Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller: Recent Episodes
Paul Miller
In this podcast, Paul E. Miller, author of A Praying Life, invites you into a conversation about Jesus and how he lived as a person. Ministry and conversation partners, Liz Voboril and Jon H., join Paul in exploring the details of Jesus’ earthly life. In attending closely to the cadences of the one person who lived a perfect life, we gain a clearer vision of what it means to be human. Learn more about Paul Miller and his ministry at seejesus.net.
Paul and Liz begin a short new series sharing lessons learned over the years about discipleship. Adam Barker, Director of our A Praying Life Ministry, joins us.
"One of the things I do when discipling Christians is I hold them individually accountable. I just go around and ask, ‘Did you do the assigned reading?’ Why do I do this? Probably because I have learned that my evangelical Christian friends in suburbia are no different than the inner city kids I used to teach when it comes to doing homework."
"In the modern American church, we're so concentrated on gathering people and making them feel good about that gathering, and that often kills discipleship." "I was leading cohorts in a church that had a passive learning paradigm, so it took me a couple of weeks to even begin to break into that. When I got some negative comments from a participant during the second or third week, I was delighted. That was honest engagement, so I knew where he was at! You can't disciple unless you know where someone is really at."
Paul, Robert, and Liz wrap up this study of Jesus by reflecting on what Jesus tells us about his glory... and what that means for how we follow him.
"We would think the glory would be the resurrection, that it would start Sunday. But Jesus says the glory starts Friday… which is just so different than how we think of glory."
"Most of the time you only see glory in retrospect. When you're enduring quietly with no cheering crowd, that's your glory." "What's Jesus going to do at the wedding feast of the lamb? He's going to be the center of the feast, and he's going to also be the host and the servants. He's going to be around checking people, checking their drinks, serving food. He just loves to love. He loves to wash feet."
Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about the resurrection of Jesus.
"It was the apocryphal gospel of Peter that helped me to realize how much space Jesus left in this Resurrection scene. If you follow what the gospel of Peter says, Jesus comes back from the grave like King Kong - he fills up all the space. You can't even see his head, because it is literally up through the clouds!"
"I want Jesus’ DNA – to ask questions, to be slow to bring judgment." "In the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in Luke and John, Jesus is the same size as Mary. He leaves space by quietly being there until she sees him – and even then he doesn't say who he is but asks her questions. And because of that, we discover some of what Mary’s like as a person. If Jesus had identified himself immediately, we’d have missed that glimpse of Mary."
Paul, Robert, and Liz begin looking at the first moments after the resurrection of Jesus, examining his interaction with Mary Magdalene.
"Mary Magdalene is the first person we know of who turns away from two angels, because they aren't helping her. She’s in pursuit, and the angels aren't helping her, so she starts looking around. We know from Luke that she had been demon-possessed, and Jesus had freed her, so what we're looking at in her single-minded focus is the depth of her love for Jesus."
"Jesus is the first person of a new creation." "Sickness is going to end. Cancer is going to end. Meanness is going to end, murder is going to end, death's going to end. This is the biggest and best news in all of history, and Jesus is able to make her name and who she is as a person the center of how he shares the news with her."
Paul, Robert, and Liz finish their conversation about Jesus on the cross, slowly walking through his last seven statements.
"Notice how short Jesus' sentences are on the cross. He has to push himself up on his feet to catch a breath and then to be able to exhale that breath without dropping… it makes it all that much harder to talk."
"Everything about this person is supernatural!" "Jesus cries out, 'It is finished!' The job is done. In John 2, Jesus tells his mother at the wedding in Cana, 'My time has not yet come.' But now the battle's over. He's done the will of his father. For the disciples, at this point, it looks like everything has gone wrong, but they'll later realize that this is a cry of triumph."
Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their slow walk through the last hours of Jesus' life, looking at Jesus and the cross.
"There are so many things that Jesus says that are memorable because they're pithy. 'Father, forgive them for they know not what they do' is certainly one that has implanted itself in our memories. But it’s very serious. Jesus is holding back the wrath of God. They don't realize that they're crucifying an innocent man, so Jesus is showing mercy on them."
"The only person that openly defends Jesus is a thief." "When Pilate said, ‘Where are you from?’ he was not asking for Jesus’ name. He knew this was Jesus of Nazareth. He wasn’t saying, ‘what's your hometown,’ but, 'are you actually God?' And of course, the main thing Pilate is mocking here is not Jesus, but the Jews, and they know it."
Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus before Pilate, looking at how close Jesus gets to Pilate's heart.
"Jesus has taken Pilate from a mocking question into opening up his heart, then he’s received more mocking from Pilate and taken him to truth. The whole thing is kind of a journey, and Pilate follows Jesus."
"Jesus is very lamb-like, but there's a lion right behind the bushes and you can feel it." "Pilate was not a fearful man. He was a crafty politician. He stayed longer, up to that point, than any other of the Roman procurators, so he's got good survival instincts; but here, he's afraid. In the end, he has a choice to save his career or to save Jesus' life; and as you know, in the end, he chooses his career."
Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about how Jesus loves as the cross draws near, turning their attention to the trial scene with Pilate.
"Pilate is one of the people in the Gospels who we tend to see through a fairly fixed definition. The scene where he washes his hands is iconic: 'Behold, the man!' So we actually don't have a feel for him as a person. What’s this guy like? It was Edersheim’s book, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, that first put me onto what’s going on in this conversation."
"The beauty of poetry is this ability to condense infinity, and Jesus does it all the time." "There’s a degree to which that mocking can help us not take ourselves too seriously, but there's also a way that mocking can prevent us from taking ourselves seriously enough."
Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about how Jesus loves as the cross draws near, turning their attention to the scene when Judas arrives at the garden.
"We can sometimes be fearful of the kind of honest command or these penetrating questions Jesus asks that unmask evil. Sin grows in the dark. And yet here they are coming in the cover of darkness, not realizing they were coming to the one who is the light of the world, who exposes every part of them."
"Jesus is the light everywhere he goes." "This whole scene probably takes no more than 10 minutes. But within that time, we see Jesus moving between all these different ways of loving. He's so very present, so aware. He moves in every quadrant of love from powerfully rebuking to asking penetrating questions to protecting the disciples. It’s a beautiful portrait of Jesus loving."
Paul, Robert, and Liz resume the Passion series, watching Jesus at Gethsemane.
"What saved us from sin and brought joy to the world? It was Jesus' death on the cross. What makes Jesus' death possible? Well, it was his obedience to his father: doing his father's will. When did he set his will firmly? What was the ground zero of his obedience? It was facing the awful sadness at Gethsemane and not giving into it, resisting the temptation to run."
"Jesus says, ‘Take this cup from me, yet not as I will, but you will.’ I love that Jesus is real about his feelings and what his feelings are pushing him to. And yet, at the same time, he's not ruled by his feelings." "This is the trigger for this vast explosion of the new creation. This is the spark. Because he faced his sadness, he didn't run. Because he didn't run, he stayed. Because he stayed, he suffered. Because he suffered, he died. And because he died, he took the sins of the world on himself and was resurrected as the first piece of the new creation."
Paul, Robert, and Liz take a break from their conversations around the passion of Jesus to reflect on Christmas, and in particular, the story of the first live nativity, created by Francis of Assisi.
"Francis of Asissi was probably the first person in the church to be completely enamored with, very particularly, the person of Jesus. It just ignited his whole life. He'd been a soldier and had a breakdown after that, as a young man in his early 20s, but then became enchanted with the person of Jesus. By the time he died in his 40s, there were 30,000 Franciscans at their annual conference. His love for Jesus was transformative on the whole medieval mind. He was the first person to create a live nativity scene, and it changed how we celebrate Christmas. Because up till then the book of Matthew, with its portrayal of the wise men, was dominant in the Christmas story, and now, the shepherds came in and got some play."
"Francis’ nativity shows what can happen if you fall in love with the person of Jesus!" "For Mary and Joseph, plans keep changing. I mean, they were going to get married and have a baby, as far as we know, in Nazareth, and they had to return for the census. I'm sure in their imagination they were going to have a baby in a better place and they ended up in a manger. Then were going to stay in Bethlehem and an angel came to Joseph and said, ‘Get out of here.’ They had to go to Egypt, and then, even then, they were going to return to Nazareth and the angel appeared to Joseph again. Joseph gets a lot of angel appearances, by the way!"
Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus in his passion, considering what his sighs teach us about being human.
"A sigh says so much. We know from Romans 8 that the Spirit himself 'intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words' (Romans 8:26). A sigh, or a groan, expresses things that words can't quite capture. There are two ways we encounter the impact of fall all the time: one is sin and the other one is death. Sin is the moral face of evil, and death, the physical."
"Jesus’ sigh is a hybrid of frustration and sadness – somewhere between a fit of anger and a burst of tears." "The cross deals with sin, and the resurrection deals with death. It's a one-two punch. Jesus' healing ministry is all focused on some impact of the curse on our physical world and our bodies. And his teaching ministry is focused on the impact of sin. And so both of them anticipate the final solution, which is the cross and resurrection. The church continues to live out those two ministries of Christ."
Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation on Jesus' passion, looking at how Jesus begins to face his coming death. To celebrate the complete Person of Jesus series, we're offering $5 off of Unit 5: The Passion Leader's Manual (digital version) when you use promo code: POD5
"Paul's line on that from Romans 5 is actually a very stoic-like passage where he says rejoice in your suffering, because suffering produces perseverance, character – all the Greeks would have agreed with that. But then Paul goes Jesus, so to speak. He says, '…and character, hope, and it's a hope that does not disappoint because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that he's given to us.' The Spirit brings resurrection, not in just in Jesus, but in our souls; we have resurrected souls."
"A life in communion with Christ continually experiences resurrection power. This doesn’t mean there’s no sadness, but we're not engulfed by sadness." "Older, traditional Christianity, as we've said, has tended to be focused on duty, which has many good sides but tends to suppress feelings. The modern world tends to be aware of, magnify, and even get stuck in feelings. So here we see the beautiful balance of Jesus. He is aware that he is troubled, and he knows where this is leading, but he's not ruled by his feelings, which is just beautiful. He says, 'for this very reason I came to this hour.' "
Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation on Jesus' passion, turning their attention to Judas' betrayal. In this episode, Paul mentions a talk he gave on Judas several years ago, as part of an audio study called "The Love Course." You can listen to that talk here (or download it to listen to later, if you click on the triple dots.)
"How do you know someone is troubled? He was agitated, and when someone is agitated, they're tense, they're restless, they fidget. And John, sitting right next to him, could sense that. Leaning up against him, he probably felt the tenseness in Jesus' body."
"Jesus has kind of given us a template to be ourselves..." "This doesn't mean that ‘yourself’ is always right but is a beautiful picture of normal. I have one older friend who will often get depressed and sometimes the reason for her feeling depressed is that her circumstances are depressing! I encourage her that it’s okay to be depressed, because your life is depressing. While that may not sound like an encouragement, I think it’s helpful to see that Jesus allows space for sadness, because often what Christians are dealing with is guilt on top of depression."
Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about learning from Jesus in his passion.
"Contrary to the typical pictures on a Sunday school wall, Jesus comes down the hill on Palm Sunday weeping – the word is actually closer to 'wailing.' In our experience of humanity, people who wail and warrior kings are never the same person, but Jesus is a wailing warrior king. His heart is filled sadness over what his people will suffer, and he will fight to the death for them."
"There’s a pattern of action that we see throughout the Bible – seeing is the beginning of action." "We see this pattern in the prayers of the Psalms ('Lord, see what I'm doing, look down from heaven'), and in God’s response in situations, ('I've seen the travail of my people and I've come down…'). Most human action begins with seeing. And so, we see here with Jesus, it is seeing the city that moves him to tears. He doesn't use his divinity to see it over the hill two miles out. Jesus reacts in the situation, just like you and me."
Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about seeing Jesus in his passion, turning their attention to what we learn from his sadness and grief over the people’s rejection of him.
"Jesus’ words are so tender, 'Your house is left desolate.' We get a picture of broken intimacy or intimacy that never happened. It’s paired with this really true and honest image of how brutal they are. 'You who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you.' He’s going after the hardness of their hearts, their will. Jesus, who is life himself, is crushed at this point. He's feeling the loss of the people of Israel."
"Understanding Jesus’ sadness can help us understand his love." "Joy is the fruit of intimacy and obedience, and sadness is the result from the failure of intimacy and obedience. Obedience involves a surrender of our will to the ways of God. That's where the will comes out in what Jesus is saying here. They're killing the prophets. The prophets are coming and telling them what they're doing wrong, and they hate that. So they're pushing against the mind of Christ; they're pushing against the ways of God."
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about the humility Jesus calls us to, looking at what taking the lower place might look like in an everyday moment.
"Humility is when your heart is humbled, it's a virtue, a character trait. Humiliation is when your circumstances are humble. It's helpful to distinguish between the two, but having experienced some of the dying of humility in my life, I slowly learned that these two things are deeply connected."
"The place of humiliation is where you learn humility." "You do not learn humility abstractly. You have to be in a humbled place. The story I'm going to tell here is made up, but it's the kind of thing that happens everyday. I've made the husband the bad guy, but I've also told it where I flip the husband and wife. But everybody gets mad at the husband in this no matter which way I do it!"
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their discussion of Jesus’ humility, looking at the foot washing scene in John 13.
"This scene reads like a YouTube video. John gives us every move of Jesus, and the effect of it is riveting… especially since he does it all in silence. John's writing this probably 60, 50 years later, from what Eusebius tells us, and he remembered every single move Jesus made because he wasn't talking. It just sealed it in his mind – like the scene itself was a visualization of the mind of Christ."
"Foot washing is Jesus’ glory. It’s where his beauty shines." "Jesus is acting out his atonement. He's showing us that the example of his dying love leads to the atonement. It's a beautiful balance between what we might call 'the example of Jesus' and 'the atonement of Jesus.' And it's just so important how we constantly need to bring them together and not pull them apart. Liberalism tends to sit on the example and our conservative churches, while they really do both, tend to weigh the atonement above the example. And it’s true, you never get at the example unless you have the atonement. But that makes it easy to miss the foot washing. But the sheer physicality of the gospels shows us Jesus' beauty."
