The Jack Miller Archive

See Repentance: A Personal Confession, p. 1. Location: Family Living Room In Gold Beach, Oregon

A Faith Worth Sharing, Kindle location 89
Presbyterian Guardian:20:June 1951:104
Location: Presbyterian Guardian:17:12:Aug, 1948:192-193

See Sermon: Election, The Powersource for Living where Jack discusses “full conversion.”

See also Family Background in “Repentance: A Personal Confession," No Date.

In the late autumn of 1948, I was sitting at home in the family living room in the small coastal hamlet of Gold Beach, Oregon. The fall weather that year had been exceptionally beautiful and warm. In that long Indian summer even my restless spirit had become slow and dull.

The book I was reading seemed to add to my sense of dulness. It was J. Gresham Machen's Christian View of Man, clearly written but at the moment not very inspiring to me. I found myself falling asleep. But in one area of my life I have always been disciplined and that is as a reader. So I plowed on. I was reading the chapter on "divine election".

As I grasped the practical meaning of what Machen was saying, my temper suddenly flared. It was like gasoline touched by a lighted match. Almost instantly I was fully awake. What was this incredible stuff? He says that I believed in Christ only because God first chose me? What did that do for my freedom of choice? Well•••who did God think He was anyway? It did not occur to me to ask myself if I really knew anything about believing in Christ. What upset me was the loss of my choice. It seemed somehow to rob me of the most important thing in my life.
In effect, the inescapable question was: Who does God think He is anyway?

An immediate answer did not come to my mind. Then as I opened the Bible to Ephesians one to check out what Machen had been saying my answer came. With breath-taking immediacy I saw that God was God and that He was God alone and all the way. Then the question came back to me. And who do you think you are?

Only one answer was possible: God.

The starkness of my insane answer shocked me. I thought I was "God". In another moment my whole being was filled with a painful sense of shame. To have man wrong is bad enough, but to have put myself on the same level as the living God -- how sickening! My thoughts were in complete upheaval, but one truth cut into me with the force of sharp-edged surgical steel. I had lived only for my own glory and not for God's. His plan was for me to live for His glory and will, and I had never done that for a single moment in my life. In fact, it had seemed to me that I had done Him a considerable favor by believing in Him. The idea that He was the absolute center of all things glorious had never even crossed my mind.

Now exposed, my conscience said to me: What a cagy, selfish, evil person you are! Of all people you are the most hugely egocentric man who ever lived! (1-2)

My restlessness which everyone noticed in me had been a kind of drivenness. I was always traveling through outer physical space in order to cope with the empty inner space. For example, I just could not cope with college. Several months before I had dropped out and left San Francisco State in a restless return to my home town in Oregon. But now as I turned twenty years old, I went back to my studies at San Francisco State and found a unity and coherence in my that work left me deeply satisfied. (3)

I came from a pioneer ranching family which had originally settled on the Rogue River in southwestern Oregon. My grandparents had operated a store in a very isolated place about thirty miles from the coast called Agnes. My parents moved a few miles to a ranch on the headwaters of the Pistol River in order to avoid the rough crowd that was then living on the Rogue River. My parents and four brothers and three sisters have been among the finest people that I have ever known. In my family everybody is hard-working, loyal, generous, and honest. in me these qualities were tainted in every part by a proud desire to dominate others. I also had a stubborn unwillingness to admit faults. (4)

Through my family this spirit of superiority was powerfully reinforced. In effect, as children we were told that "you can do most things you set your mind to" but ''watch out what you say because God will never forgive your taking His name in vain." Such Scotch Irish Victorianism won't necessarily keep you from all the bad sins, but it promotes the pretense of human independence from God and certainly makes you feel superior to the blaspheming sinners of the world. What I learned at home was that we superior Millers were always about the best in what we did and should expect to win in all reasonable competition. In this setting I don't think I ever heard anyone tell me they loved me. The idea seemed to be that winners don't need that sort of soft stuff. The effect of this training was to build in me a conceit of boilerplate thickness, leaving me with the dangerous impression even after my conversion that it was my calling to dominate people for their own good. (4-5)

Actually when twenty years had gone by since my first repentance in the family living room, I was just beginning to sense how little I knew of the love of a Father who delights in pardoning transgressors. (5)