Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

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."

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 invites himself over to Zacchaeus's house and all the people begin to mutter…" "All acts of love involve a kind of atonement; there's an exchange involved." "Zacchaeus immediately sees what the problem is: he has shamed Jesus by associating with him and the only way he can increase Jesus' reputation is by changing his own reputation. He's one of the few people in the gospels who gives Jesus a gift…"

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."

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."

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."

Paul, Jon and Liz continue their discussion of Jesus' 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 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 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' 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 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. 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."