Paul, Jon, and Liz start a new series, talking through the Passion unit of our Person of Jesus Study, which looks closely at how all the aspects of Jesus as a person that we've looked at before (his compassion, honesty, dependence on God, and faith) come together in the intense last few weeks of his life on earth.
"Jealousy is a sin that is often hidden from the person who is jealous, because it always speaks about what the other person is doing wrong. So it is powerful and deceptive. It is like cancer within. I have seen churches and families torn apart by this sin. The antidote for it is dying with Jesus – the antidote is to lose, to take the downward path of Philippians 2."
"Everyone's expecting and wanting Jesus to move up the ladder, to make a move to grab power, and he's doing the opposite. He's teaching the opposite. He's demonstrating the opposite." "You can picture it like a graph where Jesus's line would be going down and the disciples, their hearts, and their desires are moving up. There’s a point where they crisscross, and there's a rub. That rub is working against our own minds and hearts, our own ways of thinking and being. It’s the mind of Christ grating against ours in a very gentle but an obviously honest and truthful way."
Paul, Liz, and Robert continue their conversation about the woman at the well, looking at the second half of their conversation.
"Jesus has already said he has water. Now he says the character of the water is not just spring water. It’s not well water that's been sitting there forever. It's not spring water – it’s water that if you drink it, you'll never be thirsty again. This is like a super drink. Then he ramps it up once more: the water I give will become a spring of water. So when you drink this water that I give, it's going to transform your heart so you become a gusher."
"In the midst of something as simple as a drink of water, Jesus gets at the thirst of her heart." "Jesus is now beginning to give her living water, and he does it by saying, 'Go call your husband and come back.' You can feel the conversation shifting at this point; she gives a much shorter answer. This is the hardest part of the conversation for me to go to. I can do the compassion part, the intrigue part, but this coming in with this honesty is just hard…"
With the Discipleship series complete, we circle back to our Faith series (based on the Person of Jesus Faith Study) to cover a story we had not yet discussed: Jesus's conversation with the woman at the well. Paul Miller, Liz Voboril, and Robert Row look at how this story showcases Jesus' compassion, honesty, and dependence on the Father -- themes we've discussed in previous episodes.
"The conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well is remarkable. It’s the longest conversation that we have recorded between two people that are of the non-elite class, which is the top 1%. It is the longest conversation between everyday people that we have in antiquity."
"This conversation is the hope diamond of Jesus' interactions with people – it just sparkles!" "You can pick up the woman’s personality almost immediately. When people do awkward things, like Jesus does here, most of us try to gloss it over. But she states the exact awkwardness: 'How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman for a drink?' It’s kind of like she's just met a Martian."
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their discussion of discipleship, talking about how the discipling process is a process of moving people out of lukewarm into hot or cold.
"The discipling process is a process of moving people out of lukewarm into hot or cold, and that's a good process. You're calling them to greatness, and you want to move them to hot. You don't want them lukewarm."
"In general, I would say the weakness of the church is that it’s too quick, it’s 'low-bar discipling.' There's no meat in the training." "But there is a danger at the opposite side of where the training can get too obsessive or oppressive. The gnostics believed that there was this secret inner knowledge, and it kind of created a hierarchy. And you had to become an insider. It's really important for those of you who are leading discipling and those who are discipling others to guard against the intrusion of personal and institutional pride."
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their discussion of discipleship, talking about the history of discipleship practices.
"By about 200 AD, every person who wanted to become a Christian went through a year of discipleship. They did this through a form of catechism, or questions and answers, and then the graduation was on Easter. That's when you were baptized. I think one of the reasons the church does that is I'm sure they had experience with converts just being light and fluffy, so they had actually gotten stricter as far as we can tell than the New Testament."
"Culture 'disciples' us in profound ways -- everybody is being shaped by something." "The discipleship era we live in has been profoundly shaped by the revolution begun by Charles and John Wesley. They really are the fathers of modern pietism. They popularized the prayer meeting, the small group. They didn't invent these things, but they certainly made them worldwide. Methodism as a strategy went way beyond Methodism and captured the imagination of the whole church. That’s why we still have prayer meetings, discipleship groups, and even the idea of discipleship with individuals."
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship.
"At the heart of discipleship is not just seeing Jesus and becoming like him abstractly, but actually entering into the patterns of his life. One of the central principles of interpretation of the New Testament is that what happens to Jesus happens to us."
"The goal of discipleship is Christ formation." "You can't separate a teaching gift from the command to love. Otherwise, you've got a machine, and you can't create a discipling machine!"
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship.
"Two thousand years after Jesus’s death, the Church of Jesus Christ is absolutely massive—there are three billion confessing Christians. If you're going to start the world's biggest, most enduring organization, how would you go about it? It's striking that Jesus doesn't go to the rabbinical schools or to the elites."
"We laugh at the disciples for their clumsiness, but we miss the beauty of their lack of pretense." "Probably the most important thing in hunting for people to disciple is hunting for teachability. You just don't get teachability when people are on a hierarchy. I love schooling; I've been a supporter of Christian schools my whole life. I'm not knocking school or systems of learning, but you really have to be careful that you don't create hierarchies of knowledge. Jesus is always tearing down these hierarchies, and he does it with the kind of people."
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship.
"One caution with a focus on discipleship practices is that it can be like making an amusement park about going on a ride. But you don't just go on a ride at Disney, you are immersed in an experience. Discipleship without an overall goal of growing in Christ-likeness is just getting a lot more Christian information."
"The whole process of disciple-making really begins best in friendship." "Outside of the New Testament, one of the best descriptions of the telos of the Christian life is in Warfield’s sermon called 'Imitating the Incarnation.' He says, 'It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives,' because the love of Christ draws us into sharing in so many other people’s stories."
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship, looking at active vs. passive posture in discipleship, and how Jesus discipled the 12.
"Marshall McLuhan famously said, 'The medium is the message,' calling attention to the shaping power that our method of communicating has over the content of the message. If the sermon sits at the center of our imagination for discipleship, we risk having an overly passive view of growing as a disciple. This isn’t a critique on the sermon – listening to sermons is an important way to grow. But we want to get our imagination for discipleship from how Jesus does this work…"
"The heart of Jesus’s ministry is mentoring the twelve." "Jesus often takes as much time in an incident or interaction as he does in interpreting the incident for others. Sometimes he goes through two layers of people, interpreting for the larger group of people, and then again specifically for the smaller. This slows him down a lot, but he's doing Christ formation with his disciples. He's not just on a healing ministry; he’s pivoting between a healing ministry, a teaching ministry, a discipling ministry, and his own prayer time. This pattern is all through the gospels. The discipleship of the 12 is the organizing structure of his day-to-day life."
Paul, Jon, and Liz start a new series looking at the topic of discipleship.
"We are quite serious about what the Apostle Paul calls the mind of Christ. That's Philippians 2:5, where Paul said, 'Let this mind be in you which is also in Christ Jesus.' Paul then goes on to describe the story of Jesus' life: going down into death and up into resurrection. He's driving for something; don't learn this in the abstract, but let this mind be in you."
"Within the world of Christian ministry, formation tends to be a little vague: we are learning the Bible, learning doctrine, learning holiness, and all of those are important, but what you see in Paul, in the whole New Testament really, is this sharply defined telos or end goal: Christ's formation." "The Apostle Paul’s call to discipleship aims so high – it’s like he’s training Olympic athletes. What's so daunting and enchanting about it is that he’s not just saying this to the elites or the most naturally 'athletic' of the church. It's for everyone in the church, and he has this expectation that the Spirit who makes Christ present is so powerful that Christ's formation is realistic and it's doable, not in our own strength but in the spirit of Jesus."
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about faith with an episode that looks at faith as a habit of the heart that turns to Jesus.
"This is a little bit of an inference on my part, but what I think Jesus is irritated about, here in Mark 8 with the disciples, is that when they come across a problem, they don’t turn to him. They turned inward, and I’m sure started getting irritated with each other. We can easily imagine the discussion, 'You said you're going to bring the bread! Why didn’t you?' When all along, as they’ve seen already, they have this bread factory in the boat with them!"
"Faith is a habit of the heart where you look away from yourself, your wisdom, and your resources and turn to Jesus." "Oddly enough, a strong faith person is weak as they look to themselves. Strength of faith is measured by your ability to turn away from yourself. It's not looking inward to see if you have enough faith, but looking outward to the object of your faith. Faith, in that sense, is without energy. It's this is a habit of the heart where you look away from yourself and turn to Jesus."
Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation about faith, looking especially at how Jesus develops the disciples' faith.
"Right after the feeding of the 5000, Jesus dismisses his disciples. It's the only time he does this, and it’s a situation where it would appear he could use their help. But when you put all three of the gospel accounts together, you realize Jesus had to act fast. It was almost like he was getting them out of the drug world… the 'drug' of 5000 people shouting for Jesus to be King. It's an intoxicating crowd that could sweep up the disciples, and so Jesus sends them off alone in the boat."
"Jesus doesn't rescue Peter until Peter says, 'Jesus save me!' It’s classic Jesus: he leaves space for us to move towards him." "Peter looks at Jesus by faith, and then he loses it and goes back again. All of the disciples take steps of faith and then show their weakness of faith. It’s like Jesus has them in a faith coaching camp. Every time he permits stress in their lives, he builds faith in them and points them to faith."
Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation looking at the development of faith in Jesus's followers -- this episode looks at the story of Peter rebuking Jesus and at Jesus's words to the Rich Young Ruler.
"What we're thinking about now is the object of our faith. The object of Peter's faith is a traditional first century off-the-shelf messiah who has an army that destroys evil in Israel and throws the Romans into the sea. So it's very concrete. And what Jesus has just told Peter seems like crazy talk."
"The object of Peter's faith is Jesus, but it's the wrong Jesus. It's a Jesus who's going to make his life pain-free. It's not a Jesus who draws you into his death and resurrection." "There’s some beauty to John Mark walking away. He doesn't try to stop being himself immediately. Jesus is separating the wheat from the chaff. You either have to be hot for Jesus or cold. You can't be in the middle or lukewarm. John Mark is coming, in a sense, asking, ‘How can I be hotter for Jesus?’ Jesus’s answer is helping John Mark to see that he’s actually cold."
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about faith by looking at how the disciples learned about faith in the context of two boating adventures with Jesus.
"To understand God, as Calvin says, you can either begin with yourself or with God. Because a true knowledge of yourself will lead to a true knowledge of God, and a true knowledge of God will lead you to a true knowledge of yourself. You see that dynamic happening here. Jesus hasn't said anything like, 'You’re a sinner, Peter.' It's just this encounter with the immense warmth and love and kindness of God -- His sheer goodness to us – that makes Peter turn and think of his sin."
"Peter is profoundly seen. He's encountered life at a level he never has experienced before." "In the scene on the boat in the storm, what we're looking at as Jesus sleeps is his faith. He rests completely in his Father and his Father's love for him. He is without fear; the disciples fear because they don't have that rest in the Father. The faith that allows him to sleep is as helpful for them as the miracle itself!"
Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus's faith, looking at how he loves the disciples and the crowds over the course of a 24-hour period in his ministry.
"This pattern of Jesus is all through the gospels: he sees a large crowd, has compassion on them because they're like sheep without a shepherd, and then he begins teaching and healing. So this vacation that Jesus and the disciples are taking is interrupted by 25,000 people…”
"A life of faith will be filled with surprises and unexpected things!" "The reason Satan has no hold on Jesus is because the only thing Jesus wants is the love of his Father. So there's no hook, no crack in Jesus' armor; Satan has no leverage over him. I’ve often thought of that during times of suffering. If I surrender my job, my family, my career, my spouse, and my health, then Satan has no hold on me. He can't tempt me with something that I don't own. That's why suffering is so powerful in the Christian life; it strips us of something we might be tempted to own."
Jon, Paul and Liz begin a new series looking the central role faith plays -- in Jesus, in the disciples, and in us. These conversations will be framed around lessons in The Person of Jesus Study, Unit 4, Faith.
"Jesus has a lot of conversations about the disciples' faith, and there are many fascinating nuances to it. But what you hardly ever hear anybody talk about is Jesus' own faith. That can wind up making Jesus kind of plastic. The reason that we don't talk about Jesus's faith is because we're so aware that he's God. In a sense, we think 'what on Earth does he have to believe?' But the reason that we've not really reflected on this is because we've not really reflected that much on how serious the embodiment of Jesus is."
"Faith is everything. Without it, love is just so difficult." "Luke tells us that as Jesus is praying, right after his baptism, he hears this voice from heaven. 'This is my beloved son with him I am well pleased.' That's the Father building faith in his son. If you hear the voice of your heavenly Father saying, 'I am completely satisfied with you in Christ Jesus.' There's no other better place to be. It's not a temporary state -- it's unending. There's nothing that can separate you from the love of God..."
Jill Miller joins Paul, Jon and Liz for this conversation about what we can learn from the barnyard about how Christmas lands among everyday saints. "The ministry of the church happens through the hands and feet of everyday saints. So as we turn to Christmas, we thought it would be fun to both think about the Christmas story and also this idea of the saints. As we look at the Christmas story in Luke, we see that Christmas lands down among the saints."
"The manger was so dirty, but Christ as a baby was laid in that. And now the Holy Spirit is in my heart, which so many times, is dirty just like the manger. He still dwells in manure!" "We were talking about Mary with the gang [our local Bethesda group for people affected by disability], and how there was no room in the inn and what one of the kids next to me whispered, “Kind of like there's no room for me. There wasn't any room for me in school.” And then another kid said, “Yeah, it's kind of tough to get into church.” They're used to low places and one day, hallelujah, they will be raised. I'll be the one washing the feet of these kids in heaven. It was really encouraging to them to see how Jesus entered the world and experienced what they feel!"
Paul and Liz are joined by Colin Millar, seeJesus's European Coordinator, to talk about how the Spirit and Jesus work together, and how that working union energizes faith and prayer.
"The post-resurrection incarnate person of Jesus walks into that room with the disciples and he says ,'Peace be with you.' He breathes on them, and says, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.' That is something that he never did before the resurrection in his incarnate body. We see him praying at his baptism, and as he prayed, he received the Spirit from the Father to empower him to go out and to do his public ministry. So, like us, he had to pray to receive the Spirit before the resurrection. But after the resurrection he has the fullness of the Spirit given to him by the Father; a working union. And so now he can walk up to the disciples and breathe on them and breathe the very fullness of the Spirit into them. It’s a beautiful little preview of what he did for the whole church at Pentecost!"
