Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

In this episode, Jon Hori talks with Paul Miller, Paul's son John Miller, and John's friend Tim Bogertman about how to pray through sexual temptation. "I approached my dad and about a problem that I couldn't let go off, specifically with looking at online pornography. Tim is my best friend and he'd confided in me back when we were in college, and I would go to him for help and he would go for to me for help… we invited dad into the conversation just to try to help us a little bit. That's when we really started to change and our eyes started opening up to the journey." "One of the main habits of grace is confession. Confession converts shame to guilt. You can't do anything with shame – it just makes you feel yucky. But confession would convert shame to guilt and guilt could be covered by the blood of Jesus." "I knew I wanted them to pray because I wanted to create new habits of grace. I knew the power of shame, of wanting to hide. I actually said something like: Guys, I want you to prepare for five years of this. It's like you're two totally out of shape guys who've told me that you want to climb this little hill outside of Philly called Mount Pocono, which is kind of a bump compared to a real mountain, but what you really want to climb is Mount Everest..."

"The Sunday before Thanksgiving, I would love to see pastors have an awareness that probably about half the people in church are going into a situation with difficult relatives. They're going to be in situations where they're put down or marginalized or ignored. How do they get through that? They need to know the depth of God's love for them. You could almost say that Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3 is a Sunday before Thanksgiving dinner prayer. He's praying Jesus into them." "Pauls' prayer at the end of Ephesians 3 is a prayer for capacity. He's praying that God will grow their capacity so they'll know the height and breadth and depth of God's love for them... that's our most basic need as saints, and that has to come from the Spirit." "Your church is not running seven ministries — everybody, every saint within your congregation is on the front line and running five to twenty ministries, and Thanksgiving Dinner happens to be one of them.... The ministry of the church isn't just the formal things that happen in the building, it is all this love that spills out of this congregation into the people around them."

In this episode, Paul Miller, Jon Hori, Bob Allums and Liz Voboril continue 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 give the sermon and that was the preacher. That created the problem that has bedeviled the protestant church for 500 years: the celebrity preacher." "The Apostle Paul views the saints kind of like getting an old antique. You can see the beauty in it. It needs to be cleaned and polished, but you can see that glow there." "This saints category is an incredibly encouraging way of looking at yourself and other people – it's so freeing. I think what the gospel does for our heart, the saints category does for your ministry and your relationships. You can begin to see people through a resurrection lens because you are resurrected. You're on a hunt for resurrection in their hearts because you know that they have experienced that same thing. It transforms the whole way you look at the church, the way you look at the body of Christ, how you pray, when you pray. In some ways, it's the final piece that brings a praying church together."

In this episode, Paul Miller, Jon Hori, Bob Allums and Liz Voboril continue the A Praying Church series, looking at the nature of the church and how the frontlines might not be where we think they are. "It's easy to look out at the pews and see consumers. Why consumers? Because they're writing emails complaining about this and that. It's easy to be caught up in people's own narratives but that misses that Pauline lens of resurrection. These people have not only been made righteous in Christ but there's a real righteousness flowing out of them and that Jesus wants to come out of them. We have to shift from seeing them as consumers to seeing them as saints, and equipping them, telling them what they are, encouraging them, and having people share their frontline stories." "Prayer is not a gift, anymore than breathing is a gift. You can live without your right hand, but you can't live without breathing. Prayer is fundamental to the life of the church." "If you google 'armor of God Ephesians 6 image' you'll get a picture of a solitary soldier. But that's not what Paul is talking about. It's very clear the whole passage is plural -- all the plurals are hidden because we don't pick them up in English... We tend to see the armor of God almost through a pietistic lens where it's sort of the individual person trying to get through the day, but Paul has in mind the entire church working together in this battle against evil."

