Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

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, 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 the 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.