"My faith grew because he's not just out there running the universe. He's actually down here in all of this mess…" "There’s a relational reality which I think often we lose when we just leave Jesus up there at the right hand of the Father. He's distant. He's far away. He's not really down here in my life with me. When I began to understand these truths about how Jesus and the Spirit work together, suddenly, I got excited again. My faith grew because he's not just out there running the universe. He's actually down here in all of this mess or whatever is going on in my life all the time, and so suddenly, prayer becomes personal and real. As I pray and I talk to him, I'm participating in his resurrection life and the coming of his kingdom and he will do things. So now I look around and watch for little signs of resurrection."
In this episode, Paul and Liz talk with Kieran Carr, pastor at St. Philips Anglican Church near Perth, Australia about how prayer connects us and our churches to the Spirit's power.
"The power shortage in the church is evident. We don’t usually think of it in those raw terms. We maybe spiritualized that a little bit. But certainly the evangelical church has lost cultural power in the last forty years, and we often feel powerless."
"When you talk about asking for something in prayer, you're talking about power coming into a situation or to your heart." "The ministry of the spirit is a ministry of power. The church misses both in that there is real spiritual power and what the nature of the power is. It’s a power you don't control. It’s outside your imagination. It truly is, 'the wind blows where it will.' And the power is Jesus shaped. A community that prays will enter into the sufferings of Christ in ways they haven't before."
In this series, the team works through some central themes that have emerged as we've been talking with leaders about A Praying Church, elaborating on material Paul recently shared at an event at the The Gospel Coalition conference.
"When the Spirit does things, you can't go backwards and figure out how it happened. If you do, you'll go into doubt, ‘it would have happened anyway.’ It's like as you begin to pray and wait on God and ask for his Spirit to lead you within a thoroughly biblical context. What he does is just different, and I call that difference surprise. Surprise was laced all through this story."
"Surprise and imagination explosion are just different ways of saying resurrection." "Probably the most misunderstood part of how the Spirit works is that when the Spirit comes he brings us Jesus. So you don't get the Spirit as some sort of power for self-promotion. When the Spirit brings us Jesus, he brings us the goal of Christ's transformation and he brings us the method of Christ's transformation, which is dying to self."
In this new series, the team works through some central themes that have emerged as we've been talking with leaders about A Praying Church, elaborating on material Paul recently shared at an event at the The Gospel Coalition conference.
"I tell the story at the beginning of the A Praying Church book and seminar. My dad, Jack Miller, had just started at Westminster Seminary faculty. He just gotten his PhD, and started as faculty at Westminster Seminary when he visited Francis Shaffer at L’Abri. He came back very surprised, because he had experienced a community ever so briefly that had prayer at the center and he'd never seen or experienced that before. Here he was an accomplished reformed scholar, even evangelist and pastor, and that was totally new to him."
"Pride and self-will constantly draw us into a fellowship of his suffering -- and that's the door to prayer." "Paul ends that section of Ephesians 3 by praying a doxology. He turns and worships, 'now to him who's able to do beyond all that we can ask or even think.' Some translations say 'imagine,' and that’s a great translation because your imagination takes you into worlds that are outside of parameters, outside of our thought life. One of my reflections on my dad is that after all this, he began to do daring things and dream about doing daring things. So his prayers got bigger."
Robert, Paul and Liz wrap up this series by stepping back and looking at Jesus' range of love. You can download a one-page tool that summarizes these 4 ways of loving, along with the questions and prayers the team shares in this episode here.
"Jesus is really hard to put in a box. We've talked a lot about how you just cannot predict him. You know if you're reading the Gospels for the first time, he surprises at every turn. The reason for that is that his range is so big. Where we get locked into one range of loving, his uniqueness is he moves between all the ranges. So he never stops surprising us."
"There’s a famous description of the Gospel of John that says its portrayal of Jesus is so shallow that a child can play in it, but so deep that an elephant can swim in it."
"The more we meditate on and study the person of Jesus, it expands your categories. You need Jesus in you to move into his categories. The Gospels give me the categories for love and lead me to do much more daring things, and also sometimes wait much more longer than I would naturally wait!"
Jon, Paul and Liz continue their conversations on how Jesus' love is shaped by his dependence on his Father.
"Selfless openness is a willingness to let other people intrude into your life. If there's any form of love that our modern culture is allergic to, it's this one. Particularly as wealth grows, your time becomes your most valuable asset. So when someone intrudes into your life, you're giving them your best gift—and they don't even know it, which is doubly irritating!"
"Jesus loves to love. Sometimes I love to love, but sometimes I love because I should love."
"Our faith functions like a gentle intrusion of us to Jesus. We have a reticence to do that with important people, but Jesus loves it when we bring our needs to him."
Paul, Jon and Liz look at how Jesus' pattern of loving by way of "gentle intrusion" includes drawing near physically and touching people.
"Jesus shows us again and again that love moves towards people. That one idea is so clarifying! It gives me a direction and a thing to do -- even though I have no idea exactly where things will go. I move out of my safety zone and into someone else's world."
"Touch is a physical manifestation of this basic principle: love moves toward people."
"In Revelation 1, when John sees this overwhelming vision of the resurrected Christ…as light as the sun. John falls at Jesus' feet, almost like he's dead. And then Jesus reaches down and touches him. Jesus closes the gap. It's kind of the story of his life!"
Oops! We released Part 2 of our Zacchaeus podcast before we released Part 1. We have changed and reordered them on our hosting service, and if you refresh, you should see the two episodes in the right order. Our apologies!
The podcast team continues their series looking at Jesus and how his dependence on the Father shapes his love. This is the first of two episodes watching Jesus love Zacchaeus.
"When my dad preached a sermon on Zacchaeus some forty years ago and said when you think of Zacchaeus, think of Danny Devito. His whole persona, his character. Self-confident, a little on the obnoxious side of charming. Danny Devito just kind of nails it!... Zacchaeus is a man of action, and Jesus incarnates with him by essentially ordering him: Come down immediately; I must stay at your house today. It’s something we would never even think of doing with a complete stranger."
"'Blessed are those who are making everyone happy' could be a modern beatitude."
"We’re living in a cultural setting where you approach everyone and everything with skepticism and cynicism. To move toward someone with this 'gentle intrusion' love of Jesus can be automatically categorized and received as a malicious kind of move. And so we sometimes ‘freeze’ instead of loving. This gentle intrusion is a side of Christ that we need to learn."
The podcast team continues their series looking at Jesus and how his dependence on the Father shapes his love. Today, we spend the first of two episodes watching Jesus love Zacchaeus.
"When my dad preached a sermon on Zacchaeus some forty years ago and said when you think of Zacchaeus, think of Danny Devito. His whole persona, his character. Self-confident, a little on the obnoxious side of charming. Danny Devito just kind of nails it!... Zacchaeus is a man of action, and Jesus incarnates with him by essentially ordering him: Come down immediately; I must stay at your house today. It’s something we would never even think of doing with a complete stranger."
"'Blessed are those who are making everyone happy' could be a modern beatitude."
"We’re living in a cultural setting where you approach everyone and everything with skepticism and cynicism. To move toward someone with this 'gentle intrusion' love of Jesus can be automatically categorized and received as a malicious kind of move. And so we sometimes ‘freeze’ instead of loving. This gentle intrusion is a side of Christ that we need to learn."
The series continues by looking at how Jesus handles temptation when Satan returns.
"One of the principal patterns across all the gospels is the demand for a sign that comes from the Jews. It’s a little out of our cultural world, and let me just explain. You’ll see examples in the Talmud about great rabbis doing a sign, and what it is is a miracle that shows you off. It might be a miracle where you make the roof go up two feet and come down. It has nothing to do with love."
"The very nature of a sign is to separate love from power. That’s the problem with celebrity culture in the church. It separates love from power. Love always involves humility and going lower."
"In all these temptations, Satan is tempting Jesus to act on his own, but Jesus says, 'I do nothing on my own. I do just what I see my Father doing.' So, for me, that means asking others' opinions, staying under authority, being content with the rhythms of life that God’s given me. We’ve talked about being content in the garden that God has given. So many besetting sins involve looking outside of the garden God’s put you in. They're all a way of making bread."
In this episode, the team reflects a bit on where we are in our Jesus & Dependence series and what we’ll be moving into in our next few episodes.
"If you’ve been listening to our recent podcasts and that was your only window to Jesus, you would probably say he’s kind of a negative person. He says no to everybody; he said no to his mother, no to his brothers, and he was kind of negative with Satan. He’s a Debbie Downer…"
"No one does compassion like Jesus, but compassion is not at the center for Jesus. His Father is; communion with the Father through the Spirit is at the center of his life."
"The Centurion at the cross has never seen a miracle; he knew virtually nothing of this man. But just watching how Jesus acts and relates over those 6 dying hours. This is a man who knows men, and by the end of those 6 hours, he concludes that he has almost certainly met a god. It was how he lived that so stunning."
*Paul and the team reference a 4-quadrant chart in today’s conversation – you can download it here.*
Paul, Robert and Liz continue their conversation about Satan’s temptation of Jesus.
"We tend to be independent of God in our strengths. When we know we’re weak, we pray. That’s why most of our sins tend to clump around our areas of strength."
"Satan is inviting Jesus to be a celebrity, and Jesus is just disgusted at the idea."
"Put your heavenly Father at the center. Don’t go running after those things. Your heavenly Father will take care of you. Seek first His kingdom and his righteousness. It’s going to be more than ok."
Paul, Robert and Liz look at how Jesus says no to the first of Satan's three temptations.
"Jesus is saying no to immediate gratification, and he's saying yes, in this case, to hard work. He's not escaping the incarnation that he's in. He's staying within the garden that his Father has given him; he's not trying to get out of that garden."
"We are made for our Father's words." "If you have a hard relationship, you really should have one or two good friends that you could go to to ask their advice. My rule is if I've told two people, I’m right on the edge, and if I’ve told three people, I probably need to go talk to the person. It's good to have someone you can unload with, but it can be tempting to eat sympathy as a kind of bread. Our life comes from Christ."
Paul, Robert and Liz take one last look at how we see Jesus as he relates to his mother, Mary, at the end of his life and in the last glimpses we get of Mary in Scripture.
"This scene here in John 19 is quite something. If you think of the last 3 vignettes where we’ve seen Mary at work, the biggest difference between this one and those other scenes is that here, Mary is doing nothing. Each one of those scenes was a situation out of control, and we saw Mary coming in and exerting some form of control."
"Mary always initiated, and now, she’s silent and Jesus initiates towards her. Jesus, as the eldest son, cares for her retirement and physical well-being and asks John to take care of her." "In Acts 1, we see Mary mentioned with the other disciples praying in the Upper Room. So there’s this beautiful blending now of the family of Mary and the Jesus family. You see this all over the world: families become the most whole when Jesus enters in."
Paul, Robert and Liz continue their discussion of Jesus’ dependence on the Father, as we see it at play in his relationship with his mother, Mary.
“Jesus and the disciples have become so busy, and Mary thinks his life is out of balance… the whole family does. They’ve come to this conclusion that he’s out of his mind to put food as a secondary priority – to be too busy to eat! You do need nutrition… there’s wisdom in his family’s perspective, but it’s wisdom out of balance.”
“At the heart of tribalism is that the family unit is sacred: you cannot buck your family.” “The gospel brings freedom. One of the things that makes Jesus so hard to pin down is his freedom with people.”
Paul, Robert and Liz continue their series on Jesus’ dependence on his heavenly Father, looking at how Jesus gets separated from his family and winds up in the Temple when he is 12 years old. "This is the last glimpse we get of Jesus in his childhood. He would have been considered a man at age 13. It’s a wonderful glimpse of their nuclear family. We see Mary come alive as a person."
"A super-spiritual, icon-like Mary would probably just embrace Jesus quietly and sob, but here she is such a recognizably human mother!" "Jesus learned to read and write from a very early age. Jesus is at the temple – they had one room just for instruction -- he’s talking to the teachers of the law. There’s a pattern we see already. He’s listening to them and asking questions. And they’re amazed at his understanding, so they’re asking him questions, too. It’s a true dialogue! That pattern of asking questions and understanding will be his for his whole life."
Paul, Robert and Liz continue this series on learning dependence from Jesus, focusing specifically on the role that Scripture plays in helping us discern God’s will.
“'You are my beloved son' – because you are in Christ, and that is the real you. You’ve been imprinted with the image of Jesus at the core of your being. That frees you to say, 'Oh honey, I’m sorry I really messed up.'"
"What we see Jesus doing with the Old Testament, all of us do. It’s not like Jesus is being super spiritual – we just pick different sets of divine words that he does, and our choice of words, be it on social media, movies, or whatever, often messes us up instead of freeing us to be like Christ." "The one miracle I have puzzled over is Jesus stilling the storm. But I recently heard a podcast about it, and the speaker really nailed it: those molecules were created by words, so Jesus is speaking to matter and energy. He’s speaking to quarks, and they understood."
Robert Row joins Paul Miller and Liz Voboril in this new series looking at how, paradoxically, dependence on the Father frees Jesus to love.
“Jesus’ brothers look a lot freer than Jesus. They don’t have this dependence on the Father the way he does. So they can go to the Feast. He says go, he’s not stopping them. He just says you guys have a freedom that I don’t have.”
“His words could be a commercial nowadays: Your time is now. It’s always your time!” "Jesus sounds the opposite of free when he says, 'I don’t do anything but what I see my Father doing.' But what you actually see in his life is immense freedom. He has that that ninja capacity to pivot from compassion to honesty – the whole range of ways to love. I think that’s part of what is so attractive about his dependence. Our assumption is that dependence leads to a small, very limited life. When in fact, in Jesus, we see it play out in this amazing kaleidoscope of ways.”
Paul, Jon and Liz wrap up this series with an episode on prudence.
