A young Miller decides to quit

Today makes the third “front porch” visit in a row that we have sat together rehearsing some of the scenes in Preacher Miller’s life. I expect there are enough powerful lessons to learn from the Georgia preacher for us to come back to him for a lifetime.

But all the preaching, traveling, debating, and baptizing Preacher Miller does almost never happens. He comes very close to quitting as a young man. He reaches his getting-off point almost before he gets started, and he decides to unhook his belt, take off his armor, and lay down the sword. For good.

But we know that many great preachers in Bible days come close to doing the very same thing –great men such as Jonah, Peter, Elijah, and Jeremiah. The prophet Jeremiah may have come the closest to quitting. The audience of his day consists of a bunch of idolatrous Israelites who long ago stop walking with the Lord and decide to go “backward and not forward.” They reject both the healing balm the Lord offers for their diseased souls and the living water He sends to sustain them daily. As a result, their hearts become as dry as a scorched river-bed, and their spirituality is like a “broken cistern” (Jeremiah 2:13; 7:24; 8:22).

Each time Jeremiah, the “weeping prophet,” sits down to write a plea to the people he loves, the scroll becomes dampened by his dripping tears. Finally, Jeremiah’s tears run dry, and he digs his heels in the ground and makes this sad resolve: "I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name" (Jeremiah 20:9). He has had enough. He is through.

Who can blame him? Who among us would not have said the same? For years he has preached his heart out and nobody listens! So, he washes his tired hands of the people and of preaching. Perhaps he even goes out to look for another job, the door slamming behind him as he heads toward the nearest town. He’ll show them.

But he doesn’t climb too many dusty hills before he stops in his tracks. Something inside him just doesn’t feel right. He has a burning sensation down deep that keeps tugging at him, and it is not letting up. As he pauses, the words he has vowed echo in his head: I will not make mention of him nor speak any more in his name!

Perhaps he turns around for that day, thinking, “All right. I’ll go back home and relax today, and, after a good night’s rest, I’ll go find me a new job tomorrow.” But all he has coming is a rough night on a boisterous sea. Guilt has set in, and an aching inside him will not let him rest. Perhaps it is in the middle of the night that he gets up, looks in the mirror, washes his face, and makes another resolve – and it is one of the greatest declarations that I’ve ever heard a preacher make:

"His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with holding it in; indeed, I cannot!" (Jeremiah 20:9).

With a grimace and a shake of the head, Jeremiah realizes that there are some things in life that do not leave us much choice. For him, preaching the Lord’s gospel is just such a thing. He has too much zeal and courage in his satchel to just lay it down.

The young Preacher Miller carries a healthy portion of zeal and courage in his own satchel, too. But can he garner the same type of resolve when he reaches a Jeremiah-like low point and has had enough, too. When that hour comes – sometime around the mid-1930s – the Georgia preacher makes the same decision Jeremiah makes. To make it official, he gets up one morning to go to an old preacher he knows to give him the bad news:

"I’m quitting,” he says, “I just can’t take it anymore."

The reply that comes catches the young Miller by surprise: "Preacher Miller,” the old man says, "if you can quit, by all means do!"

“Now, I wasn’t ready for that!” my granddad would tell me many years later. “He was supposed to beg me to stay, to put his hand on his shoulder and assure me it’d be all right. I thought he would tell me how badly the church needs men like me, and how the brotherhood would suffer,” he added with a healthy laugh.

But Preacher Miller never hears those words. As a result, he decides to take the old man’s advice. If that was the way he wanted it, he’d just quit!

But there is a problem.

“Oh, I tried to quit,” my granddad would tell me many times, “I tried. But I couldn’t do it.”

There was a burning, you see, down deep in Preacher Miller’s bones, just as with Jeremiah. And he figures out early on that it never was going to let up – not as long as the good Lord gave him breath.