Biography
John Keith Miller became well known with the publication of his book The Taste of New Wine in 1965. Since that time he has shared his personal faith journey with the public in the publication of many other books as well as speaking tours. His special gift is his ability to be vulnerable and admit his failures and struggles in a way that enables others to grow. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"What Then Must We Do?" 
He lives with his wife, Andrea, in Texas and continues to be committed to communicating about the Christian life. He has been a regular columnist in “Faith at Work Magazine” and continues to produce books, tapes, study courses, audio cassettes and films.

One of the difficulties that I've had with being a Christian, all my life, is that I couldn't find a model living today who looked anything like the serving Jesus - I certainly didn't.

Someone was telling me this last year about the way this works out in the academic community, especially among theologians. Because of the competition, it's very difficult for people to be real in the academic community and to serve each other. This person was telling a story about a small college where a professor, who was the "bull moose" professor on the campus, had written a book twenty years ago which made him the expert in his field. Since that time a lot had happened, but he still reigned at this little school. When they had parties he just took over the party. He was hardly the servant model.

A young professor had moved in from Johns Hopkins University. He had just finished his Ph.D. He was excited, he was smart and he hadn't heard anything about this old professor. He came down to the college and a professor's wife had a dinner party to welcome him. (Her husband was up for tenure and she thought this would be a good move.) So she invited the old "bull moose" professor and the young man and seven or eight other couples and they were sitting around having dinner. Well, the old man began to pontificate. And the young man said, "I'm sorry, sir, that's not true, nobody believes that anymore." And he gave the evidence, you know, in terms of references - which is deadly in that field. After he had done this three times the old man began to get very angry. So, just before dessert, the young man said, "I'm sorry sir, I hate to interrupt you again, but that is not true."

The old man stood up and he said, "Good night!" and he charged across the room. He opened the door and he stepped through it and he closed it after him. Everybody was horrified. Nobody had ever talked to the old man in that way. The young man didn't even know what he had done. The young professor and his wife were thinking, "No tenure." And so everybody looked sort of sick. The young man said, "Well, at least he's gone."

"No, he's not," said the Hostess, "that's a closet."

The problem is that this kind of life keeps us from living in a way that sounds anything like Jesus Christ, because we're so interested in how we look as we serve people.

Now the scripture lesson today (John 13:3-5, 12-15) has to do with a question: What if God freed us from the guilt and the anxiety and the fear and the resentment that swirls around our beds at night when we wake up alone and frantic? Even if we are committed to Jesus Christ and filled with the Holy Spirit, we don't like to talk about the fact that these things still happen. What are we to do if God frees us from these things? What is the model that our Lord gave us, a working model for the Christian life, which would fulfill his vision of what it means to be whole and healthy - which the Bible calls "holiness."

Well, the scripture opens this evening as our Lord is about to leave us. He knows that He is going to be taken, and He has one more shot - this evening with His disciples. What's He going to talk to them about? He'd been pouring His life into them for three years - His vision of the Father and His Kingdom. The Greek word which is used for Kingdom doesn't mean a geographical place, it means "rule or reign." So that wherever God ruled in someone's heart there was an outpost of the Kingdom. What was this outpost supposed to do and be like? Now the time for teaching was almost over and He had this chance to tell them how they must live as they delivered this glorious message - the good news of God about human life - that there is hope and meaning and intimacy with God and each other and freedom from the self-limiting disease of sin.

Well, what can Jesus do to show them in unmistakable terms the style of life that He wants them to live? It's sort of a watershed moment in history. He takes a bucket of water and He begins to wash the disciples' feet. Now this is an act that's hard for us to understand in this time because it was the most lowly servant in the household who caught this task - we don't have any servants that lowly. People came in with dirty feet and they took off their sandals and they were washed by this lowly servant. Jesus said, "You are no better than I am. I want you to learn how to be a servant, whoever you are." They knew that being a servant had led Him to do great things - they'd watched Him and they'd seen Him and He said to them, "Greater things than I've done will you do if you follow what I tell you."

This sin disease in my own life is the addictive self-centeredness that makes me put myself in the center where only God should be. When I do this I'm set up to control my wife and my children and the people around me. And this disease is so insidious that I can't see it in myself, but I can see it in them and this causes so much of the conflict in my life. I soon realized that I didn't know how to be a servant at all. I wanted to be an executive for God. I was trained to be an executive and I thought He needed people like me.