“What’s fascinating is the difference between Jewish prudence and Greek prudence. The words have almost an entirely different sense. Both have this sense of standing down, but their motive is entirely different. For the Greek mind, particularly the stoic mind which dominated Greek thought, the danger was emotions…”
“For the Greeks, prudence was how do you live wisely in a world of idiots…. one of the things that’s completely lacking in that is love.” “In contrast to that, you can see the Jewish idea of prudence flowing all through the book of Proverbs. My basic strategy is love. But how do I do it? I need to be careful, prayerful, thoughtful, asking questions. I need to be like a sheep among wolves, as shrewd as a snake and as innocent as a dove.”
Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus’ honesty.
“People cancel one another very easily and shut down with the other person. But Jesus says we can’t do that. We need to move towards our enemies, and you need to do it thoughtfully thinking, 'How can I care for them? What needs does this enemy have?'”
“You cannot be passive with evil is another way of saying it. Evil is far too pervasive. It’s far too intrusive. It’s far too aggressive for you to have a neutral stance with it.” “‘Loving your enemy’ is almost like you’re in a fight, backed into an alley and you have one last big swing. You can either use that opportunity for a ‘Hail Mary’ of a swing against the enemy, or follow Jesus and get down on the floor and wash their feet.”
Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus’ honesty.
“Jesus is actually being a little on the funny side when he says, ‘First take the plank out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.’ There’s this trace kind of light humor through the Sermon on the Mount. You know, ‘if your eye offends you pluck it out.’ But it’s striking that when someone frustrates you or there’s a broken relationship, Jesus begins with how do we see that person.”
“There is a pain to meekness—you can feel like you’re disappearing, because you are—but then we’ve got this promise that the meek will inherit the earth!” "Judging tends to be quick. It’s this immediate analysis of someone else or a situation. Jesus isn’t saying it might not be accurate. But Jesus is just saying that you don’t have to have an opinion. And if you do have an opinion, you don’t have to share it, and if you are going to share it, then first stop and look at yourself for a little bit. It slows human relationships down."
“Peter is insisting that he's not going to betray Jesus. We know from the parallel passages that Peter keeps on insisting. The next thing Jesus says, after ‘Will you really lay down your life for me?’, is, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me.’ We have a chapter break there, and we often assume that that chapter break is in the original, but it's not. It's seamless. Jesus is actually dealing with Peter trying to create an earthly home for himself. That’s where Peter is going with his insistence. It's a perfect example of Jesus not trying to win in his honesty.”
“Jesus is so thoughtful in his love.” "A lifestyle of forgiveness functions like a check on the amount of honesty that comes out of us. Probably the biggest face of that is forbearance. Peter is almost certainly about to blast someone. He’s forgiven and forgiven and forgiven and he's reached his limit. Jesus is saying there is no limit. There's no point at which you ever stop forgiving and then he goes ahead and tells the parable of the man who owes 10,000 talents."
Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus’ honesty.
"The phrase 'speaking truth to power' is often shared as kind of almost glib kind of thing. But speaking truth to power is really at the heart of the prophetic tradition that we see in the hebrew prophets, and all through Scripture. It's permeated civilizations that have really embraced Christianity. It’s really neat to look back at Jesus and watch him do it.
“What you're seeing here in Jesus is the beauty of jealousy.” "Jealousy, like anger or sexual desire, is a neutral quality. When we hear jealousy we often think negatively just like when we hear anger but Jesus is jealous for his Father's house. He's jealous for the Gentiles. Anyone who's a lover is protective of the object of their love. They are jealous for that person and so he is consumed by his Father's loves and to not be jealous is to not care, to be indifferent."
"Sometimes we’re strangely surprised when we've given someone an honest word and they don’t say ‘Oh, thank you for that rebuke. I have felt pride welling up in my heart all morning and I've just been waiting to be humbled. Thank you, you've really blessed me.’”
“Peter keeps on insisting, but Jesus is quiet. What you're looking at there is Jesus’ dependence on his heavenly Father.” "One of the features of modern culture is a tendency for people, when they’ve been sinned against, to demand that that the other person have a full and complete confession. It can lead to small wounds becoming big wounds. It’s a demand that the other person have a complete understanding of everything evil they’ve done to you. But here, Jesus actually kind of crafts a poem."
"In almost every case, Jesus’ anger is focused on 1 or 2 things – a blocking of love or a blocking of faith. It's striking. And these two are Paul's primary criteria metrics for every church. Almost all of the epistles begin with Paul’s mentioning ‘I've heard of your faith’ or ‘I've heard of your love.’”
“It's just lovely to see Jesus irritated.”
"There are at least three ways his irritation is different from our typical irritations. First, his focus is on others, and in our irritations, we tend to think about ourselves. Second, he takes positive action. He says something about it. He’s dealing with stuff openly in the community. Third, while we tend to hold on to our irritation and nurse it, he lets go of it. He moves on."
Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus’ honesty.
“The fully human Jesus was in step with the Spirit and the Spirit can lead you in these really complex situations. He’s loving people who see themselves above Jesus and those who are below in the same story. It’s neat to see that high bar for love. When you get in these overwhelming situations where you don't know how to love, you can pray your way through and ask he Spirit to lead.”
“The gospels are really odd for a stoic.”
“For the Greek stoics everything was about emotion management. The beauty of Jesus is he's fully alive—he’s alive to what's good and he's not trying to suppress who he is to manage life. The consequences of his good anger will be his own death. He's the true warrior, the true hero who goes into the face of evil.”
Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus’ honesty, looking in particular at what we can learn about Jesus and honesty from the disciples he chooses.
“Jesus is savoring that right about Nathaniel when he could have bristled at it or reacted in some other way, but instead he’s savoring the honesty of it.”
“Judging is honesty twisted – where you’ve not really taken the time to discern what’s going on in the situation.”
“The worst kind of judgment is hidden judgment. When you begin to put judgment out in a community, it’s actually helpful. I’m not saying that you go around judging people. But if you’ve been stuffing something, it’s really good for you to get that out. Sin always grows in the dark. Ideally, you’re sharing it with a friend and saying, 'am I off here?' ”
“How do you balance care for a person and care for truth? It is extraordinarily complex. In any relationship where you hit some speed bumps, you immediately encounter that complexity. I am not a neutral truth speaker. I am a sinner saved by grace, who is a saint at my core, but I’ve got my flesh to deal with…”
“It’s not like you graduate out of prayer and get good at honesty. What happens is you get quicker to go to prayer, so that your honesty can be shaped with gentleness and wisdom.”
“What Jesus is getting at in the Sermon on the Mount about judging is honesty that’s been unreflective. You need to do 'beam research' in your own eye, you need to slow down, apply the Golden Rule, be reflective before you speak. Think about your heart, your motivation, your behavior. The Golden Rule slows you down. That self-reflection frames your honesty.”
We’re at the start of a new podcast series called “Jesus & Honesty.” In these episodes, we’ll be focusing on Jesus’ stunning, others-centered honesty. In today’s conversation, we start by looking at this strange “Gift of Honesty.”
“What Jesus says here in Luke 7 is actually really very kind. That kindness is a characteristic of his honesty. He will often deal with obvious things in front of him that the rest of us will just be quiet about and have sideways conversations about later on.”
“Jesus’ honesty enlarges the world of these dinner guests. It is good advice, and it invites them to live in light of eternity.”
“Sometimes in stories like these, we assume that Jesus just showed up and decided in the moment what he was going to do. We can miss his dependent prayer life on the Father before, during, and even after these moments. That is where he gets the wisdom to know what to do.”
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| In this episode, Jon, Paul and Liz round up some J-Curve related conversations and themes. These excerpts are from items Jon shared in the conversation. “The common idea of the Christian life is that Jesus saves us, and then, we don’t technically believe this, but somehow, we live as if the power that raised him kind of goes and burrows into the ground like a gopher and pops up at the very end when Jesus returns again. So, it almost feels like a power that’s underneath the ground, like radioactivity.”
“The students would say, ‘Ah, he’s flexing. He’s on the flexing chart.’ And just like that, they renamed the ‘failure-boasting chart.’ ”
“I realize more and more that while we sometimes complain about the younger generation, we underestimate them, what the Lord is doing in them, and what he will do through them. I’m not typically an optimistic person. I’m more of a glass half-empty person, but over the years, I’m becoming more and more of an optimist or at least a realist in terms of the reality of resurrection power in the midst of a dying world." |
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| In this episode, recorded late last Spring, Paul, Jon and Liz reflect on some aspects of the "A Praying Church" material that resonated in recent conversations and events. “We bring our bad praying and our secularism to the Old Testament and so we miss some of the richness of prayer there. One practical reason is because while in the New Testament prayer is generally just called ‘prayer,’ in the Old Testament, you have this really rich variety of language that covers the range of what it is to be human before God.”
“Prayer is not central. God is central.”
“Secularism is pervasive. It’s a mindset that makes functionally prayer as a window dressing… I love to pray these gigantic kingdom prayers and ask questions, because it lets you see the story unfold. It’s just fascinating what God does. It’s just a lot more interesting though than what I would come up with." |
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Paul, Jon and Liz continue their discussion of Jesus’s compassion, looking at what he teaches in the ‘golden rule.’
“In the Golden Rule, Jesus flips our natural tendency to self-care – he doesn’t deny the value of self-care, but he says let that be a window into the world of love for you.”
“Be attentive to others in the same way you want people to be attentive to you.”
“ 'Not that we should live one life but a thousand lives, binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours.’ I think I’ve read that sentence of Warfield’s a hundred times. It’s one of the most beautiful descriptions of the Christian life that I know."
We’ve been focusing on compassion and how it’s a movement toward people that begins with looking. We’ve looked at enemies of compassion: judging, self-righteousness and legalism. And now we’ll return to compassion and unpack a bit more of how it works.
“What we’re going to look at today is the verb ‘incarnate’ which comes from the noun ‘incarnation.’ We are used to thinking of Jesus’ incarnation, of God becoming man, but in many of the stories that we have from the Gospels, we can see Jesus doing what you might call a 'mini-incarnation' – meaning a small version of what he did in coming from Lord of the universe down to being embodied as a human being.”
“We’re used to thinking of the ‘big leap’ of that Christmas morning incarnation, but it’s neat to see these small leaps of daily ’mini-incarnation.’ ”
“If we’re really going to love, we need the Spirit of Jesus inside of us. We need to be praying our way through relationships. We need the Incarnating One, who is complete truth and complete compassion, to help us weave our way through the intricacies of human relationships.”
Paul, Jon and Liz continue the conversation about Jesus & Compassion and take another look at the problem of legalism they discussed in the last episode.
"There’s no better place to explore the law than the Sermon on the Mount. One way to look at it is to see how the law functions as a frame around grace. And if you don’t have that frame, then grace spins off like a dust devil, it has no content to it."
"Much of Jesus’ attack on legalism is an attack on how legalism weakens love. That kind of legalism is actually virtue signaling, not love. It’s trying to get you in union with culture, not flowing from union with Christ."
“When Paul says ‘imitate me as I imitate Christ,’ I think sometimes we get stuck unnecessarily in the idea that if I’m going to imitate Jesus it’s this kind of floaty, high, holy life. Not only can I not do that, I don’t even know what that is. But if you look at the context of that whole section, it really is ‘imitate Jesus as he loves and he crosses barriers.’ ”
We continue our discussion of Jesus & Compassion and explore how legalism affects our relationships.
"Legalism is a fascinating thing to study, particularly in our modern world where you’ve got competing worldviews that have their own different legalisms. It seems like everyone is reacting to someone else’s legalism! It’s a great place to dive in and hear from Jesus."
"What the law lacks is power, and that’s why the Spirit of Jesus is so central. The only way then that I can obey the law – especially in the way Jesus and the Apostle Paul have raised the standards of the law – is by the spirit."
"Love is so delicate. It’s so difficult to balance all the angles, the timing -- how to say something and when to say it and who to say it to and how to break through my own fears. Love is so complex that I need Jesus inside of me. ‘Apart from me, you can do nothing.’ "
We continue our series on Jesus & Compassion by looking at two stories that highlight how we get legalistic in relationships — starting with Mary & Martha.
"Martha is not saying ‘Ok, my doing this job frees Mary to go to Bible study. That’s wonderful!’ At this moment in the story, Martha loves respect and efficiency, and she’s not getting either. This leads to a demanding spirit, the harshness that comes out above the surface. What feeds that demanding spirit is a disordered love. And Jesus, when he responds to her, he goes after her disordered love."
"Usually when we hear the word legalism, we think of legal structures or rules that are rigid, but legalism has a way of inhabiting our relationships."
"Relational legalism is hard to see because there’s almost always a good principle involved. But when that good principle gets married to, for want of a better term, a soft idolatry of efficiency or respect or you eating well or the perfect meal or any of those things, then that demanding spirit comes out. It’s just lovely to see Jesus go right after Mary’s heart. To paraphrase Jonathan Edwards, my affections shape what I want. Ultimately repentance needs to kind go all the way down to where our loves are out of order."
We continue our conversation looking at the story of Jesus and the dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee in Luke 7. "In receiving this woman’s love and not condemning her, the disdain that Simon and likely others feel for the woman goes over to Jesus. The identical thing happens in the interaction with Zacchaeus, because Jesus goes to his house and has dinner with him."
"Jesus is teaching Simon to look at another person – not to look at them as a category, a function of their morality or their political party, but to look at them as a person."
"The church has been 'in' this story for 2000 years, particularly learning how to value women and treating them as equals. Jesus is right at the same level of this woman. He’s not above her. And he, in fact, honors her. It’s been a journey for the church to learn how to do that."
We continue our series on Jesus and Compassion, looking at the story of Jesus and the dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee in Luke 7. "What’s so striking is Jesus' silence. It’s not unlike multiple other scenes in Jesus’ life where He does something that has the effect of creating space that other people fill. I think it’s so striking for me, because I tend to fill space! Just this morning at a prayer meeting, I wanted to say something funny, but I remember thinking ‘what will happen if I tell this joke?’ It would mess up the gentle storyline that was going on. Sure – there’s a sense in which everybody would have enjoyed it, but it would have suddenly put me in the center. I was struck by how it would mess with the Holy Spirit’s narrative."
"Jesus is showing us what it’s like to be a human in step with the Spirit."
