Top 40 Calvin Miller Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Calvin Miller

2. “Those who fervently love God are intoxicated by His warmth and live out their addiction like moths drawn to a flame.”

— Calvin Miller

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

— Calvin Miller

4. “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.”

— Calvin Miller

5. “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.”

— Calvin Miller

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

— Calvin Miller

7. “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.”

— Calvin Miller

8. “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.”

— Calvin Miller

9. “It is not such a fiercesome thing to lead once you see your leadership as part of God’s overall plan for His world.”

— Calvin Miller

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

— Calvin Miller

11. “What would I do differently if I could do it all over again? I would put more emphasis on being a better husband and father. To the church or the university I would whip out a lot more noes, and a lot more yesses to my family. I would eradicate almost all of the ‘Daddy’s-too-busies,’ and the ‘later, darlings,’ from my vocabulary.”

— Calvin Miller

12. “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.”

— Calvin Miller

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

— Calvin Miller

14. “Churches that ignore their communities will not grow, and churches that will not globalize don’t matter much.”

— Calvin Miller

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

— Calvin Miller

16. “With love that knew no fear, the Singer caught his torment, wrapped it all in song and gave it back to him as peace.”

— Calvin Miller

17. “Death is a confirmation of the believer’s creed. For the skeptic it is discovery, immense and late.”

— Calvin Miller

18. “Without application, preaching is at best a lecture and at worst entertainment.”

— Calvin Miller

19. “A passion to obey Christ is born out of our relationship with him. The more we love him, the more we want him to be a part of our affairs.”

— Calvin Miller

20. “The lips know only shallow tunes.”

— Calvin Miller

21. “After eating the world’s bread, we wake each morning to remember: We are still hungry. Seek a better loaf. Eat, and never die. Taste, savor, and be filled forever.”

— Calvin Miller

22. “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.”

— Calvin Miller

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

— Calvin Miller

24. “Becoming a great preacher, like becoming a great artist, requires a life commitment.”

— Calvin Miller

25. “I will also argue that metaphor and story is not only a legitimate form of exposition but is a preferred style of exposition mostly because it is so much more memorable than mere precepts-driven homiletics.”

— Calvin Miller

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

— Calvin Miller

27. “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.”

— Calvin Miller

28. “We must look to Mary’s example to know how to deal with the glorious impossibilities of God. Look how she turned the world upside down by making one simple statement.”

— Calvin Miller

29. “But we have arrived at a glistening, smug day when nobody much sins, and those that do are prone to call it something else.”

— Calvin Miller

30. “Community is essential, but the fundamental calling of the church is global.”

— Calvin Miller

31. “Imagination must constantly run on a new track or it becomes lifeless. A living imagination is essential to prayer.”

— Calvin Miller

32. “If anybody is left behind in a congregation of a thousand, the preacher has not preached well.”

— Calvin Miller

33. “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.”

— Calvin Miller

34. “John Hines said, “Preaching is effective as long as the preacher expects something to happen – not because of the sermon, not even because of the preacher, but because of God.”

— Calvin Miller

35. “But we are wealthy, and our purses are so heavy that we cannot carry both our goods and his cross. So we cling to our wallets and leave the cross bearing to those who have less to surrender.”

— Calvin Miller

36. “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.”

— Calvin Miller

37. “Jesus always quickens artistic and literary imagination.”

— Calvin Miller

38. “Prayer is like any other kind of communication. There are times when meaning is shared, but there is no real excitement. At other times, though, the mood is so pregnant with joy it’s impossible to forget.”

— Calvin Miller

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

— Calvin Miller

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

— Calvin Miller

41. “Long ago I learned that more than half of any pastor’s congregation come to church broken and in the grip of some life issue that is eating at their wellbeing.”

— Calvin Miller

42. “When it comes to adding authority to the sermon, the Bible is the most powerful way to comment on what the Bible has to say.”

— Calvin Miller

43. “God needs only a little of our agreement in order to work mighty wonders.”

— Calvin Miller

44. “What is born at midnight, in the eeriest hours of God’s presence, can beget our entire reason to be.”

— Calvin Miller

45. “The human spirit is either a treasure chest or a junk box. We were designed to bear the power of God, but the debaucheries of our hearts can quickly fill the space intended for God.”

— Calvin Miller