I'd set out to be God's person in 1956 when I was converted to Jesus Christ. I traveled all over the world, I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine. When that book came out I began to speak in different nations and different places and I burned myself out in a few years - compulsively working because the religious work addiction is the only one that's blessed. It's exactly like the alcohol addiction, we just use a different "substance": religious activity.

What happened to me was I began to get serious heart symptoms and almost destroyed myself. I sold my home and we moved to a little island town, Port Aransas, Texas. I didn't know if I was going to live or die, and I began to get my affairs in order. I quit speaking and I wanted to try to get back some kind of control of my life and some kind of physical health. We attended a little Episcopal mission there. Almost no one else came to it; there were about 20 members. There was no Sunday School so I didn't have to teach for the first time in 25 years. There was just a Communion Service. A semi-retired priest, whom I liked very much, was in charge of the mission. The average age was about 70 and people just sort of moved slowly around the halls. I liked it. There was no responsibility here. I never wanted to speak to another Christian group in my life, I was so burned out.

Then one day we had some visitors, (when you have visitors in a congregation of 20 you notice). This couple came in and the man was in a sort of Hawaiian looking shirt, but different somehow, and it was rumpled. He was about 6'3" and about 50 years old - a very handsome man. The woman was a lovely looking woman and she had on a nice dress, but it was rumpled, too. We don't have a lot of rumpled people in the Episcopal Church, so I noticed them right away. I went over to see them and I shook hands in my best business manner and I said, "How do you do? We're glad to have you here. Where are you from?"

The guy said, "You are never going to believe this story."

I thought, "I'll bet I'm not going to believe this story."

So he began to talk to me and he said, "About three days ago, I get mixed up because of the time change, we were in Australia. I was the C.E.O. of a large brokerage firm and there had been an attempted buy-out of this firm by the Mafia. I told them I wasn't going to sell. I'd built that sucker and I was going to run it. Three days ago, or whenever it was, I got this call from a friend and he said, 'There's a contract out on your life. Don't go home. Call your wife, ask her out to supper, and take her straight to the airport. There's a ticket,' - and he gave the name the ticket was held in - 'Pick up the ticket and get on the plane and take off.'"

I said, "How in the world did you get to Port Aransas, Texas?" I was sort of sorry he'd come, it sounded like a pretty serious thing to me.

"Well," he said, "We had a party about six months ago and I was drinking heavily and somebody said, 'Hey, I'm going to buy a condominium on a little island in Port Aransas, Texas. Anybody wanna buy half interest in it?' And I said I'd take a half interest." This is the way people do things sometimes when they're drinking - for those of you who don't know. This man looked at me and he said, "I can't use my credit cards because they'll trace us." So we gave him some clothes and loaned them our bicycles so they could have some transportation. Then this man looked at me and he said, "Keith Miller - I've read one of your books!"

I thought, "Oh no." I mean that is not what I wanted to hear. I was trying to get away from people who had read my books!

He seemed very excited and he said, "Where's your group. I've always wanted to be in one of your groups. I'd like to attend it."

I said, "Well, we really don't have a group here yet, we haven't been here very long...." I was mumbling just to get out of this because we didn't have a group and I didn't want a group.

He said, "Well, you believe in what you wrote, don't you?" So we started a group on Tuesday mornings - great person of courage that I am. This man and his wife were new and fanatical Christians, they were very excited, they wanted to go right out on the street and convert the whole town. Well, in this little fishing village, you go out and tell somebody on the street they need Jesus and they may stick a knife in your ribs. I said, "Let's pray for God's will." We Episcopalians do a lot of evangelism this way. So we began to pray for God's will. We prayed for two years for God's will. The minister said he had contacted all the Episcopal contacts in that town anyway so we didn't have to worry about that. Then he retired. I was the Bishop's warden in this little mission and the Bishop called me and said, "Keith, you're really going to like the new guy we've got coming down there. He's 45 and he's got an MBA from Harvard and he's been in business. You're really going to like this guy."

I said, "Well, fine. Send him down."

He said, "Well, we'll have him call you and you can set up an appointment to meet him."