"I believe that as we mature as believers we become more Jesus-like, we broaden our range of love, our ability to balance these opposites. So instead of getting stuck in a rut where we kind of rely on our core personality, who we are as a person broadens out. You’re able to move back and forth between compassion and honesty. Sometimes I need to be listening, sometimes I need to be disrupting. Maturity is learning that balance, developing a praying spirit submitted to your heavenly father, just like Jesus."
In this episode, we continue looking at how Jesus and the disciples interact with the man born blind in John 9. "Jesus looks at this blind man and he looks long enough that the disciples ask him, ’Rabbi, who sinned this man or his parents? Jesus says, ‘Neither.’ In other words, you’re in the wrong paradigm or story. But let me just defend the disciple’s story for a minute. Their story is that sin leads to suffering. And they have warrant at one level for saying that because in John 5, when Jesus heals the kind of the cranky guy in the in the pool of Bethesda, Jesus says to the lame man, ‘go and sin no more.’ In other words yes, there is a very dominant pathway that sin leads to suffering. The wages of sin is death."
"There is nothing like the Gospels in the way they portray ordinary people."
"Jesus left space so the disciples would see the blind man, and then he left space for the blind man and in that space the blind man emerges as a person and we get this rich dynamic of what this guy is like. There’s a whole new way of being human here of relate that we can forget what it’s like. Almost every time Jesus has a conversation, he’s crossing through cultural barriers."
In this episode, we turn our attention to the story of how Jesus and the disciples interact with the man born blind in John 9.
"You can see the contrast here between the disciples and Jesus: judging vs compassion. I think it’s helpful to get a sense of what sins feel like, because when I’m impatient, I don’t feel impatient. I just feel like there are a lot of slow people around! But you see how slow Jesus’ compassion is, versus how quickly the disciples judge."
"It’s not a matter of just stopping the judging, but it’s this putting on of an ability to see the beauty of Jesus in a person."
"You know the more you study the Gospels and see how delicate love is, the more you are aware of your need for Jesus. When Jesus says, 'apart from me, you can do nothing,' that’s me! I can’t go through the day without judging! I think 'Judge not' from Matthew 7 – that two-word command – is Jesus’ hardest command."
This week, we wrap up our discussion of The Prodigal Son in Luke 15 as we discuss the father's conversation with the elder brother.
"The father’s trying to help the elder brother see his brother and see his own heart. He’s painting a picture of his younger brother that would invite the elder brother into compassion, because that that’s missing."
"It’s harder to be a victim than it is to be a sinner."
"The tricky thing is that in our culture right now victimhood is probably the most powerful self-righteousness out there. Everybody hunts for victim categories to fall into, because it gives you kind of an identity. But it just kills our ability to forgive, or to be thankful. The older brother can’t enjoy this feast. He can’t come into the party because he’s been having his own little party about how good he is!"
This week, we continue our discussion of The Prodigal Son in Luke 15 as we reflect on the father's relationships with both the older son and the younger son.
"Both sons struggled to go into the father’s house. The elder brother thought he was too high; the younger, that he was too low. The father moves towards his older son, in his disgust and his pride, and towards his younger son, in his brokenness and his shame."
"Love moves towards people."
"The father reflects what Jesus is like, and Jesus is inviting us into us being like that. There’s a tendency to get stuck in the son’s brokenness, and to think that brokenness is an end in itself. But the end game here is that we become like the father, which is to say: like Jesus!"
In Part 2 of The Prodigal Son (Luke 15), we focus on the son's repentance and the father's self-control. "Repentance is so different from our modern way of thinking of the self. ‘I need to be in touch with my inner self’ and so on. No, the problem is your inner self is out of touch with God. Repentance is a kind of restoring back to the original sanity."
"We are only ourselves when we’re in a life of thankful obedience with our Heavenly Father."
"One of the things I love about the way Jesus tells the story is the implication of the text that the father has been constantly looking. Jesus doesn’t tell us how long this is. It’s a parable. But the implication is that he has to look up from his work every five to ten minutes, because the father picks him up on the horizon when he sees him a long way off. The father has incredible self-control not to have rushed out and tried to fix things from a distance."
In this episode, we look at the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) with a focus on the father, considering the context of the story and the father’s decision to grant the son his wish.
"It’s fascinating to go through Proverbs and the Psalms and look at the number of references to paths… And Jesus tells his disciples to come follow me. The very first name for the early church was 'The Way.' When Paul describes our relationship with the holy spirit we are 'walking with the spirit.' So there’s a pattern, a kind of a grid…."
"The father is not a steward with his money. His question is not 'how can I preserve and grow my capital?', it's 'how can I be a lover with my money?' "
"The father’s brilliant because he knows the son’s character. He’s greedy. He’s full of himself. He doesn’t care about the village. He’s the definition of the biblical fool. The father knows the son is going to spend this money. The problem is he can’t get at the son’s heart until the son is broken. The father is actually making a million-dollar investment in his son’s soul."
We’re continuing our series that looks at Jesus as a person. This week, we talk about the parable of the good Samaritan in Luke 10.
"It’s remarkable that the Samaritan man pays for an extended time of care. Not a small amount of money. He hands over $300 to this innkeeper and says he’s going to come back and pay any additional costs. This is a 9.9 of love!"
"The point of the parable is not just to be like the good Samaritan – Jesus is driving at our tribalism."
"Paganism is just how do you do life well without Jesus. You need a tribe. You need safety, you need community, you need to maintain justice. If someone gets you, you get them back. It’s the world of hate. The sermon on the mount is a slam into paganism. At the heart of it is Jesus’ command to love your enemy."
We’re beginning a new series that will look at Jesus as a person, and along the way, we’re picking up on some themes that go back to our earliest episodes. This week, we explain a bit about the back story of this series and talk about what we see in Jesus in the story of the widow of Nain in Luke 7.
"It was in reading this story my thinking and awareness of Jesus as a person first began to open up. As I was reading this, a little light went off and I thought, 'Now, wait a minute. In the prodigal son, doesn’t something similar happen when Jesus describes how the father greets the prodigal son? And where the father looks and sees the son on the horizon, feels compassion and then acts?' And then I thought, 'Wait a minute, isn’t that also in the good Samaritan too?' "
"Looking is not insignificant – in the Hebrew mind, all action begins with looking."
"This attentiveness to a person that we see in Jesus leads to a tenderness with people. Jesus is not a miracle machine. He’s not a justification by faith robot. He’s showing us how to be human." Watch this video to hear more about how Paul learned to love by watching Jesus.
If you’re interested in going deeper into the material we discussed today, look at lesson one of Unit 1, The Person of Jesus: Compassion. Learn more at seeJesus.net/PersonOfJesus.
We wrap up theJ-CURVE: Descent of Love series by looking at the Father's response to Jesus' descent. Our material comes from theJ-Curve book and newJ-Curve Interactive Bible Study, Unit 3.
"Just as Jesus’ body is waiting on that cold slab, we have cold slab relationships in our lives. We can pray for these relationships and be filled with love. We’re not immobile, but we can’t make change happen in the other person. That can only be a gift from the Father. Knowing this frees you to relax in your deaths and not demand that a resurrection happen in your timing or way.”
"I have a very strong temptation to try to do resurrection in my own strength."
"I think of the dying and rising of Jesus and in our everyday lives like a bungee jump. There’s this huge drop, but as it goes down the kinetic energy is building and building. That’s kind of like what’s happening with the Father as he is watching his son’s obedience in love. So then, the resurrection is this incredible release of the Father’s energy and delight in his son."
We're in the midst of a series for Advent called J-CURVE: Descent of Love. Today we’re going to focus in on Paul’s emphasis on Jesus’s surrender of his rights, “he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.” Our material comes from the J-Curve book and new J-Curve Interactive Bible Study, Unit 3.
"I had to do something last weekend that I didn't want to do and I could just feel my spirit resisting. It was a job around the house that I dislike. I paused and I prayed and I “received” this job. It's a corny thing to say, but I did it by saying Jesus would you give me the grace to do this footwashing task. I think this is often a missing step of love. It is the decision to not grasp. For me, it was free time, or going on a bike ride, or watching some TV show—there was something I was grasping at. My will might be hidden from me, but it's not hidden from my wife. There's this low-level crankiness that comes out in a lot of subtle ways. But my surrender led to me actually doing a better job. Thinking of the footwashing analogy, receiving this from my Father made me more attentive to the feet and getting the dirt off..”
"In Philippians 2:6-11, Paul pulls back the curtains and gives us an x-ray of Christmas. It's the only place we hear the story from Jesus' perspective."
"The great moment in Jesus’ life is Gethsemane. What's happening at Gethsemane is that Jesus is not grasping at a pain-free life. He is not grasping at a different narrative. He's not grasping at a different job. He's surrendering his will while being fully alive to his desire. And that allows room for joy as you continue the work of love."
"The first two steps of Jesus’ descent in Philippians 2:1-8 match the first two steps of love in our lives. The incarnation is kind of like falling in love and dating and getting married and the honeymoon. That’s what we rightly associate with love -- we call it falling in love – but then after that comes the work of love. So first, there’s the commitment to love, and then the work of love."
"Christianity has lots of lists. They’re all through the Bible, and they aren’t bad! In fact, it’s really helpful to have a track to run on. But at the heart of our faith is a story."
"The story doesn't end in death. The father responds to the beauty of his son's love and raises him from the dead, first in his resurrection, and then in his enthronement. So it's not stoicism. The Christian life is not about hanging in there because it's good for you. We have a hope that is both a future hope of resurrection of our bodies and a restoring of all things. But even in this life now, we can look forward to ongoing many resurrections as we walk with Christ.”
We're starting a new series for Advent called J-CURVE: Descent of Love. In these conversations we'll look at how love draws Jesus "down" and "in," first in the incarnation and ultimately to the cross. Our material comes from theJ-Curve book and newJ-Curve Interactive Bible Study, Unit 3.
"Our natural human tendency is to seek out people that think like you. You can bond instantly with them. So how do you join pieces that are different, where we think differently and react differently? The Apostle Paul's answer is you need the mind of Christ. What's his mind? Love shaped by humility. You die to yourself, lose your narrative, leave your sense of who you are… "
"Everybody wants to be unified but the trick is how to get there."
"So what’s the mind that keeps up from having the mind of Christ? I would call it the modern therapeutic call to love. It goes something like this, ‘I know life has been hard and people have wounded you but god wants us to love one another love is putting the other person first like Jesus did of course that doesn't mean that you should endure in a difficult relationship god won't give you more than you can handle. One way to do that is to make sure that you have clear boundaries.’ Every single sentence is good in there, but somehow when you pull it all together, it just kills love.”
In this episode, Jon Hori talks with Paul Miller, Paul's son John Miller, and John's friend Tim Bogertman about how to pray through sexual temptation. "I approached my dad and about a problem that I couldn't let go off, specifically with looking at online pornography. Tim is my best friend and he’d confided in me back when we were in college, and I would go to him for help and he would go for to me for help… we invited dad into the conversation just to try to help us a little bit. That's when we really started to change and our eyes started opening up to the journey.”
"One of the main habits of grace is confession. Confession converts shame to guilt. You can't do anything with shame – it just makes you feel yucky. But confession would convert shame to guilt and guilt could be covered by the blood of Jesus."
"I knew I wanted them to pray because I wanted to create new habits of grace. I knew the power of shame, of wanting to hide. I actually said something like: Guys, I want you to prepare for five years of this. It’s like you’re two totally out of shape guys who’ve told me that you want to climb this little hill outside of Philly called Mount Pocono, which is kind of a bump compared to a real mountain, but what you really want to climb is Mount Everest...”
"The Sunday before Thanksgiving, I would love to see pastors have an awareness that probably about half the people in church are going into a situation with difficult relatives. They're going to be in situations where they're put down or marginalized or ignored. How do they get through that? They need to know the depth of God's love for them. You could almost say that Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3 is a Sunday before Thanksgiving dinner prayer. He's praying Jesus into them."
"Pauls' prayer at the end of Ephesians 3 is a prayer for capacity. He's praying that God will grow their capacity so they'll know the height and breadth and depth of God's love for them... that's our most basic need as saints, and that has to come from the Spirit."
"Your church is not running seven ministries — everybody, every saint within your congregation is on the front line and running five to twenty ministries, and Thanksgiving Dinner happens to be one of them.... The ministry of the church isn't just the formal things that happen in the building, it is all this love that spills out of this congregation into the people around them."
In this episode, Paul Miller, Jon Hori, Bob Allums and Liz Voboril continue theA Praying Church series with "Seeing the Saints."
"Historians call the 1500s the century of the Bible. And part of that love for scripture meant moving the sermon to the center of the worship service on Sunday morning and communion became quarterly. There were many good parts to that, but practically, someone had to give the sermon and that was the preacher. That created the problem that has bedeviled the protestant church for 500 years: the celebrity preacher."
"The Apostle Paul views the saints kind of like getting an old antique. You can see the beauty in it. It needs to be cleaned and polished, but you can see that glow there."
"This saints category is an incredibly encouraging way of looking at yourself and other people – it’s so freeing. I think what the gospel does for our heart, the saints category does for your ministry and your relationships. You can begin to see people through a resurrection lens because you are resurrected. You're on a hunt for resurrection in their hearts because you know that they have experienced that same thing. It transforms the whole way you look at the church, the way you look at the body of Christ, how you pray, when you pray. In some ways, it’s the final piece that brings a praying church together."
In this episode, Paul Miller, Jon Hori, Bob Allums and Liz Voboril continue the A Praying Church series, looking at the nature of the church and how the frontlines might not be where we think they are.
"It's easy to look out at the pews and see consumers. Why consumers? Because they're writing emails complaining about this and that. It's easy to be caught up in people's own narratives but that misses that Pauline lens of resurrection. These people have not only been made righteous in Christ but there's a real righteousness flowing out of them and that Jesus wants to come out of them. We have to shift from seeing them as consumers to seeing them as saints, and equipping them, telling them what they are, encouraging them, and having people share their frontline stories."
"Prayer is not a gift, anymore than breathing is a gift. You can live without your right hand, but you can't live without breathing. Prayer is fundamental to the life of the church."