In this episode, Paul Miller, Jon Hori, Bob Allums and Liz Voboril talk about "How Not to Get Weird" with prayer. "Jesus talks about the danger of weird praying in the Sermon on the Mount. He warns against going to a street corner and announcing your prayer. His antidote is 'go to your closet' -- and I do think your closet is a good check on your integrity. Private and public prayers should mirror one another. When you pray better in public than you do in private that opens the danger to your prayers becoming presentations." "Good comedy functions prophetically, and there are so many Hollywood prayers that mock phony Christian syrupy dramatic prayers." "Anytime there's a miss between the outer and the inner, Jesus calls that hypocrisy. Nothing upsets him more. If you're bad on the outside and bad on the inside, he's fine with that, he'll go have dinner with you. But when you're bad on the inside and trying to look good on the outside Jesus retches. Any time we add drama to prayer, or we over spiritualize prayer, or we don't have love with prayer, we send a double message that's disorienting to people and they should be disoriented because that's not the way life should be."

In this episode, we explore how one way of praying continually is to pray in all our "mini-communities." Paul is joined by Jon Hori, Bob Allums and Liz Voboril. "I learned the secret to praying with praying with your spouse. It is to go 100% in their shoes, or as we say at seeJesus, to incarnate. If they want to lead the prayer time, let them lead the prayer time; if they want to pray at you, let them pray at you. You have to remove any possible prayer barriers." "Jesus began with his disciples with just a 22 second prayer. That's how long it takes to say the Lord's prayer." "Guy culture can be macho and mocking. When there is a heavy diet of mocking, it is very hard to pray together in small communities. Guy cultures like this can do prayer meetings, but the mocking culture makes it harder to penetrate below that shallowness because you are afraid someone will mock you."

We resume our A Praying Church 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 it." "You have to begin seeing God doing things. As you see God answer your prayers, it builds your faith more. Our hearts are not naturally believing, and our world is filled with unbelief." "Paul uses the phrase 'constant in prayer,' in other words 'you be constant in prayer.' With the lack of the plural 'you all' in English, it's easy to miss that he's saying 'Y'all be constant in prayer", or the Philly version, 'Yous guys be constant in prayer.' It is a call for the entire community to be constant in prayer."

To celebrate the release of the new Person of Jesus Study -- Student Edition, we invited asked John Miller, Paul's oldest son, to join us for a conversation about how the study got it's start when John was a senior in High School. "I did this sabbatical on the person of Jesus where I just studied the gospels…and one of the things that struck me was how alive Jesus was when you actually paid attention to him as a person. I thought 'if our teenagers could get a hold of this, it would create a a reality in their minds that you couldn't take away.'" "I wanted to imprint John with the person of Jesus." "I didn't realize that over all these different weeks, I had gotten to know Jesus. Watching his death was really hard...[After that lesson], I had a week where my friend had died and it was weird just walking around. The only thing I could get myself to understand about what had happened was that Jesus, who was my Lord and savior, whom I'd already given my life to, had now become my friend, and my friend had died. I knew that Jesus was alive. I knew he conquered the grave, but in that moment for me, my friend was dead."

To celebrate the release of the 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 house, what would I notice about him. He said things and talked like he didn't care what people thought about him!" "The goal of Jesus' honesty is not to make his life less painful because he has less weird or obnoxious people in it – his goal is to draw people into the life of his Father." "You really need to combine compassion and honesty. In a difficult relationship, it's a compassionate act to invite honesty or to hold off on your honesty to let people speak into your life. Jesus constantly begins with understanding, so there's a kind of a general order there: begin with compassion and let that shape your honesty. Honesty's a little bit like pepper or hot salsa – a little goes a long way!"

We continue 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' faith. So, if you go too big then it's overstretched…it's not real. The other problem which I think is much more of a problem in American circles is to not exercise faith, to think that faith just drops on you…'"

Paul is back from a podcast break and we're resuming 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 prayers, but to pray only those would be like getting stuck in the weeds." "Sometimes you need to look at the forest instead of one particular tree." "The part of the Lord's prayer that fits this is the opening petition: "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." That prayer is mammoth! That is the Jesus version of 'go big or go home.'"

In this episode, we share the 2nd half of a gem from the seeJesus archives -- it's a talk Paul Miller gave at the Bethlehem Pre-Conference in February 2020 introducing the J-Curve. The first half can be found one episode back. "One of the beautiful things about looking at the J-Curve is that it stabilizes your emotions and it gives shape to them. It's one of the characters of the modern world that people embrace their emotions and go into free fall..." "The cross is not a place for self-improvement—it's a place for dying" "We have this sort of epicurean software that we bring to the gospel. Dying and rising with Christ gives me a whole narrative that liberates my emotions but frees me from the tyranny of them at the same time, so I don't have to be caught— not only by the spirit of my age, but I don't have to be trapped by my own spirit. I can be real; I'm free to lament, and I'm free to sing in prison like Paul."