So he called me and I said, "Come on down for lunch. When you come in to town I've got a little office down on Main Street, we'll have lunch." So on the appointed hour, all of a sudden I heard this brrrrrrr and it was a Harley Davidson motorcycle - the biggest kind - the guy was in a black leather jacket, a priest's collar, black front and a helmet and goggles. This was our priest. I thought, "Oh Lord, what have we here?"

During this time I'd had a real confrontation with my own denial of the fact that I'd hidden my selfishness from myself and through a lot of agony I'd seen my own sin and the fact that I'm almost totally self-centered. It had hurt me a lot to see it, but as a result I'd tried to give my whole life to God because I knew of no other way I could find His power to overcome this sin. I was willing to do whatever God wanted me to do.

This minister had a little retreat for us and he said, "Tell me, what kind of a church do you want to have here?"

Well the answer that some people had was, "An Episcopal Church."

He said, "No that's not what I mean." Some of the people didn't have the foggiest idea what was he asking. I thought I knew, but I didn't want to be chairman of the committee so I didn't say anything. He said, "You know, if you are going to sell a product you have got to know if you are selling oranges or trucks." That made sense to us, we were business people. He said, "Have you ever thought about being a servant church?" We had never thought about being a servant church. Most of these people were retired business people who had come down there to kind of relax. People came to our church because they wanted to go to church on Sunday while they were playing at the beach.

We got to looking at what it might mean to be a servant church. We decided it meant to help people do what they needed to do for their health and wholeness; not to get them in the church to help us with our program - that was getting them to do what we wanted them to do. This blew us away when we realized this. Now we didn't think it would work, because nothing had ever worked in this little church. It was not a church community.

We decided to look around and see what the needs of the people were in our town. We found some startling things. There were young mothers with little children who'd come down there and been left by their husbands. They got the menial jobs in our town - the bar maids and the waitresses - and they had no place to leave their kids. So we started a day care center in our church; one day, then three, then five. Then we had a clothing "shop" called the "Next to New," because people came down from the North thinking it was going to be a warm place. But it was cold, so they didn't have the right clothes. So we provided them with secondhand clothes, but we didn't give them the clothes because we wanted them to have dignity. We would sell them the clothes for 25 or 50 cents. The Rotary Club lost it's place to have lunch so one of the guys said, "Well, why don't we just serve the Rotary Club at our church?" So we thought, "Why not? There's nothing else going on there." So we invited the Rotary Club to come and have lunch with us.

Then the Alcoholics Anonymous people lost their place to meet and we said, "Come and meet at our place." Now, we should have thought this over, we should have had a non-smoking meeting, because the whole church smells like a butt can from the Navy. Then Overeaters Anonymous group wanted a place to meet so we invited them. Then some people came to us and said, "The Brownies don't have a place to meet." So we began to have an Episcopal Brownies meeting. We began to take people to the hospital because it was 40 miles a way and some didn't have a way to go.

All of a sudden, instead of having people just lurking around the halls, the place was a bee hive of activity. We weren't getting these people to do something for us or to get in our program. We were asking them what they needed and helping them to do what they needed to do for their own health.

Now at this time, I had been so busy doing what I'm doing right now - speaking to a lot of people - that I'd forgotten about calling. I was too busy talking about the Christian life to live it. I grew a beard and for some reason it came out white. I had a white beard and my name was John - I use my first name with people who know me well. I read some material that said, "If you will call on people the Sunday they visit your church, 90% of them will join your church. If you wait until the next day you'll lose about 30%, you wait a week and you lose almost all of them." So I started calling on the people who visited our church. I didn't try to convince them to become Christians, I tried to help them find a cleaners or the hospital and they began to come to church.

Other people started to come in to get married and buried. The Brownies' mothers had to get married and buried and they brought their parents. Some mothers whose kids we kept came because the kids liked it around there but we didn't have a Sunday School class. We started an Inquirer's Class - now this blew me away - because these people wanted to know, "What about God?" Well, we invited them in and some of them had never been to Sunday School. The priest was the teacher and I was sort of the case history, because I'd had all the problems.

We had this guy who came in and he's a massive guy, a great big man. He's a loving man I now know, but he frightened a lot of people when he first came in. He shaved his head like Yul Brenner and that just turned people off and he played the Mambo drums and things like this. So he came in one Sunday and he said, "Okay, this is my last Sunday, because I've tried every church in town and I believe in reincarnation. What do you think about that?"