"If you google 'armor of God Ephesians 6 image' you'll get a picture of a solitary soldier. But that's not what Paul is talking about. It's very clear the whole passage is plural -- all the plurals are hidden because we don't pick them up in English... We tend to see the armor of God almost through a pietistic lens where it's sort of the individual person trying to get through the day, but Paul has in mind the entire church working together in this battle against evil."
In this episode, Paul Miller, Jon Hori, Bob Allums and Liz Voboril talk about "How Not to Get Weird" with prayer.
"Jesus talks about the danger of weird praying in the Sermon on the Mount. He warns against going to a street corner and announcing your prayer. His antidote is 'go to your closet' -- and I do think your closet is a good check on your integrity. Private and public prayers should mirror one another. When you pray better in public than you do in private that opens the danger to your prayers becoming presentations."
"Good comedy functions prophetically, and there are so many Hollywood prayers that mock phony Christian syrupy dramatic prayers."
"Anytime there's a miss between the outer and the inner, Jesus calls that hypocrisy. Nothing upsets him more. If you're bad on the outside and bad on the inside, he's fine with that, he'll go have dinner with you. But when you're bad on the inside and trying to look good on the outside Jesus retches. Any time we add drama to prayer, or we over spiritualize prayer, or we don't have love with prayer, we send a double message that's disorienting to people and they should be disoriented because that's not the way life should be."
In this episode, we explore how one way of praying continually is to pray in all our "mini-communities." Paul is joined by Jon Hori, Bob Allums and Liz Voboril.
"I learned the secret to praying with praying with your spouse. It is to go 100% in their shoes, or as we say at seeJesus, to incarnate. If they want to lead the prayer time, let them lead the prayer time; if they want to pray at you, let them pray at you. You have to remove any possible prayer barriers."
"Jesus began with his disciples with just a 22 second prayer. That’s how long it takes to say the Lord's prayer."
"Guy culture can be macho and mocking. When there is a heavy diet of mocking, it is very hard to pray together in small communities. Guy cultures like this can do prayer meetings, but the mocking culture makes it harder to penetrate below that shallowness because you are afraid someone will mock you."
We resume ourA Praying Churchseries with the first of two episodes on "Pray Continually" with Paul Miller, Jon Hori, Bob Allums and Liz Voboril.
"Prayer and faith go hand-in-hand. Prayer is, in effect, a faith muscle. You don’t go to the gym and try to lift 200 lbs if you’ve never been there before. The muscle has to grow. It takes time. You start with your little garden and add more seeds to it."
"You have to begin seeing God doing things. As you see God answer your prayers, it builds your faith more. Our hearts are not naturally believing, and our world is filled with unbelief."
"Paul uses the phrase 'constant in prayer,' in other words 'you be constant in prayer.' With the lack of the plural 'you all' in English, it's easy to miss that he's saying 'Y'all be constant in prayer", or the Philly version, 'Yous guys be constant in prayer.' It is a call for the entire community to be constant in prayer."
To celebrate the release of the new Person of Jesus Study -- Student Edition, we invited asked John Miller, Paul's oldest son, to join us for a conversation about how the study got it's start when John was a senior in High School.
"I did this sabbatical on the person of Jesus where I just studied the gospels…and one of the things that struck me was how alive Jesus was when you actually paid attention to him as a person. I thought 'if our teenagers could get a hold of this, it would create a a reality in their minds that you couldn't take away.'"
"I wanted to imprint John with the person of Jesus."
"I didn't realize that over all these different weeks, I had gotten to know Jesus. Watching his death was really hard...[After that lesson], I had a week where my friend had died and it was weird just walking around. The only thing I could get myself to understand about what had happened was that Jesus, who was my Lord and savior, whom I'd already given my life to, had now become my friend, and my friend had died. I knew that Jesus was alive. I knew he conquered the grave, but in that moment for me, my friend was dead."
To celebrate the release of the revisedThe Person of Jesus, Unit 2: Honestystudy, we invited Timo Strawbridge, Director of Spiritual Life at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Lakeland, FL, to join Paul and Liz for a conversation on how Jesus' honesty helps us.
"One of the things that just shocked me about Jesus was his honesty. I was trying to read the gospels and say okay if this guy were at my house, what would I notice about him. He said things and talked like he didn't care what people thought about him!"
"The goal of Jesus’ honesty is not to make his life less painful because he has less weird or obnoxious people in it – his goal is to draw people into the life of his Father."
"You really need to combine compassion and honesty. In a difficult relationship, it's a compassionate act to invite honesty or to hold off on your honesty to let people speak into your life. Jesus constantly begins with understanding, so there's a kind of a general order there: begin with compassion and let that shape your honesty. Honesty's a little bit like pepper or hot salsa – a little goes a long way!"
We continue ourA Praying Churchseries with the 2nd part of our conversation on "Pray Big".
"My dad, Jack Miller, gave me one of the books that’s had a big influence on my prayer life. It was a book about the story of the life of James O. Fraser, a missionary to the Lisu people of China called Behind the Ranges."
"Don't mix up confidence with faith — that is deadly."
"You can't ‘overstretch’ faith. So, if you go too big then it's overstretched…it's not real. The other problem which I think is much more of a problem in American circles is to not exercise faith, to think that faith just drops on you…’"
Paul is back from a podcast break and we're resuming ourA Praying Churchseries with a two-part conversation on "Pray Big".
"The idea of praying big is that there's a tendency in prayer meetings or even in your own prayer life to focus on immediate needs, moving from Aunt Edna's hip to Uncle Ira's arthritis back again to cousin Eddie's whatever! I'm not belittling the importance of those prayers, but to pray only those would be like getting stuck in the weeds."
"Sometimes you need to look at the forest instead of one particular tree."
"The part of the Lord's prayer that fits this is the opening petition: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That prayer is mammoth! That is the Jesus version of ‘go big or go home.’"
In this episode, we share the 2nd half of a gem from the seeJesus archives -- it's a talk Paul Miller gave at the Bethlehem Pre-Conference in February 2020 introducing the J-Curve. The first half can be found one episode back.
"One of the beautiful things about looking at the J-Curve is that it stabilizes your emotions and it gives shape to them. It's one of the characters of the modern world that people embrace their emotions and go into free fall..."
"The cross is not a place for self-improvement—it’s a place for dying"
"We have this sort of epicurean software that we bring to the gospel. Dying and rising with Christ gives me a whole narrative that liberates my emotions but frees me from the tyranny of them at the same time, so I don't have to be caught— not only by the spirit of my age, but I don't have to be trapped by my own spirit. I can be real; I'm free to lament, and I'm free to sing in prison like Paul."
In this episode, we share a gem from the seeJesus archives -- it's a talk Paul Miller gave at the Bethlehem Pre-Conference in February 2020 introducing the J-Curve. We'll share the first part of the talk this week, and the conclusion in 2 weeks.
"Suffering disorients you. You think everything's gone wrong because even though no one told us we sort of instinctively feel that life should be free of suffering, and if we give up on that we might become a stoic and say well life is just like that. The J-Curve locates me so instead of being disoriented by suffering I know where I am…"
"The Spirit finds your weakness irresistible. It's where he does his best work!"
"The J-Curve is a flesh-killing machine…it's God's way of imprinting the beauty of Jesus on you. I think that's what God is doing with his entire church, he's weakening us so that we can taste Christ."
Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Liz Voboril for this interview with Lydia Leggett ad David Bostrom, two of seeJesus's A Praying Life Trainers.
"A prayer card is a non-complicated actual note card where you start writing down things that you're asking of the Lord so that you can remember. It's a tool that is helpful for keeping track of what you're asking the Lord to do."
"One of the real benefits of prayer cards is that they help you pay better attention to what God might be doing."
"I think of Colossians 4:2, ‘Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.’ Prayer cards help me be watchful because in our distracted world it’s hard to be watchful without a record of what you're asking the Lord to do. As you watch the story unfold you're able to be thank more thankful because you've got a record of what you've seen the Lord do, not necessarily answers to prayer that you just check off, but a story developing that feeds thanksgiving and faith in your own heart.”
Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Liz Voboril for this interview with Jon and Sonia Hori. Jon is seeJesus's West Coast and East Asia Director. He and his wife Sonia have four children (and two rambunctious dogs!).
"The kids would come to the table expectantly, especially my little one. He would grab the box and put on the table. He was just very eager, anticipating and wondering you know, how is the Lord going to answer our prayers today? He had already seen, in that short amount of time, how the Lord answered specific prayer requests. It was nice to see that childlike faith in him, and it was contagious..."
“It’s almost like the family prayer box becomes a mini theater—a window to watching God at work."
"The last thing we want is for people to think ‘Oh, they have this magnificent praying family!’ It’s full of flops... but one of the main things to remember is that the invitation from the Father is just to keep coming!"
This episode is part of a series titledA Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul and Liz Voboril for this series. Today they're joined by guest Maresa DePuy, Prayer and Women's Mentoring Director at Life Park Church near Charleston, SC.
"One woman named Mary started praying by herself behind the scenes, and I came in about a year later and joined her. We would pray Sunday mornings during services in the back of the church interceding for the prayer needs. One by one, God sent us other ‘Annas’ in the church and so we were a small cluster of praying women for a few years as the story began…"
“I do think it's a temptation that you can fall into as a prayer team leader to just kind of force prayer into the church. It's really got to be done by the Spirit..."
"The prayer meeting becomes an incubator or a greenhouse where all of this faith just begins to bloom. So you leave more confident, expecting that the work of God is going to go forth in some way and the exciting part is you don't know how. You come back to that next prayer meeting with a posture of celebration and thanksgiving. What we try to do in our in our staff meetings and our community prayer services is celebrate what we see God doing in response to our weak, broken, but Spirit-filled prayers."
This episode is part of a series titledA Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul and Liz Voboril for this series.
“The rising side is really what makes theJ-Curve the J-Curve. Because in Jesus' day and Paul's day, everybody knew about the dying side. I mean that's what paganism was. Paganism was a management system for dying reasonably well."
“There's a lot of wisdom in stoicism but no hope..."
"The upside of the J is answered prayer. It's God at work. It's God invading my world... so, Jesus dying on the cross, praying psalm 22 as he's dying... he's requesting resurrection when he says 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' He doesn't want to be forsaken. He's not just lamenting. He wants out. He wants to be saved from death. And the resurrection is the Father's response to Jesus. So now the entire Christian life now is a reenacting of that at much less intense level."
"This parable is trying to show is the current management model of the church which puts prayer in the periphery is simply crazy. Like you have an organization where you ignore your CEO. It’s just bad management and it comes under the guise of good management."
"How odd it is that the church worships Jesus spends little very little time waiting and talking to him."
"He's not just the savior of my heart—he saves my family today. His saving work is active and present. He is the CEO! I think Jesus, by his Spirit, permitted the pandemic to slow the church down. To get us to pay attention to janitors."
This episode is part of a series titled A Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul and Liz Voboril for this series.
"In leading prayer meetings, I don't want to overwhelm people. I don't want to make it a pietistic guilt trip. I don't want to go legalistic. I want the prayer meeting to function the same way discipling or mentoring works. I don't even want a prayer meeting to seem like an extraordinary meeting. Because super spiritual makes me nervous. It just sets you up for a fall, I think..”
"It's not like you're all individual people praying solitary prayers, taking turns. You're not in a lineup. You're praying together."
"Prayer isn't a time where you shut down desire. You awaken it. There's such fear of bad desire that we go stoic and shut down all desire. But prayer is a time where desire comes alive, and people can speak into that. I will speak into wrong desire that might emerge in a prayer time. I'll do that privately. But when desire come alive it's real, it's you praying, not some spiritual person that you're trying to create."
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| This is episode is part of a series titledA Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul and Liz Voboril for this series. "I remember when I was 17 sitting in the pews of this small 60-person church where dad was a part-time pastor. He was so excited about Jesus, and I knew enough to think that you can't be that excited about Jesus and God not do something. And He did!….”
"Prayer functions like fuel for the Spirit. It's a pattern see see all through Jesus' life, and it's the drivetrain of the church."
"Your church, your life, your body is dead like Jesus on the cross. And as you begin to pray, it's like Easter morning, you're waiting for Easter morning, you're waiting for God to break through..." |
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This is episode is part of a series titledA Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul and Liz Voboril for this series.
"Jesus focuses on teaching his disciples how to pray, and it begins with them requesting it. Jesus doesn't teach them until they're eager to learn. They've got to want to do it.”
"If you struggle to get prayer meetings going, take heart—Jesus' attempt to get a prayer meeting going failed too."
"Now when you turn the page, and you go from Luke to Acts, it is absolutely delightful because Acts like Luke opens with a prayer meeting, except it's a 10-day prayer meeting and they've really got it, because Jesus didn't tell them to pray, he's told them to wait, and they knew what they should do— they prayed."
This is episode is part of a series titledA Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul and Liz Voboril for this series.
"The first glimmer of the church is in Genesis 4:26. At the end of this chapter, in the midst of this sort of descent into evil, people begin to call upon the name of the Lord. What jumps out is that they're defined by prayer. That is what it is to be the called out people of God.”
"When Solomon dedicates the temple in 1 Kings, he doesn't preach he prays."
"For the Jewish people, the temple became known as a place of prayer. That that was their primary thought as to what you did in the temple—it just it permeates Jewish culture even outside of Christianity. Solomon imprinted the DNA of the temple as the place of prayer."
This is the first episode in a new series titledA Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul, Jon Hori and Liz Voboril for this series.
"In Luke you have the praying Jesus, and in Acts you have the praying church. But over the past 50 years, corporate prayer has been on very significant decline in the American church.”
"The reason why we pray together is because the beating heart of the church of Jesus Christ is the Spirit of Jesus."
"Advent is like the feel of the early stages of the work of the Spirit. It's just pure faith and waiting. You're not doing anything. There's this incredible American “allergy” to advent as a lifestyle. The cadence I’ve just described is almost unknown – no that would not be right to say - it is lost to the western church. It has been very known in the past, but it is now currently at a low ebb."
This is the fourth and final episode of our Advent series called, "Joy of Every Longing Heart." Liz Voboril and Jon Hori interview Ian Nagata, a missionary in Japan who serves both as an associate pastor and musician. You've heard Ian's music as it opens and closes each podcast episode!