In this episode, we share a gem from the seeJesus archives -- it's a talk Paul Miller gave at the Bethlehem Pre-Conference in February 2020 introducing the J-Curve. We'll share the first part of the talk this week, and the conclusion in 2 weeks. "Suffering disorients you. You think everything's gone wrong because even though no one told us we sort of instinctively feel that life should be free of suffering, and if we give up on that we might become a stoic and say well life is just like that. The J-Curve locates me so instead of being disoriented by suffering I know where I am…" "The Spirit finds your weakness irresistible. It's where he does his best work!" "The J-Curve is a flesh-killing machine…it's God's way of imprinting the beauty of Jesus on you. I think that's what God is doing with his entire church, he's weakening us so that we can taste Christ."

Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Liz Voboril for this interview with Lydia Leggett ad David Bostrom, two of seeJesus's A Praying Life Trainers. "A prayer card is a non-complicated actual note card where you start writing down things that you're asking of the Lord so that you can remember. It's a tool that is helpful for keeping track of what you're asking the Lord to do." "One of the real benefits of prayer cards is that they help you pay better attention to what God might be doing." "I think of Colossians 4:2, 'Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.' Prayer cards help me be watchful because in our distracted world it's hard to be watchful without a record of what you're asking the Lord to do. As you watch the story unfold you're able to be thank more thankful because you've got a record of what you've seen the Lord do, not necessarily answers to prayer that you just check off, but a story developing that feeds thanksgiving and faith in your own heart."

Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Liz Voboril for this interview with Jon and Sonia 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 and wondering you know, how is the Lord going to answer our prayers today? He had already seen, in that short amount of time, how the Lord answered specific prayer requests. It was nice to see that childlike faith in him, and it was contagious..." "It's almost like the family prayer box becomes a mini theater—a window to watching God at work." "The last thing we want is for people to think 'Oh, they have this magnificent praying family!' It's full of flops... but one of the main things to remember is that the invitation from the Father is just to keep coming!"

This episode is part of a series 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 her. We would pray Sunday mornings during services in the back of the church interceding for the prayer needs. One by one, God sent us other 'Annas' in the church and so we were a small cluster of praying women for a few years as the story began…" "I do think it's a temptation that you can fall into as a prayer team leader to just kind of force prayer into the church. It's really got to be done by the Spirit..." "The prayer meeting becomes an incubator or a greenhouse where all of this faith just begins to bloom. So you leave more confident, expecting that the work of God is going to go forth in some way and the exciting part is you don't know how. You come back to that next prayer meeting with a posture of celebration and thanksgiving. What we try to do in our in our staff meetings and our community prayer services is celebrate what we see God doing in response to our weak, broken, but Spirit-filled prayers."

This episode is part of a series titled A Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul and Liz Voboril for this series. "The rising side is really what makes the J-Curve the J-Curve. Because in Jesus' day and Paul's day, everybody knew about the dying side. I mean that's what paganism was. Paganism was a management system for dying reasonably well." "There's a lot of wisdom in stoicism but no hope..." "The upside of the J is answered prayer. It's God at work. It's God invading my world... so, Jesus dying on the cross, praying psalm 22 as he's dying... he's requesting resurrection when he says 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' He doesn't want to be forsaken. He's not just lamenting. He wants out. He wants to be saved from death. And the resurrection is the Father's response to Jesus. So now the entire Christian life now is a reenacting of that at much less intense level."

"This parable is trying to show is the current management model of the church which puts prayer in the periphery is simply crazy. Like you have an organization where you ignore your CEO. It's just bad management and it comes under the guise of good management." "How odd it is that the church worships Jesus spends little very little time waiting and talking to him." "He's not just the savior of my heart—he saves my family today. His saving work is active and present. He is the CEO! I think Jesus, by his Spirit, permitted the pandemic to slow the church down. To get us to pay attention to janitors."

