Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

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. Yo...

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus' 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 discip...

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 w...

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 Lu...

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...

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 ye...

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 y...

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 got...

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,...

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...

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." "To...

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. "...

Oops! We released Part 2 of our Zacchaeus podcast before we released Part 1. Part 1 will be released on August 2. Our apologies! Jon, Robert, Paul and Liz continue their conversation about how Jesus intrudes into Zacchaeus's life. "The second half of the Zacchaeus story is just delightful, but it's easy to miss. I find most Christians are unaware of exactly what happens in this second part. Jesus...

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 yo...

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....

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 t...

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...

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...

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...

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-spiri...

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 J...

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 commer...

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,...

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 pe...

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 whe...