"In The Pastor’s Kid, Barnabas Piper writes, 'I grew up knowing of Jesus as God and man. I knew all the stories of His life. But it wasn't until I began to understand the depth of Jesus’ humanity that I began to love Him truly.' And I think that captures how we know all these different Bible stories, but often have not really entered into the story with our imaginations. Not imagination like reading stuff into the story... but informed imagination, to really draw it out.”
"It wasn't just rediscovering the gospel again - it was rediscovering the heart of Jesus."
"There's a phrase in Japanese that we use here is called 'Kuuki wo yomu' which means 'to read the air' or “'to read the atmosphere.' It's an art form in itself, like when do you say something and when don't you say something? You're reading people's faces and it's like a slight twitch in their eyebrow - what might that mean? What are they trying to communicate? It's so subtle. It's not that Jesus can't read the air, it's just He chooses not to so many times -- that always kind of gets people excited I think."
This is the third episode of our Advent series called, "Joy of Every Longing Heart." Liz Voboril and Jon Hori interview Jill Miller and Felicia Grandinette about their experience with discipling people with special needs.
"One day Kim was very frustrated with work—she walks dogs, going from house to house with an aide. She came home fired up, lit up with anger. That morning I was at a Bible study. After Kim got her shoes off, I shared with her really briefly what I had learned that helped me with anger in that study. As soon as I talked to Kim I saw her anger deflate. I had just left my teaching job and I was struck how little people with disability are actually discipled and how they can learn…”
"We’ve limited the soul and the power of learning – the soul is not disabled!"
"If there's parents out there you know you're longing for this perfection. I remember I could hardly I could hardly like watch other children that were Kim's age it was just so painful. I like my heart was broken it was such a longing. Over the years – Kim's going to be 38 this month – I’ve seen that I’m the one that had a heart that needed adjusting. I've really seen how God has created Kim the same way as he's created me for particular purpose. That longing in me has really turned into thanksgiving."
This is the second episode of our Advent series called, "Joy of Every Longing Heart." Liz Voboril and Jon Hori interview Robert Row, seeJesus's Student Ministries Coordinator, and hear more of his story and his heart for junior and senior high school students.
"At some point as a church we're going have to look in the mirror and ask the question what have we missed, what in our training has led to what we're seeing [with youth leaving the church]. I'm deeply convicted that part of that is that we've given them lots of truth – which we all wholeheartedly agree with – but we've missed giving them a love to fall in love with: the Person of Truth."
"The study of the person of Jesus has just riveted and changed my life."
"I see [students] starting to contemplate who this person really is. Most of their church lives they've known the 72-hour Jesus -- his cross and resurrection -- but they haven't really known him as a person."
Today we begin a new series for advent, titled, "Joy of Every Longing Heart." In each episode, Liz Voboril and Jon Hori will interview a different staff member or trainer about how they've seen Jesus and see others seeing Jesus. We start with an interview with Laura McCaulley, seeJesus's Central Florida Trainer.
"I remember sitting on the back patio and thinking I was just showing up for a regular Bible study. I did not expect my curiosity would be engaged the way that it was. I remember the lesson asked 'Can you think of any non-spiritual reason that Jesus might have for wanting to give the disciples some fish?' I thought to myself, 'Do I have permission to think about Jesus in any non-spiritual category?'"
"The questions invited me to bring my imagination to a God that I thought I knew... but perhaps didn't know as well as I thought."
"I said, 'I am making Christmas happen here at this house. If I weren't doing all of these things we would not be having Christmas!' So, as you might imagine, while I sat in the worship service that night I had some major repentance... what happened to me on that Christmas Eve was recognizing how I had inflated my own importance and the importance of my efforts to bring about a perfect Christmas."
This episode is the fourth and final in our mini-series on Leadership.
"One of my primary tax tasks as a leader is to create foster and encourage a praying community and then my second task is to be a praying leader myself."
"The heart of it is not the discipline of praying but the awareness that the spirit of Jesus sits at the center of all Jesus' work."
"There’s a big difference between the idea of having a leader standing in the middle of a circle holding a big torch and everyone looking to that person for direction and the idea that we all gather around this big bonfire of the Spirit including the leader.... for everyone to look at the leader creates dependence. The leader is eventually going to die or retire. So to gather around this “campfire” of the Spirit creates enormous future confidence. As a leader, you're binding people to something that's so much better than you. I see myself then very self-consciously as the friend of the bridegroom."
This episode is the third in a mini-series on Leadership.
"I love the older term ‘missionary order’ because that it conveys a sense of calling and ordering. There's a long tradition going back to the earliest monasteries in the late Roman era of having an actual written document that defines what your community is like."
"Every community has weeds, and weeds are a problem, but often the bigger problem is how we handle those weeds."
"The New Testament says very little about leadership… it is much more concerned with the two basic thrusts which are faith and love—believing in Jesus and becoming like Jesus. If those are working in the community then the community will even begin to help or shape an immature leader and vice versa."
This episode is the second in a mini-series on Leadership.
"One of the proverbs that is just drilled in my heart is Proverbs 27:23, 'Give attention to your flock.' Solomon says pay attention your flock because riches do not last forever. Organizations of any size get complacent - they just do... It's easy to not take the time to tend your garden."
"The hardest garden to attend as a leader is guarding your own heart."
"A lot of my work is to watch people and I just hunt for where they thrive and try to get them where they're thriving. No no one is is good everywhere; where someone's thriving you just have less weeds."
This episode is the first in a mini-series on Leadership.
"To concentrate on where something's not working is a dying because no one likes to stare at failure. But I find that kind of dying produces the spirit's life."
"I remember being physically sick at the thought of disappearing but that's how the Kingdom works."
"It's the people working in IT, the hairstylists and moms who are friends with their neighbors—that's where the cutting edge of the church is. You disappear so that other people can come up. You can't equip the church if you are the center."
This episode is the seventh in a series called "Forming aJ-Curve Community," based on Part 5 of Paul's book,J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life.
"All of God’s principles aren’t enough—God needs to be at the center of his principles. What does that look like? That’s the Spirit."
"I’ve got this map, and I’ve got my goal on my journey, but I need the guide."
"I’m at the edge of the story. I’m self-consciously realizing that I’m not in charge of the story. It might look like it on paper, but I know in fact that I’m at the edge. It’s like I’m body-surfing and waiting I’m for a wave to catch. I know I can’t create the wave, and I need for a wave to come."
This episode is the sixth in a series called "Forming aJ-Curve Community," based on Part 5 of Paul's book,J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life.
"Some of the Corinthians called themselves the elite, the 'spiritual' ones. It sounds like it was an early version of Gnosticism. They considered themselves 'spiritual' and looked down on Christians that weren’t as wise as they were."
"The world has the right to demand that we look like Jesus."
"The Spirit appears to be, if there is such a thing, the gentlest of the Trinity. We’re warned against offending the Spirit. My pride offends the Spirit. My independence offends the Spirit. In that sense he is elusive."
This episode is the fifth in the "Forming aJ-Curve Community" series, based on Part 5 of Paul's book,J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life.
“The new way of getting power is the Spirit. The way Paul accesses that power is the same way Jesus did in his death and his resurrection – it was through dying. In effect, Paul is re-enacting the dying and rising of Jesus all the time."
"A ministry of prayer is the only ministry where you disappear. In every other ministry, someone notices you."
"The Spirit of Jesus needs to be at the center of a community in order to defeat the human community’s tendency to idolizing community and moving merely to safety. It is my primary task as a Christian leader to be a conduit for the Spirit’s power, and that happens through humility and weakness."
This episode is the fourth in a new series called "Forming aJ-Curve Community," based on Part 5 of Paul's book,J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life.
“The 'health and wealth' gospel has come out of an environment where we have taught justification without the J-Curve. The health and wealth gospel is basically that Jesus is for me, and that prayer is a way to power."
"If you teach grace without living a cruciform life of dying love then you are creating cheap grace. You cannot leave a vacuum."
"As I re-enact the gospel, that becomes the glue that brings incredibly different people together. If you begin to do the J-Curve, you undermine tribalism and eventually destroy it."
This episode is the second in a new series called "Forming aJ-Curve Community," based on Part 5 of Paul's book,J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life.
“Behind every faction, there’s some idol in the center. A tribe is always centered around something that it is worshipping."
"You don’t get at power by seeking it – you get at power by losing it, just like Jesus did."
"Paul is deliberately weakening himself. He’s leaving space for the spirit. When I lead with weakness then I’m a person of prayer because I don’t know what to do. This is Proverbs: the heart of wisdom is knowing you don’t have it."
This episode is the second in a new series called "Forming a J-Curve Community," based on Part 5 of Paul's book,J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life.
“What we’re going to look at is the very first problem Paul tackles in Corinthians 1, and it’s the problem of tribalism…. They’re starting denominations, but they’re about 1500 years too early!"
"Because my tribe is Jesus, I can enter every tribe. But I don't have to be captured by the tribal narrative they have."
"A tribe creates a virtual wall that reduces pain. So to go out of my little group and into your world, I'm drawing out potential humbling for me."
This episode begins a new series called "Forming a J-Curve Community," based in part on Part 5 of Paul's bookThe J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life.
“Babbius’ monument [in Corinth] is telling us a story, and the story, or narrative, is about what is important…. Being seen and honored and known is what life is about here. What Paul counters the Corinthians with is a different narrative.
"For the Apostle Paul the cross is not just our salvation, it is the narrative of our life."
"Opposing the Babbius narrative is the cross. They could not be more different. The cross is at the bottom of the Failure-Boasting slide. Babbius is going up. He’s made it in life and he’s announcing it. Paul is coming in and telling the story of a poor Jewish peasant who was rejected by his own people and crucified at the cross. But it is in that weakness that the power of God lies."
This is the fourth and final episode in a series calledHope and Direction in a Time of Crisis. These episodes have been excerpted from free webinars hosted by Paul Miller and conversation partners Jon Hori, Liz Voboril and Keith Grant.
“Generally speaking the emphasis within our therapeutic world is either improving the self with some kind of wisdom or improving the self’s environment. So we making 'good choices', staying away from draining people, do lots of self-care, etc. But at the very center of Christianity is Jesus. His journey leads to the cross.
"The cross is not a place for improving the self, it's a place for the death of self."
"I think it’s a right desire that we can't wait to get back to our pre-pandemic “normal,” but it can become almost an expectation that if we if we aren't in a normal situation then we can't be fully human. But, in fact, it's in the embodiment of our living in the particular place that God has put us right now where the beauty of Jesus begins to emerge."
This is the third episode in a series calledHope and Direction in a Time of Crisis. These episodes will be excerpted from free webinars hosted by Paul Miller and conversation partners Jon Hori, Liz Voboril and Keith Grant. To view upcoming webinars, visit seejesus.net/events.
“Sometimes it's hard for us to get into touch with what the Apostle Paul was like as a person because he's either so exalted that he's almost Jesus number 2, or he just kind of floats. I want to drill down a little bit in into this particular way that Paul has of looking at life."
"Paul is not an optimist, he's a realist."
"Paul sees life exactly as it is. When Paul was on that Damascus Road, he was stunned by the presence of the resurrected Jesus—the blazing light of the risen Savior—and that blazing light is still with him in his prison cell.
This is the second episode in a new series calledHope and Direction in a Time of Crisis. These episodes will be excerpted from free webinars hosted by Paul Miller and conversation partners Jon Hori and Liz Voboril. To view upcoming webinars, visit seejesus.net/events.
“One of the tendencies that we have as believers is to edit our prayers to get them all balanced and it can freeze people. There's a real beauty in beginning with what's on your heart. It doesn't mean that doesn't have to be reshaped and grown, but you've got begin with what's on your heart."
“The gospel gives us permission to be ourselves. That doesn't mean that ourselves don't need some work, we all know that, but it lets us sort of relax."
"I've likened this tendency to a kind of a perfectionism with prayer to creating an avatar. You create a spiritual being that you aren't and try to get that person to pray right. When you're no longer yourself, as messy as you may be, then you can't connect with God because it's not the real you connecting with the real God."
This is the first episode in a new series calledHope and Direction in a Time of Crisis. These episodes will be excerpted from free webinars hosted by Paul Miller and conversation partners Jon Hori and Liz Voboril. To view upcoming webinars, visit seejesus.net/events.
“We’re separated from this text by 2,000 years, but you can feel Paul’s emotions. They are vivid. Emotions are a function of what it is to be human. It’s kind of a human flourishing you’re looking at. Human flourishing is not escaping or being pulled somehow above the emotions of life. Paul is completely embedded in love in the hearts of the Thessalonians. They are on his heart, so therefore he feels anxiety. It normalizes good anxiety."
“Anxiety is like anger. It is potentially sinful. But it’s not inherently sinful. That’s the simplest way to say it."
"We tend to put anxiety and human flourishing in two different buckets, as if they are enemies of one another. What dying and rising with Jesus does it mixes the buckets. It puts them together. In fact, it’s anxiety, a life of stuff coming at you, that is the way you get to know Jesus. The things that are making me anxious are my door to knowing Jesus. And that’s true human flourishing: being in Jesus."
In this final episode in our Lenten series, we turn our attention to the resurrection.
“The way Jesus announces [his resurrection] is pure Jesus. We discover that Jesus has been just standing there quietly with Mary, saying nothing. I love that. It’s so like him to just be present with Mary. Generally speaking the more powerful our voice is, the more market share we have in a conversation, the more we use that. No one has more market share than Jesus. No one has more powerful voice, and yet he's the quietest person in the room."
“Jesus's sign is his spent-ness."
"Jesus's sign is his spent-ness. He loves to the very the end, the Telos. He's completely drained of everything at the end of his life. His scars, his wounds, reveal the completeness of his love. And for us, it's our scars that bind us to Christ and that reveal Christ in us to others. Christianity is not some sort of scar management or plastic surgery. That would be taking the American dream and draping it over true Christianity and missing the real thing."
Jesus doesn’t say he’s troubled in spirit. John, who is just to his right, picks it up. If you are aware of someone—you love them, or you are just an astute observer of people—you can tell when they are anxious. I think this is one of three references that John has to Jesus' anxiety. And they are all surrounding the passion. What I love about it is that it normalizes anxiety. So much of our modern world either tries to escape anxiety or feels guilty about it. But Jesus was anxious."