I started to think, "Well you can't win them all." But the priest said, "Who knows?" "What do you mean who knows?" I thought, "You know. You tell him," I thought, but I didn't say that. But the priest said, "Personally, I don't believe in reincarnation, but you are welcome here believing in reincarnation. I don't know as much as I used to know. If you want to come around to the office I'll tell you what Christians believe about this." You know the guy stayed and he brought some of his friends - which was a concern to some other people.

Then the priest said, "We want to hire a babysitter for the service."

We said, "Pastor, we don't have any babies."

He said, "Of course not, we don't have a babysitter." That made sense, so we hired a babysitter. For several weeks nobody came and then the babies started coming in.

He wanted to form a Christian Education Committee. And we said, "We have no kids." He said, "Of course not, there's no Christian Education Program." So we formed a Christian Education Committee and got a curriculum and taught the teachers and they showed up for three weeks and nobody came. Then the people started coming in.

All of a sudden there was a different feeling around that little mission. The people who came were excited and they became Christians. They got converted to Jesus Christ. They didn't know anything about nominal Christianity, they'd been helped and they wanted to do the same thing for their friends. From no kids, we had a Sunday School of 16 before long. We had 20 in the adult class. We changed from 37 to 72 in average attendance and the budget virtually doubled and we never talked about these things. Because the Alcoholics knew they wouldn't be rejected, some of them started coming to church. Rotarians who hadn't been in years came and asked about the faith. We began to see that what we'd always tried to do with programs - to get new members, to build a Sunday School, to increase giving - were by-products of being real helpers, servants to other people in our community as they tried to do their things and to do their programs about life. We were, I realized, washing their feet.

It was like a miracle to me. I've gotten three degrees because I feel so inadequate and I wanted to be adequate. What we were doing was too simple, too little, too insignificant, too demeaning - as Jesus' servant model in washing their feet must have seemed to the disciples. It's like asking them, in modern terms, to wash each other's bathrooms. How could this possibly lead people to the awesome God of Abraham, of Moses, of Isaac, of Jesus? But I'm beginning to learn if I will give my life to God each day, wherever I am, and ask only for His will for me for that day, that I will wind up in the strangest places telling people about this relatively simple life of serenity that I'm finding.

If I'm willing, I find myself in the strangest places telling people about this life; sometimes in New York or California or New Zealand or Phoenix, Arizona, or Chicago, Illinois. I've found that there's sometimes great spiritual power in the menial helping of other people; the loving of them in non-flashy ways that anyone can do without any training at all.

I want to close this sermon with a story that I haven't told for about four years. I realize that some of you have heard it. There was a man that decided that he wanted to give his life to God and he kept forgetting about God. One morning he was shaving and as he looked in the mirror he said, "Whatever it costs, I'm going to be your person today; I'm going to be a servant for you, Lord." The man realized he was late and rushed down to catch the commuter train. He lived in Connecticut and he was going to New York to catch a train to Boston. He had a briefcase and a small bag with him.

When he got to the train station he was almost late and the conductor was saying, "All aboard." He ran down the track and all of a sudden he heard a little thump. He looked down and there was a poor little boy that he had knocked down. The conductor said, "Come on, you can make it!" He started to go and then he remembered what he has said - that he was going to be a servant - so he stopped and he patted the kid on the head. The kid had a great big puzzle, about a 1000 piece puzzle, that was all over the platform and he was crying. So the man reached down and he said, "I'll get it for you," and he started to pick up the puzzle. The little kid just watched him. And when he was finished, the kid looked up at the man and said, "Mister, are you Jesus?" And the man realized that on that platform, and in that child's life, he had been Jesus.

This is often a reminder to me that there is great power and great communication in tiny, specific and unseen acts of love for Jesus Christ's sake.

Will you join me in a prayer? Lord, thank you that you didn't call many to be great, that you called us to be real and to take off the burden of our parents expectations - anybody's expectations - and to learn how to be the people that you made us to be. Thank you that we don't have to be important or do flashy things, but that somehow, as we touch people and forget about all we know, we are touching You and You are touching us. Help us, Lord, to be simple and to be loving and to be who You made us to be.

Interview with Keith Miller

Dave Hardin: Keith, you've recently published a new book, Sin: Overcoming the Ultimate Deadly Addiction. You don't hear much about sin any more, and I've certainly not heard it called an addiction. What's that all about?

