Donald Miller's Blog, page 146

Does God Have a Specific Plan for Your Life? Probably Not.

I want to write an essay saying the statistical chance of God having a specific plan for your life is roughly 1 in 227. I'd base that statistic on scripture, because scripturally, for every one person God had a specific plan for, there were 226 He did not. Joseph was in, Benjamin was out and so on.

Okay, I haven't actually done the math. It may be 1 in 250 or 1 in 95, but that is hardly the point. The point is we think God is going to tell us exactly what to do, but chances are, He isn't...

How to Get Confidence From God

I told a friend recently that if he wanted to gain confidence as a public speaker, he should practice. I told him to just accept any invitation, large or small, and get some hours down.

He thanked me but also mentioned he wanted his confidence to come from God, from his faith. He wasn't being snooty or anything, trying to passively let me know what a great Christian he was, because if he'd been doing that, I'd just have shrugged my shoulders and let it go. But my friend was being genuine.

The...

Do You Own Your Successes?

About three weeks ago, I was fifty or so flight of stairs into my workout. I'm going to try to climb Mt. Hood in early June. The training has gone okay, but I have my doubts. I've not lost the weight I thought I'd lose, to be honest. That happened when I trained to ride my bike across the country, too, and everything turned out fine. And yet I worried. What if I didn't make it? I started feeling defeated, even with eight more weeks to train. I began to wonder if I had what it took.

But I...

Why Doctrine is Only Half the Message

In your opinion, is being a jerk heresy?

I only ask this because it seems we've lost touch with a true, holistic understanding of communication, believing as long as our ideas are theologically or philosophically true, we can present those truths through an offensive methodology. If you ask me, it's a trick.

In a perfect world, people would make decisions about what they believe based on it's philosophical merit, but that isn't how people decide what is true at all. The truth about how people d...

Sunday Morning Music, Ryan Bingham

I first heard Ryan Bingham on a late-night drive from Dallas to Abilene. There's a terrific radio station in Dallas called The Ranch (95.5) that plays a lot of traditional country music, mostly Texas based. I'd flown in and found the station and it kept me country along that beautiful road of rolling hills when a song came on that I liked so much I pulled out my i-phone and recorded enough of it I could research and find out who sang it. And later I did that, and discovered it was Ryan...

Is Telling the Truth More Important than Selling the Truth?

If you were to put a group of modern, leading evangelicals in a room and ask them to write a book about God and the church, formalizing a message to the world, I doubt you'd end up with anything like the Bible.

You probably wouldn't tell the story of Bill Clinton having an affair, Benny Hinn faking healings and getting a divorce or Ted Haggard talking macho and homophobic and then secretly sleeping with men and using drugs. I doubt you'd talk about powerful religious figures being involved in ...

Are People Basically Good?

I've always wondered why people who believe in total depravity say things to their kids like "good job" when they catch a baseball. Shouldn't they say something like you caught the ball, but you still deserve to go to hell?

I've never really trusted people who believed we were totally depraved, for obvious reasons. How can their view of the world be trusted? They are totally depraved, after all.

A pastor friend told me recently, though, that the term total depravity doesn't mean you aren't a...

Does Your Personality Influence Your Theology?

Have you ever noticed Calvinists think in black and white? And I'm not just talking about their theology, I mean they think in black and white about everything? And have you noticed that people who obsess about the second coming also like science fiction books? Of course those are general statements, and the most offensive thing you can say to a twenty-something is that people might have common characteristics (they hear "nobody is original") but, honestly, and I mean really, really...

Warning Labels on Cell Phones

I met a new friend recently who made cell phones. His company made smart phones, I don't remember which ones, but lots of the ones that aren't the I-phones. He was brilliant to talk to, and socially conscious, too. What I mean is, he actually spent time wondering what his products were doing to the social landscape, how the creation of a particular phone changed the way people lived their lives. And he wondered whether people's lives were changed for the better, honestly.

We talked about how...

Asking People to Leave Church

A couple times at a church I'm familiar with, here in Portland, the lead pastor, has very kindly asked people to leave. I remember a specific time he just stood up and asked how many people had been coming to church for a year or more but hadn't found a way to plug into the community. He then invited them to plug in, (which at this church means to serve or find a home group or work in a ministry) and then asked them if they hadn't found a place that fit them, it might be time to try another c...