“If you are a lover of people, and I mean that in the broadest sense of the biblical love, it’s going to lead you into tension."
"What I love about this whole scene [when Judas and the Jewish leaders arrive at Gethsemane], is that when you put it all together, Jesus is like Bruce Lee or Jason Bourne. Everything’s a weapon. He’s rebuking, loving, protecting, challenging, healing, commanding. He is the prince of peace. So this person that we saw all agitated is in complete command of himself. Even now he’s probably feeling anxiety, but he’s not trapped by his emotions. He is a vibrant lover of the people around him. And that’s what makes the passion so beautiful. The camera has moved to slow motion on Jesus life we can see incident after incident where Jesus is loving, rebuking, caring, comforting, lamenting. He’s showing us what it is to be a person."
“God in his wisdom is kind of bringing a poverty on the entire world. It’s striking, especially in America. We have a Declaration of Independence so it’s written in to our seminal documents that we should not be constricted by anybody. And yet God is constricting us."
“I'm not saying the virus is a beautiful thing, but all suffering for those of us who are in Christ can be drawn up into the dying of Jesus."
"The only way he can make us weak is to overload all our well-oiled systems. And that’s what’s happening in all of our lives to different extents. And we are surrounded by people who are also overloaded. People are losing their work, coming under financial stress. So it’s not only something that teaches us to love, it opens up doors, opportunities to love."
In this episode, we look at how Jesus' sadness as he nears the cross is another window into his personhood.
“It really is true that Jesus is present. He's present with not only their rejection of him but with himself. He's comfortable being sad. And I don't think as Christians we're that comfortable or we hear much teaching on the negative emotions."
“It's just a remarkable window into Jesus heart that he's looking outside of himself at a time like this."
"One of the neat things about Jesus' sadness is that he doesn't get self-entangled. That is, if there's a problem in Christianity with stoicism, in the broader culture there's increasingly this problem of getting self-entangled in your grief. If emotions can be a bit suppressed within Christianity, within the broader culture they have almost become sacred."
This episode begins a new series on Jesus' Passion by looking at how the disciples want to go higher, but Jesus is focused on going lower.
“James and John get their mother to try to get them the number 1 and 2 places in the Kingdom. And the other disciples don’t say ‘You know I don’t think that is Jesus way.’ They are just mad that James and John beat them to it! They are all fighting for the top. But Jesus is remarkably gentle through the whole thing. The disciples are functionally Epicureans—hunting for the shortcut across the 'J' of the J-Curve. That’s our natural desire."
“The disciples want suffering-free glory and Jesus says it doesn’t exist."
"One of my favorite phrases from Jesus in Luke 15 is where Jesus says take the lower place. I just love that. There is an act of the will where you take the lower place. You are deciding that you are going to go lower. I just think the opportunities that we have to do that at the big and the small level are enormous. It’s as simple as a moment in conversation at the family table, letting someone else interrupt me so my idea takes the lower place..."
This episode wraps up our series onJ-Curve: Union with Christ by looking at how theJ-Curvehelps in a mini-crisis.
“The Apostle Paul introduces theJ-Curve as a kind of a master story 'let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus' (Philippians 2:5). And then he describes the downward journey of Jesus all the way to death on a cross."
“Every community has a narrative."
"TheJ-Curve normalizes the bumps. There’s a kind of perfectionism now in our culture that sort of demands that life should be bump free. Paul the Apostle is a perfectionist, but his perfectionism is in his ability to reenact the dying and rising of Christ. It's the perfection of love. It's the perfection of faith. And it's not in my situation. So it allows me to have this calm center in all kinds of circumstances."
This episode continues our series on theJ-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ."
“When we think of idolatry we think about how it affects our relationship vertically with God and that is obvious and good but we’re not necessarily attentive to how it affects the horizontal relationship with those around us."
“Ministry is particularly subtle idol because it’s got Jesus written all over it."
"Paul sits on the word 'know' in Philippians 3. Because in the J-Curve you get to know Jesus in ways you would never have known him through teaching or study. The good shepherd gets very close to you in the dying because it’s his story. It’s his spirit and his presence. So Jesus becomes your friend in the dying."
This episode continues our series on theJ-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ."
“You can see two different loves operating here. Field hockey is a lesser love, but it is still a valid love. It was taking more time and energy than my greater love for Emily to know Jesus. But nevertheless, that greater love was shaping how I responded to failures in the lesser love."
“There’s this whole world of lesser loves that are just delightful. Becoming like Jesus is not the dissolution of those lesser loves, but them rightly ordered."
"My imagination was captured by the idea that I wanted Emily to be in Jesus. I knew that the way to become in Jesus was to travel his journey and out of that would come resurrection. And it worked! It’s so powerful! It was an imaginative vision of the beauty of Jesus coming into my family that had been mastering me for some 20 years."
This episode continues our series on theJ-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ."
“My sister Rosanne got into Wellesley College and she came back on Thanksgiving vacation and said 'Paul, you could get into Harvard.' She didn't have to say that twice. I heard that once and I was planning my life..."
“We are all 'in' something. 'In Christ' is mystical, but it’s remarkably unmystical as well.
"If you teach justification by faith and the atonement separate from this really rich idea that that I am in Koinonia with Jesus then you answer the question at the beginning of Romans 6 badly. The answer in Romans 6 to the problem of selfishness and the Christian life is that our union with Christ is an embodiment in which we continually reenact His life of love, and that leads to suffering and a life of repentance."
This episode continues our series on theJ-Curve, looking closer at what we tend to do instead of theJ-Curve: marketing ourselves and trying to climb the failure-boasting chart.
“The word “boast” the way Paul uses it in Philippians 3 is bigger than our English word. It also includes glory and rejoicing. So, when your favorite sports team wins, you glory in that sports team. The concept gets right at the heart of how our flesh operates."
“When I was silent in that meeting, it put to death something evil in me – my boasting self. I felt the pain of that."
"A lot of people are quiet – they don’t boast – but Paul is not so much talking about what you say, but about the boasting self. If you are critical, that’s a form of boasting. You’re bringing someone down. Gossip is the boasting self. You’re sharing information about someone else that quietly lifts you up. So many of our sins rotate around this desire to move up the failure-boasting chart!"
This episode explores the idea that gift-giving is deep in the structure of the universe... reflecting the heart of our gift-giving God.
“You’re driving in heavy traffic, and someone coming from the opposite direction wants to make a left-hand turn in front of you. To let them do that might cost you missing a traffic light. You can see from their turn signal that they are requesting a gift. And, in most cases, what do you do? You give them a gift of time. They wave their acknowledgement and you nod in exchange. Though there’s no takeaway for either of us, we both walk away satisfied."
“It’s like you're touching the structure of the universe which is the mind of God: all of life is gift.."
"I don't know if I've ever heard anyone connect the structure of the universe with a left turn! But it’s kind of hopeful because if you see things in this way that it's not like you have to go and move across the world to engage in the deep structure of the universe. It's built into everyday life it if we see it and receive it as well as give it."
This episode continues our series on Paul's latest book, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life.
“As Americans we have a whole declaration of no limitations, but the very nature of love is to have your freedom constricted. What we’ll react to sometimes in a difficult relationship to the feel of the relationship—I have to be careful what I say around the person, it’s unfair, it’s unbalanced. Life shouldn’t feel this way. But that’s actually the feel of love, that narrowing, the constricting, the limiting.
“That’s the womb where resurrection takes place—it’s where you get to know Jesus."
"When people recoil from the narrowing of love it narrows their hearts. If you want to see someone who has a wide heart, they’ve experienced narrowing. It’s like the heat of that forms the human soul the way it should be.”
This episode begins a new series on Paul's latest book, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life.
“The American church is like me at the back of the plane, at many levels, thinking everything has gone wrong. And part of what has gone wrong is that we don’t really have any teaching on dying and rising with Jesus."
“We’re missing a significant piece of Christianity."
"One of the difficulties of suffering of any kind is that it is disorienting. You lose your way. It feels devoid of meaning. What the J-Curve does is bring hope to it, because dying is not the last word, and it gives you a toolkit of what to do when you find yourself in a patch of suffering.
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This episode wraps up our conversation about how Jesus became a missing person.
“Secular-liberalism itself is no longer aware of its Jesus roots. What it’s done now is still hold on to Jesus, but no longer as a person, just his attributes.”
“Political correctness is simply Jesus’ attributes, secularized."
“One of the big passions of my life is for the church, and for our youth in particular, to experience an embodied Jesus. When that happens, they are inoculated against the siren call of Secular-liberalism and they can out-compassion Secular-liberalism because Secular-liberalism does not have the spirit of Jesus. A virtual Jesus haunts our culture, but we have the real thing!"
This episode continues our conversation about how Jesus became a missing person.
“In classical Greek literature, people are defined by their central characteristic. Achilles in the Iliad is swift; he is swift Achilles. Everything he does is swift. Erich Auerbach compares that to Jacob. If you look at Jacob, in the first part of his life he’s just a scoundrel. He’s crafty. If he was in the Iliad, he would be crafty Jacob. But, as Robert Alter puts it, Jacob, like so many other Bible characters is a 'center of surprise.' Jacob actually changes.”
“Emotions made Stoics nervous. If you've been in an argument lately, you know why."
“The Jewish love of the physical meant that they could affirm Jesus’ humanity but not his divinity. The Greek mind was the inverse of this. Jesus’ divinity was easy for the Greeks to see; it was his humanity that they struggled with. In the fake gospel of Judas, Judas—because he loves Jesus—gives Jesus over to be crucified so Jesus can be rid of his body. That’s the Greek mind, it didn’t like the body.”
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See Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative.*
In this episode, we begin a conversation about why paying attention to how Jesus interacts as a person feels so strange and unfamiliar to many of us.
“When it comes to repentance and holiness, it’s almost like we’re good at the dying—at sin identification—but the resurrection, the beauty formation, is weak. If we don’t have a vision of the person of Jesus, then our beauty formation is without content. It just ends up being good or being nice.”
“Why is this glowing diamond sitting at the center of our faith, the person of Jesus, so hidden?"
“Repentance and faith are absolutely critical to the Christian life. But sometimes it can feel like an endless idol hunt, like if you’re really a devoted Christian, you’re always seeking deeper recesses of your heart. In some ways, that is true, but if that’s not balanced out by a positive vision of the image of Jesus being imprinted on me, then it actually is kind of depressing. As you become more like Christ, you’re constantly looking out, so you don’t get so self-entangled. At the heart of love is a self-forgetfulness.”
In this episode, we look at how Jesus greets Mary Magdalene in John 20.
“Jesus is the same person pre-resurrection and post-resurrection. I think I could pick him out at a party. I’d look around and hunt for the person who is being quietly attentive to someone who is unimportant. That would be Jesus!”
“'Mary!'” It’s so Jesus to say that. It’s pure poetry! It’s so short, but yet filled with so much.”
“These two snippets about Mary tell us a lot about her. What immediately comes to mind for me is this long history of strong Hebrew women – there is no one like these women in ancient literature: Sarah, Rebecca, Abigail, Ruth, Jael, Deborah....”
In this episode, we interview Tyler Johnson, Lead Pastor of Redemption Church in Arizona, about how seeing Jesus has made a difference in his life.
“The biggest thing that pressing into Jesus has cultivated in me is the need to depend more on the Father through prayer…”
“Jesus was the most dependent human being who ever lived."
“If we saw a middle-aged man in Starbucks talking to his father, and saying what Jesus said in John 5:19, 'Dad, I don’t do anything unless I see you do it. If you don’t do it, I don’t do it,' we would think this guy needs to grow up… he’s got daddy issues, whatever. But that is how Jesus lived, and that’s how Jesus loved.”
Available wherever you listen:
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In this episode, we reflect on the two scenes studied thus far and begin to see some of the elements of Jesus' beauty that captivate us.
“Jonathan Edwards said Jesus combines 'divine excellencies as otherwise would have seemed to us utterly incompatible in the same subject.' When you see opposites like compassion and honesty come together in a person, it’s just striking and you’re drawn to that. It touches your soul."
“When you watch Jesus, you begin to sense that he has a center outside of himself. It’s like a gyroscope – an internal stabilizing device. What you’re looking at when you see this in Jesus is his prayer life with his Father..."
““For us, I think this is where the gift of the Holy Spirit comes in. You can study Jesus until you are blue in the face, but you’re always left with, 'Lord, I don’t know how to do this.' And so we pray to the Father for the Spirit, who brings Christ to us."
In this episode, we continue our study of Jesus' conversation with Pilate in John 18.
“Jesus enters Pilate’s world. It’s not like Jesus is just witnessing to Pilate. He is doing that, but it is inseparable from incarnating, entering his world."
“Love moves toward people."
“Jesus forbears. It’s one of the fruits of the spirit, usually translated as patience, but a better translation would be forbearance. It’s the activity of absorbing someone’s evil. If forgiveness erases the guilt, forbearance absorbs the pain of the sin… What forgiveness and forbearance do is they clear the playing field for love."
In this episode, we shift our focus to Jesus' conversation with Pilate in John 18.
“Pilate asks Jesus, 'Are you the King of the Jews?' Almost everybody takes that at face value, but it is almost certainly a mock. Let’s think about it. Everyone in this situation knows Jesus is not the King of the Jews ... Pilate is mocking Jesus. After this scene, the joke, 'Is Jesus King of the Jews?' goes all through the narrative."
“For guys in particular, the faux intimacy of mocking can give the illusion that we’re close when we aren’t and keep us from developing genuine intimacy; it can even begin to redefine intimacy as mocking."
In this episode, we conclude our study of John 13 by looking at the theme of perfection.
In this episode, we return to our study of the foot-washing in John 13, focusing on Peter's response.
In this episode, Paul shares some reflections on friendship, on occasion of the death of his good friend David Powlison on June 7, 2019.
In this episode, we look at the footwashing in John 13. Paul draws our attention to a number of details in story, including Jesus’ silence, the vivid details, and the effect of Jesus's beauty and humility on John even 50 years after the event. We then consider the ancient triad of goodness, truth and beauty, and how a deeper discovery of Jesus as a person might strengthen the church's witness in goodness and beauty.
In this episode, Paul Miller shares how a question from his wife, "Do you love me?" launched him into a study of the person of Jesus... and how what he saw changed him.