Keith Miller: Well, David, several years ago I'd made every commitment that you are supposed to make and my life began to get pretty miserable. And I thought, "Gol-ly," and I prayed, and I read the Bible, and I went to church, and I did all the right things, but inside I'd wake up afraid a lot of mornings and I was very lonely. My relationships with the people close to me began to get frayed and they accused me of trying to control them. They made me very angry. I had some heart problems and finally the doctor told me I was going to die if I didn't do something to change my life. So we retired to this small place I was talking about - this Port Aransas - and I began to try to think through what was the matter with me. I got help from some people, counselors, friends and my minister, and all of a sudden I realized that what I was doing was sin. And I thought, "How can this be when I'm a Christian going around speaking to all these people and I wasn't doing anything bad?"

So as I began to read the Bible I discovered that there is Sin (with a capital S) which is putting myself in the center of my life and the lives of the people around me where only God should be. The things we call sin are the things that we do because we put ourselves in the center. And I can't stop this. I mean, I say, "I'm not going to resent Aunt Millie. Lord thank you. I'm filled with the Holy Spirit and I don't have to resent Aunt Millie anymore. I'm not going to resent Aunt Millie, I'm not going to do it, Lord. Thank you Lord and I praise you, thank you that I don't have to do it." Then she walks in the door and I resent her just like that. I mean, that's the way an addiction works. You say, "I'm not going to drink, I'm not going to drink, I'm not going to drink," and then an alcoholic drinks.

So I began to see that these fears are addictive, they are things that we cannot stop doing. And I thought, "My gosh, if this is true, then what's the primary characteristic of addiction?" I began to study this. You know what the primary characteristic of addiction is? Denial. That is, the person who has the disease can't see it. I can see it perfectly in you, but I can't see it in me - this need to control people. That's what Jesus said about the mote and the beam. He said you guys are fantastic about picking out the tiniest speck of sin in somebody's eye and you can't see the beam in your own. I thought, "My gosh, if this is true then the primary characteristic of the Christian Church is that we are in denial about our own sin." So I wrote a book.

Hardin: And that's what that's about?

Miller:  Well, yea. It's probably not going to win the Pulitzer Prize because not a lot of people want to read about sin. But the problem is it's what's crippling our marriages, and it's what's crippling our national institutions and our churches.

Hardin: Now you mentioned a work addiction that you had. How do I know if I'm addicted to something?

Miller:  Well, there are some very easy ways to tell. One test is if you are doing something and you can't stop it. One of the primary addictions of Christians is the addiction to religious work. If you can't say no to your pastor when he asks you to do something, if you over commit and you are exhausted and you take on something else, that is not normal behavior. I mean animals don't do it and nobody does it unless you are doing it compulsively. An addiction is something you cannot say no to which harms your life.

Hardin: We've been called an addictive society. Are we?

Miller: I knew the answer to that two years ago. I'm finding out that I only know about my own sin as I read the Bible. I think that many of us are. You see, the work addiction and the religious addiction are the only two that are blessed. But they are identical with alcohol. In other words, the alcoholic uses alcohol and the workaholic uses work. The fact is that we are both trying to cover these feelings of insecurity and fear that we can't handle any other way.

Hardin: Now you mention in the book the 12 Step Program of Alcoholics Anonymous. How do you apply those to sin?

Miller: Gosh the great movements of spirituality in the church have always come on the edge. What's happened is that the fastest growing spiritual movement in America today are the 12 Step Programs. There's AA, NA, Al-Anon, ACA - all these different things. What it does is take the Christian message, basically, the message that the first thing you have to do is realize you are powerless and come to God, whom we call Jesus Christ.

What I do is say, "God help me with this addictive process." And He won't do it and it makes us furious. You see the problem is that, according to Christian theology, only God's power in Christ can overcome sin. I want Him to help me with my power - you know, to give me an extra high octane in the gasoline tank - and I've still got the wheel. If I can get Him to help me then I'm still in control. This is the control disease. The sin disease is to try to control when only God should be in control.

Hardin: I've heard it said that trying to get rid of that control behavior is almost a lifetime assignment. It's a powerful force isn't it?

Miller: Well it is for me and it is addictive and only God can help me. I've known more serenity and peace than I've ever known since I began to get in this program.