An Early Resurrection Quotes

“In the temple, I promise to consecrate everything to God. Part of this promise is financial. I promise, for instance, to consecrate all my money. But, in the end, the law of consecration isn’t about money—it’s about time. By working, I convert my time into money. Money is just time made fungible. In the end, the only thing I have to give is my time. If I cling to it, time will ruin me. If I think of my time as my own, then every unchosen obligation will feel like theft. Every call to give my time will feel like I’m being robbed of what ought to have been mine. I’ll roll out of bed in the morning expecting to do as I please instead of looking to serve. Occasions for care will look like failures to succeed. Quiet moments will look like boredom. Ordinary work will look like a waste of time. The only way to be saved from this ruin is to return this time to Christ. The only way to care for time is to give it away.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“The essence of care is to pay attention. Rather than being distracted by the past or the future, I pay attention in the present. I take care. I attend. I’m careful. My eyes are focused. My hands are deft and gentle. I can tie my shoes without rushing—over, under, loop, pull. I can wash a dish without fidgeting. I can stop and listen without daydreaming. I can sit in traffic without anger. Whatever I’m doing, I can do it with care.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“In the body of Christ our weakness is an occasion for care rather than judgment. The body of Christ isn’t strong because it has no weaknesses. The body of Christ is strong because it’s the place where weakness is shared. And our weakness, our need for each other, is the very thing that seals this sharing. When I live in Christ, things get turned upside down. The end arrives at the beginning. The last becomes first. The greatest become the least, and the least become types of Christ. In Christ, we’re all bound together. If “one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection

“The only way to save myself from the future’s tyranny is to willingly sacrifice that future on God’s altar. I have to give the future away. I have to let it go. I have to stop trusting in it or hoping for it. I have to hand it over to Christ. I have to consecrate the whole of it. And I have to do so while remaining alive and embedded in time.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“I’ve spent a lot of time trying not to be weak. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to put myself beyond the need for care. I’ve worked hard. I’ve exercised. I’ve earned degrees. I’ve written books. I’ve bought new clothes. I’ve driven new cars. These things aren’t bad in themselves. They can be good. They can, in fact, be done with care. They can be undertaken as acts of love, as means of service. But, as a rule, I haven’t done this. I’ve treated these things more as idols than as occasions for care. I’ve pursued them as props for projecting a fiction of worthiness, independence, and strength. But I am tired—so tired—of pretending not to be weak. I’m tired of pretending I’m not going to die. I’m tired of pretending I don’t need Christ. If I’m serious about Christ, then my only hope is to let these idols die. My only hope is to practice living with as much care and patience and attention as I can. In this sense, care is the work of no longer pretending to be strong. Care depends on finally being honest.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“Flag icon
It’s tempting to think that my present weakness makes me fundamentally different from Christ. And then, as a result, it’s tempting to think that such weakness must be incompatible with Christ’s divine strength. If this is true, then, to be like Christ, I would have to be untroubled by time and untouched by cares. I would have to avoid suffering rather than caring for it. But this is backwards. Christ’s strength doesn’t simply rescue me from my weakness and vulnerability. As I’ve argued, it seems clear that his strength doesn’t even save him from his own power to be acted upon. Christ is strong enough to be vulnerable. Similarly, my weakness leaves me exposed to Christ, vulnerable to his care, and open to sharing a life with him. This weakness is the ground we share. It’s the ground of life. It’s ground zero for God’s promise. Without this weakness, I wouldn’t need him. I’d be walled up, alone, inside my own perfect strength.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“The gospel is a promise and God’s promises aren’t bound by time. Promises defy time. They bring the future into the present. Promises are a certain way of looking forward. When I promised myself to my wife, I didn’t just bind myself to her in the present. I gave her my future. Without waiting for that future to arrive, without waiting to see what sorrows or joys would come, I promised. Dressed in white, we knelt at an altar in the temple and joined hands. We were terribly young. The mirrors, set face to face, reflected endless futures at which we couldn’t guess. Still, I loved her. I gave her all those futures as a gift. And we kissed. Now, promised to each other and sealed by a holy ordinance, we live as though those futures had already come. Now, in a very real way, our futures are already given as gifts in the present. And, now, we’re empowered by those promises to love each other in the present.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“In this way, the law is like water. There is no life without water. I have to have water. I have to learn how to keep the law. But without Christ, the law works against itself. It works against life,. It freezes solid. Without Christ, the law turns to ice and traps me in sin. Frozen, I die. Only as a type of Christ, only as a servant of Christ's love, does the law thaw. Christ is not only the light and life of the world. He is the life and light of the law.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“My job is to live, right now, as if I had already passed through death’s veil and into the presence of God. My job is to live my promised redemption in the present tense.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection

“At a deeper level, at the level of the heart, sin is a problem because it can hijack the law and then wield the law as a weapon against the possibility of love. (p. 62)”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“The test is simple: can I look at my son, weak and stubborn and gangly, and see his perfection? Can I look at a leaf, weak and browning and chewed on, and see its perfection? Can I watch the sun’s light fail at the end of a hard day and see its perfection? Can I look at my own life—so fraught, so weak, so faltering, so inadequate, so distracted, so nearsighted—and care for it, perfectly, as Christ does?”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“God’s care is whole, not broken into parts. It’s complete, not partial. This is what the Greek word for “perfection” (teleios) in Matthew 5:48 means: to be perfect like God is to be “whole” or “complete.” But what kind of perfection or wholeness is at stake when Christ asks me to be perfect like my Heavenly Father is perfect? Christ appears to have just said exactly what he means: he means the kind of love that is perfect because it is whole and not partial. He means the kind of love that is complete because it cares for both those who are evil and those who are good.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“In the verses that lead up to this commandment ["Be ye perfect"], Christ isn’t urging me toward the kind of future moral perfection that might come from never breaking the law, good a goal as this may be. Instead, he’s urging me in the strongest possible terms to practice, in the face of a painful and imperfect world, a certain kind of care. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies…”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“if I worship the goal of succeeding in my vow to keep the law—then I’ll be tempted to give up. Religion will feel like an impossible burden. I’ll be angry and ashamed.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“I don’t do the work for the sake of these goals. I do the work for Christ. I do the work for its own sake. I learn to love the work. I still have goals, but these goals don’t own me. They don’t control me. They don’t master me. I don’t pin my happiness on achieving them. Christ is my master. And then, free from the tyranny of these goals, attentive to the work, the work itself improves. I become more patient and skillful, and success becomes more likely. No longer worshipping success, I’m more likely to succeed. But even if I fail—as I consistently will—the work will have been worth doing for its own sake.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“No longer aiming through my loved ones, I can care for them. And no longer aiming through the law at a distant future in God’s presence, I can care for the law in Christ. I can live in God’s presence, now.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“Repentance, rather than being a name for how Christ was already at work in my life, already empowering and redeeming me, just felt like a form of court-mandated punishment.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“In Christ, it’s possible to die while you’re still alive. And having died early, it’s possible for your resurrection to begin before you’ve even left this world. In Christ, time’s grip loosens and things start happening out of order. This is what a Christian life looks like: you’re born, you’re buried with Christ, your resurrection begins, and then you die. If Christ has his way, we’ll all die before we’re dead and every one of us will yield our lives, here and now, to an early resurrection.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“This is what’s different about Nephite Christianity: they lived in Christ before Christ came. They lived Christ’s future in their present…This is what the Book of Mormon makes plain: to live a Christian life is to live in Christ as if he were already present.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“This is what’s different about Nephite Christianity: they lived in Christ before Christ came. They lived Christ’s future in their present.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“If I’ve chosen the future over the present, then I’ll be tempted to use that future to judge the present. I’ll be tempted to use that future to decide who’s worthy of my care and attention and who isn’t. Those who get in the way of that future are my enemies. Those who can help me secure that future are my friends. But, if I’ve chosen to let my future die and, now, live in Christ, then I won’t be able to carve up the world this way. I will see only one category: those who need care. Friend or enemy, helpful to my future or not, everyone will show up as needing me to bless them and care for them.