13 Quotes by Adam S. Miller

Let God grow in you. Hear his voice in your need. Let Jesus resurrect you right now, in this life, even before you’re done dying. Let him put your spirit back in your hungry body.

Grace doesn't grease the wheels of the law. Grace isn't God's way of jury rigging a broken law. It's the other way around. The law is just one small cog in a world animated entirely--from top to bottom, from beginning to end--by grace.

I won't deny that it is possible for our restless hearts to find rest in God, but I do want to deny that this rest results from the satisfaction of our desires. God does not save us from our hungers by satisfying them. God saves us from the tyranny of our desires by saving us from the impossible work of satisfying them. [from the essay "The God Who Weeps: Notes, Amens, and Disagreements)

Sin acts as if God's original plan was for us to bootstrap ourselves into holiness by way of the law and then, when this didn't quite pan out, God offered his grace--but only the bare minimum--to make good the difference. This is exactly backwards. God's boundless grace comes first and sin is what follows.

Faith is more like being faithful to your husband or wife than it is like believing in magic. Fidelity is key. You may fall in love with someone because of how well they complement your story, but you’ll prove yourself faithful to them only when you care more for the flawed, difficult, and unplotted life you end up sharing with them. Faith isn’t the opposite of knowledge. Rather, like love, faith perfects knowledge by practicing fidelity to it.

Work, chained to its outcome, is misery. Do what you can, do it better than you’re able, and let things happen as they may. The action, not its fruit, is your business. The outcome is not your concern. If God is going to show himself to you in the work that you shoulder, he will only do so if you’ve stopped craving an approving audience and, instead, work out your own salvation.

[The Book of Mormon] is given to you as a Urim and Thummim, as your own personal seer stone. Look into it and learn how to see the world by its light. And as you do, you'll be shown not only how to say but to do what the Lord requires.

Wisdom depends on a measure of good fortune. Broken by poverty and illness, even the wise become fools. But riches don’t guarantee wisdom either. Wisdom is just as easily destroyed by greed and bribes. As a result, no one is safe from idiocy until they’re dead. This is another reason why ends are better than beginnings. Patience.

Grace isn’t God’s improvised response to sin. Sin is our ongoing refusal of God’s already given grace.