This episode is part of a series titled A Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul and Liz Voboril for this series. "In leading prayer meetings, I don't want to overwhelm people. I don't want to make it a pietistic guilt trip. I don't want to go legalistic. I want the prayer meeting to function the same way discipling or mentoring works. I don't even want a prayer meeting to seem like an extraordinary meeting. Because super spiritual makes me nervous. It just sets you up for a fall, I think.." "It's not like you're all individual people praying solitary prayers, taking turns. You're not in a lineup. You're praying together." "Prayer isn't a time where you shut down desire. You awaken it. There's such fear of bad desire that we go stoic and shut down all desire. But prayer is a time where desire comes alive, and people can speak into that. I will speak into wrong desire that might emerge in a prayer time. I'll do that privately. But when desire come alive it's real, it's you praying, not some spiritual person that you're trying to create."

This is 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. "I remember when I was 17 sitting in the pews of this small 60-person church where dad was a part-time pastor. He was so excited about Jesus, and I knew enough to think that you can't be that excited about Jesus and God not do something. And He did!…." "Prayer functions like fuel for the Spirit. It's a pattern see see all through Jesus' life, and it's the drivetrain of the church." "Your church, your life, your body is dead like Jesus on the cross. And as you begin to pray, it's like Easter morning, you're waiting for Easter morning, you're waiting for God to break through..."

This is 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. "Jesus focuses on teaching his disciples how to pray, and it begins with them requesting it. Jesus doesn't teach them until they're eager to learn. They've got to want to do it." "If you struggle to get prayer meetings going, take heart—Jesus' attempt to get a prayer meeting going failed too." "Now when you turn the page, and you go from Luke to Acts, it is absolutely delightful because Acts like Luke opens with a prayer meeting, except it's a 10-day prayer meeting and they've really got it, because Jesus didn't tell them to pray, he's told them to wait, and they knew what they should do— they prayed."

This is episode is part of a series titled A Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul and Liz Voboril for this series. "The first glimmer of the church is in Genesis 4:26. At the end of this chapter, in the midst of this sort of descent into evil, people begin to call upon the name of the Lord. What jumps out is that they're defined by prayer. That is what it is to be the called out people of God." "When Solomon dedicates the temple in 1 Kings, he doesn't preach he prays." "For the Jewish people, the temple became known as a place of prayer. That that was their primary thought as to what you did in the temple—it just it permeates Jewish culture even outside of Christianity. Solomon imprinted the DNA of the temple as the place of prayer."

This is the first episode in a new series titled A Praying Church. Bob Allums, Director of seeJesus's A Praying Life Ministry, joins Paul, Jon Hori and Liz Voboril for this series. "In Luke you have the praying Jesus, and in Acts you have the praying church. But over the past 50 years, corporate prayer has been on very significant decline in the American church." "The reason why we pray together is because the beating heart of the church of Jesus Christ is the Spirit of Jesus." "Advent is like the feel of the early stages of the work of the Spirit. It's just pure faith and waiting. You're not doing anything. There's this incredible American "allergy" to advent as a lifestyle. The cadence I've just described is almost unknown – no that would not be right to say - it is lost to the western church. It has been very known in the past, but it is now currently at a low ebb."

This is the fourth and final episode of our Advent series called, "Joy of Every Longing Heart." Liz Voboril and Jon Hori interview Ian Nagata, a missionary in Japan who serves both as an associate pastor and musician. You've heard Ian's music as it opens and closes each podcast episode! "In The Pastor's Kid, Barnabas Piper writes, 'I grew up knowing of Jesus as God and man. I knew all the stories of His life. But it wasn't until I began to understand the depth of Jesus' humanity that I began to love Him truly.' And I think that captures how we know all these different Bible stories, but often have not really entered into the story with our imaginations. Not imagination like reading stuff into the story... but informed imagination, to really draw it out." "It wasn't just rediscovering the gospel again - it was rediscovering the heart of Jesus." "There's a phrase in Japanese that we use here is called 'Kuuki wo yomu' which means 'to read the air' or "'to read the atmosphere.' It's an art form in itself, like when do you say something and when don't you say something? You're reading people's faces and it's like a slight twitch in their eyebrow - what might that mean? What are they trying to communicate? It's so subtle. It's not that Jesus can't read the air, it's just He chooses not to so many times -- that always kind of gets people excited I think."