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“This is what it means to love someone: their obvious weakness cannot stop me from seeing their present perfection.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“No longer worshipping success, I’m more likely to succeed.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“This is a different kind of life. In Christ, I still have goals, but, practicing care, I don’t do the work for the sake of these goals. I do the work for Christ. I do the work for its own sake. I learn to love the work. I still have goals, but these goals don’t own me. They don’t control me. They don’t master me. I don’t pin my happiness on achieving them. Christ is my master. And then, free from the tyranny of these goals, attentive to the work, the work itself improves. I become more patient and skillful, and success becomes more likely. No longer worshipping success, I’m more likely to succeed. But even if I fail—as I consistently will—the work will have been worth doing for its own sake.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“Every day I ask the world to give me something that it can’t. I ask my wife to make me feel happy. I ask my work to make me feel loved. I ask my car or my house or my clothes to give me peace. I ask a movie or a football game to make life feel exciting and meaningful. I ask the church to be what I think it ought to be. And when this doesn’t work, I get bitter and go looking for something else that might have what I want. I invest some new thing with the hope that, when I get it, it could make me happy. This, though, is cruel and unfair. It’s cruel because peace and happiness aren’t even the kind of thing that the world, however willing, could give. Peace and happiness simply aren’t, at bottom, a function of the world being a certain way. They are a function of my relating to the world in a certain way. They’re a function of my caring for the world in a certain way. And when I put my trust in Christ—when I consecrate my time and treat my goals and desires as types—then I find that peace and happiness and love are already given, in plain view, in the ongoing work of caring for the world.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“It’s tempting to think that my present weakness makes me fundamentally different from Christ. And then, as a result, it’s tempting to think that such weakness must be incompatible with Christ’s divine strength. If this is true, then, to be like Christ, I would have to be untroubled by time and untouched by cares. I would have to avoid suffering rather than caring for it. But this is backwards. Christ’s strength doesn’t simply rescue me from my weakness and vulnerability. As I’ve argued, it seems clear that his strength doesn’t even save him from his own power to be acted upon. Christ is strong enough to be vulnerable. Similarly, my weakness leaves me exposed to Christ, vulnerable to his care, and open to sharing a life with him. This weakness is the ground we share. It’s the ground of life. It’s ground zero for God’s promise. Without this weakness, I wouldn’t need him. I’d be walled up, alone, inside my own perfect strength.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“When I accept Christ as my master, I die early and time’s polarity gets reversed. Rather than always being attracted to the future, time becomes full and the present becomes magnetic. Drawn by the pull of the present into the thick of life, I’m resurrected early. But when I’m absorbed in caring for this present world, time doesn’t go away. Goals don’t go away. Desires don’t go away. The future doesn’t go away. The law doesn’t go away. They all remain in play. In the present, I care for time, I don’t escape it. But now, rather than being idols, all these things become types. I still have goals, but I don’t put my trust in them. These goals become types. I still have desires, but I don’t put my trust in them. These desires become types. I still keep the law, but I don’t put my trust in the law. I put my trust in Christ.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“Let’s use the word care (echoing the Latin word caritas for “charity”) to name Christ’s way of handling time. Let’s use it to name his way of handling sickness and loss and sin and death. Care, let’s say, is a name for that pure love of Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:4–8). Care suffers long, is kind, envies not, and is not puffed up. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. It makes justice possible. It never fails. Though everything else passes away, care continues. And it continues because care is Christ’s response to the world’s continual passing away.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“It’s not easy being part of the body of Christ. Christ is vulnerable. He can be hurt. Like God, he can weep. Whatever it may mean for the Father and the Son to be all-powerful, it clearly includes the power to “shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains” (Moses 7:28). It includes the power to suffer, to endure loss and catastrophe and disappointment and still be God. As Christ showed Enoch—to Enoch’s astonishment—“the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept” (v. 28). God wept because he commanded his children that “they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood” (v. 33). God was wounded by his love for a people that had none.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die

“The gift of the Spirit is a kind of down payment on eternal life.”
― Adam S. Miller, An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die