Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

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 brokenn...

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 li...

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...

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...

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...

We wrap up the  J-CURVE: Descent of Love  series by looking at the Father's response to Jesus' descent . Our material comes from the  J-Curve   book and new  J-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 chan...

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' 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 m...

"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." "Chri...

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 the  J-Curve  book and new  J-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....

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...

"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...

In this episode, Paul Miller, Jon Hori, Bob Allums and Liz Voboril continue the  A 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...

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...

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...

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...

We resume our  A Praying Chur c h  series 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 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 att...

To celebrate the release of the revised  The Person of Jesus, Unit 2: Honesty  study, 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...

We continue our  A Praying Church  series 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'...

Paul is back from a podcast break and we're resuming our  A Praying Church  series 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 praye...

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...

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...

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...

Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Liz Voboril for this interview with Jon and Sonia H. 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 an...

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. 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...