 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.

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

#14. We become anxious when we take a godlike stance, occupying ourselves with things too great for us.

Paul E. Miller

#15. 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.

Paul E. Miller

#16. Anxiety is unable to relax in the face of chaos; continuous prayer clings to the Father in the face of chaos.

Paul E. Miller

#17. 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.

Paul E. Miller

#18. Prayer mirrors the gospel. In the gospel, the Father takes us as we are and gives us his gift of salvation. In prayer, the Father receives us as we are because of Jesus and gives us his gift of help.

Paul E. Miller

#19. Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life.

Paul E. Miller

#20. 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

Paul E. Miller

#21. When I begin praying Christ into someone's life, God often permits suffering in that person's life. If Satan's basic game plan is pride, seeking to draw us into his life of arrogance, then God's basic game plan is humility, drawing us into the life of his Son.

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

#24. God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden ...
The best gift of the desert is God's presence ... The protective love of the Shepherd gives me courage to face the interior journey.

Paul E. Miller

#25. Humility makes you disappear, which is why we avoid it.

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

#29. 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.

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller

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

Paul E. Miller