This is the third episode of our Advent series called, "Joy of Every Longing Heart." Liz Voboril and Jon Hori interview Jill Miller and Felicia Grandinette about their experience with discipling people with special needs. "One day Kim was very frustrated with work—she walks dogs, going from house to house with an aide. She came home fired up, lit up with anger. That morning I was at a Bible study. After Kim got her shoes off, I shared with her really briefly what I had learned that helped me with anger in that study. As soon as I talked to Kim I saw her anger deflate. I had just left my teaching job and I was struck how little people with disability are actually discipled and how they can learn…" "We've limited the soul and the power of learning – the soul is not disabled!" "If there's parents out there you know you're longing for this perfection. I remember I could hardly I could hardly like watch other children that were Kim's age it was just so painful. I like my heart was broken it was such a longing. Over the years – Kim's going to be 38 this month – I've seen that I'm the one that had a heart that needed adjusting. I've really seen how God has created Kim the same way as he's created me for particular purpose. That longing in me has really turned into thanksgiving."

This is the second episode of our Advent series called, "Joy of Every Longing Heart." Liz Voboril and Jon Hori interview Robert Row, seeJesus's Student Ministries Coordinator, and hear more of his story and his heart for junior and senior high school students. "At some point as a church we're going have to look in the mirror and ask the question what have we missed, what in our training has led to what we're seeing [with youth leaving the church]. I'm deeply convicted that part of that is that we've given them lots of truth – which we all wholeheartedly agree with – but we've missed giving them a love to fall in love with: the Person of Truth." "The study of the person of Jesus has just riveted and changed my life." "I see [students] starting to contemplate who this person really is. Most of their church lives they've known the 72-hour Jesus -- his cross and resurrection -- but they haven't really known him as a person."

Today we begin a new series for advent, titled, "Joy of Every Longing Heart." In each episode, Liz Voboril and Jon Hori will interview a different staff member or trainer about how they've seen Jesus and see others seeing Jesus. We start with an interview with Laura McCaulley, seeJesus's Central Florida Trainer. "I remember sitting on the back patio and thinking I was just showing up for a regular Bible study. I did not expect my curiosity would be engaged the way that it was. I remember the lesson asked 'Can you think of any non-spiritual reason that Jesus might have for wanting to give the disciples some fish?' I thought to myself, 'Do I have permission to think about Jesus in any non-spiritual category?'" "The questions invited me to bring my imagination to a God that I thought I knew... but perhaps didn't know as well as I thought." "I said, 'I am making Christmas happen here at this house. If I weren't doing all of these things we would not be having Christmas!' So, as you might imagine, while I sat in the worship service that night I had some major repentance... what happened to me on that Christmas Eve was recognizing how I had inflated my own importance and the importance of my efforts to bring about a perfect Christmas."

This episode is the fourth and final in our mini-series on Leadership. "One of my primary tax tasks as a leader is to create foster and encourage a praying community and then my second task is to be a praying leader myself." "The heart of it is not the discipline of praying but the awareness that the spirit of Jesus sits at the center of all Jesus' work." "There's a big difference between the idea of having a leader standing in the middle of a circle holding a big torch and everyone looking to that person for direction and the idea that we all gather around this big bonfire of the Spirit including the leader.... for everyone to look at the leader creates dependence. The leader is eventually going to die or retire. So to gather around this "campfire" of the Spirit creates enormous future confidence. As a leader, you're binding people to something that's so much better than you. I see myself then very self-consciously as the friend of the bridegroom."

This episode is the third in a mini-series on Leadership. "I love the older term 'missionary order' because that it conveys a sense of calling and ordering. There's a long tradition going back to the earliest monasteries in the late Roman era of having an actual written document that defines what your community is like." "Every community has weeds, and weeds are a problem, but often the bigger problem is how we handle those weeds." "The New Testament says very little about leadership… it is much more concerned with the two basic thrusts which are faith and love—believing in Jesus and becoming like Jesus. If those are working in the community then the community will even begin to help or shape an immature leader and vice versa."

