Top 50 Paul E. Miller Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Prayer is a moment of incarnation – God with us. God involved in the details of my life.”

— Paul E. Miller

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

— Paul E. Miller

3. “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.”

— Paul E. Miller

4. “If you know that you, like Jesus, can’t do life on your own, then prayer makes complete sense.”

— Paul E. Miller

5. “God wants us to come to him empty-handed, weary, and heavy-laden. Instinctively we want to get rid of our helplessness before we come to God.”

— Paul E. Miller

6. “When God seems silent and our prayers go unanswered, the overwhelming temptation is to leave the story – to walk out of the desert and attempt to create a normal life. But when we persist in a spiritual vacuum, when we hang in there during ambiguity, we get to know God. In fact, that is how intimacy grows in all close relationships.”

— Paul E. Miller

7. “The only way to come to God is by taking off any spiritual mask. The real you has to meet the real God. He is a person.”

— Paul E. Miller

8. “All of Jesus’ teaching on prayer in the Gospels can be summarized with one word: ask. His greatest concern is that our failure or reluctance to ask keeps us distant from God. But that is not the only reason he tells us to ask anything. God wants to give us good gifts. He loves to give. In the parable of the persistent.”

— Paul E. Miller

9. “The only way to come to God is by taking off any spiritual mask. The real you has to meet the real God. He is a person. So, instead of being frozen by your self-preoccupation, talk with God about your worries. Tell him where you are weary. If you don’t begin with where you are, then where you are will sneak in the back door. Your mind will wander to where you are weary.”

— Paul E. Miller

10. “We don’t like God too close, especially if God is a deity we can’t control. We have a primal fear of walking with God in the garden, naked, without clothing. We desperately want intimacy, but when it comes, we pull back, fearful of a God who is too personal, too pure. We’re much more comfortable with God at a distance.”

— Paul E. Miller

11. “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.”

— Paul E. Miller

12. “Your heart can become a prayer factory because, like Jesus, you are completely dependent. You needed God ten minutes ago; you need him now. Instead of hunting for the perfect spiritual state to lift you above the chaos, pray in the chaos. As your heart or your circumstances generate problems, keep generating prayer. You will find that the chaos lessens.”

— Paul E. Miller

13. “To learn how to pray is to enter the world of a child, where all things are possible.”

— Paul E. Miller

14. “Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life.”

— Paul E. Miller

15. “We tell ourselves, “Strong Christians pray a lot. If I were a stronger Christian, I’d pray more.” Strong Christians do pray more, but they pray more because they realize how weak they are. They don’t try to hide it from themselves. Weakness is the channel that allows them to access grace.”

— Paul E. Miller

16. “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

17. “Seize the corner of his garment and don’t let go until he blesses you.”

— Paul E. Miller

18. “God doesn’t like to be experienced. He wants to be known.”

— Paul E. Miller

19. “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

20. “If the miracle comes too quickly, there is no room for discovery, for relationship.”

— Paul E. Miller

21. “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

22. “One of the subtlest hindrances to prayer is probably the most pervasive. In the broader culture and in our churches, we prize intellect, competency, and wealth. Because we can do life without God, praying seems nice but unnecessary. Money can do what prayer does, and it is quicker and less time-consuming. Our trust in ourselves and in our talents makes us structurally independent of God. As a result, exhortations to pray don’t stick.”

— Paul E. Miller

23. “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

24. “Hesed loves regardless of the response. It does not demand recognition or equality. It is uneven.”

— Paul E. Miller

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

— Paul E. Miller

26. “Instead of fighting anxiety, we can use it as a springboard to bending our hearts to God. Instead of trying to suppress anxiety, manage it, or smother it with pleasure, we can turn our anxiety toward God. When we do that, we’ll discover that we’ve slipped into continuous praying.”

— Paul E. Miller

27. “If God is sovereign, then he is in control of all the details of my life. If he is loving, then he is going to be shaping the details of my life for my good. If he is all-wise, then he’s not going to do everything I want because I don’t know what I need. If he is patient, then he is going to take time to do all this. When we put all these things together – God’s sovereignty, love, wisdom, and patience – we have a divine story.”

— Paul E. Miller

28. “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.”

— Paul E. Miller

29. “We just don’t think God could be concerned with the puny details of our lives. We either believe he’s too big or that we’re not that important. No wonder Jesus told us to be like little children! Little children are not daunted by the size of their parents. They come, regardless.”

— Paul E. Miller

30. “Alan Jacobs, in his biography of C. S. Lewis, reflected that “those who will never be fooled can never be delighted, because without selfforgetfulness there can be no delight.”

— Paul E. Miller

31. “At the center of self-will is me, carving a world in my image. At the center of prayer is God, carving me in his Son’s image.”

— Paul E. Miller

32. “Jesus wants us to be without pretense when we come to him in prayer. Instead, we often try to be something we aren’t.”

— Paul E. Miller

33. “We can’t do battle with evil without letting God destroy the evil in us as well.”

— Paul E. Miller

34. “If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life.”

— Paul E. Miller

35. “Humility makes you disappear, which is why we avoid it.”

— Paul E. Miller

36. “Hesed love isn’t just doing love; it is the enjoyment of love. It likes to have parties.”

— Paul E. Miller

37. “The glib way people talk about prayer often reinforces our cynicism. We end our conversations with “I’ll keep you in my prayers.” We have a vocabulary of “prayer speak,” including “I’ll lift you up in prayer” and “I’ll remember you in prayer.” Many who use these phrases, including us, never get around to praying. Why? Because we don’t think prayer makes much difference.”

— Paul E. Miller

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

— Paul E. Miller

39. “Usually, what bugs us the most about other people is true of us as well.”

— Paul E. Miller

40. “PRAYER IS WHERE I do my best work as a husband, dad, worker, and friend.”

— Paul E. Miller

41. “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

42. “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.”

— Paul E. Miller

43. “When we suffer, we long for God to speak clearly, to tell us the end of the story and, most of all, to show himself. But if he showed himself fully and immediately, if he answered all the questions, we’d never grow; we’d never emerge from our chrysalis because we’d be forever dependent. Jill was profoundly changed in her twenty-year wait. If God had instantly explained everything to her and healed Kim, that change would not have taken place. No one works like him. He is such a lover of souls.”

— Paul E. Miller

44. “Because cynicism misses the presence of the Shepherd, it reverses the picture in John 1 of light invading darkness. Like Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, cynicism looks too long into the Dark Lord’s crystal ball. Its attempt to unmask evil unwittingly enlarges evil. Increasingly, we are returning to the world of pre-Christian paganism, where evil seemingly has the loudest voice and the last word.”

— Paul E. Miller

45. “Prayer is asking God to incarnate, to get dirty in your life.”

— Paul E. Miller

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

— Paul E. Miller

47. “Like Jesus, we must embrace the death that the Father has put in front of us. The path to resurrection is through dying, not fighting.”

— Paul E. Miller

48. “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.”

— Paul E. Miller

49. “Many Christians haven’t stopped believing in God; we have just become functional deists, living with God at a distance.”

— Paul E. Miller

50. “Oddly enough, it took God to show us how not to be godlike. Jesus was the first person who didn’t seek independence.”

— Paul E. Miller