This episode is the second in a mini-series on Leadership. "One of the proverbs that is just drilled in my heart is Proverbs 27:23, 'Give attention to your flock.' Solomon says pay attention your flock because riches do not last forever. Organizations of any size get complacent - they just do... It's easy to not take the time to tend your garden." "The hardest garden to attend as a leader is guarding your own heart." "A lot of my work is to watch people and I just hunt for where they thrive and try to get them where they're thriving. No no one is is good everywhere; where someone's thriving you just have less weeds."

This episode is the first in a mini-series on Leadership. "To concentrate on where something's not working is a dying because no one likes to stare at failure. But I find that kind of dying produces the spirit's life." "I remember being physically sick at the thought of disappearing but that's how the Kingdom works." "It's the people working in IT, the hairstylists and moms who are friends with their neighbors—that's where the cutting edge of the church is. You disappear so that other people can come up. You can't equip the church if you are the center."

This episode is the seventh in a series called "Forming a J-Curve Community," based on Part 5 of Paul's book, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life. "All of God's principles aren't enough—God needs to be at the center of his principles. What does that look like? That's the Spirit." "I've got this map, and I've got my goal on my journey, but I need the guide." "I'm at the edge of the story. I'm self-consciously realizing that I'm not in charge of the story. It might look like it on paper, but I know in fact that I'm at the edge. It's like I'm body-surfing and waiting I'm for a wave to catch. I know I can't create the wave, and I need for a wave to come."

This episode is the sixth in a series called "Forming a J-Curve Community," based on Part 5 of Paul's book, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life. "Some of the Corinthians called themselves the elite, the 'spiritual' ones. It sounds like it was an early version of Gnosticism. They considered themselves 'spiritual' and looked down on Christians that weren't as wise as they were." "The world has the right to demand that we look like Jesus." "The Spirit appears to be, if there is such a thing, the gentlest of the Trinity. We're warned against offending the Spirit. My pride offends the Spirit. My independence offends the Spirit. In that sense he is elusive."

This episode is the fifth in the "Forming a J-Curve Community" series, based on Part 5 of Paul's book, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life. "The new way of getting power is the Spirit. The way Paul accesses that power is the same way Jesus did in his death and his resurrection – it was through dying. In effect, Paul is re-enacting the dying and rising of Jesus all the time." "A ministry of prayer is the only ministry where you disappear. In every other ministry, someone notices you." "The Spirit of Jesus needs to be at the center of a community in order to defeat the human community's tendency to idolizing community and moving merely to safety. It is my primary task as a Christian leader to be a conduit for the Spirit's power, and that happens through humility and weakness."

This episode is the fourth in a new series called "Forming a J-Curve Community," based on Part 5 of Paul's book, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life. "The 'health and wealth' gospel has come out of an environment where we have taught justification without the J-Curve. The health and wealth gospel is basically that Jesus is for me, and that prayer is a way to power." "If you teach grace without living a cruciform life of dying love then you are creating cheap grace. You cannot leave a vacuum." "As I re-enact the gospel, that becomes the glue that brings incredibly different people together. If you begin to do the J-Curve, you undermine tribalism and eventually destroy it."

This episode is the second in a new series called "Forming a J-Curve Community," based on Part 5 of Paul's book, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life. "Behind every faction, there's some idol in the center. A tribe is always centered around something that it is worshipping." "You don't get at power by seeking it – you get at power by losing it, just like Jesus did." "Paul is deliberately weakening himself. He's leaving space for the spirit. When I lead with weakness then I'm a person of prayer because I don't know what to do. This is Proverbs: the heart of wisdom is knowing you don't have it."

This episode is the second in a new series called "Forming a J-Curve Community," based on Part 5 of Paul's book, J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life. "What we're going to look at is the very first problem Paul tackles in Corinthians 1, and it's the problem of tribalism…. They're starting denominations, but they're about 1500 years too early!" "Because my tribe is Jesus, I can enter every tribe. But I don't have to be captured by the tribal narrative they have." "A tribe creates a virtual wall that reduces pain. So to go out of my little group and into your world, I'm drawing out potential humbling for me."

This episode begins a new series called "Forming a J-Curve Community," based in part on Part 5 of Paul's book The J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life. "Babbius' monument [in Corinth] is telling us a story, and the story, or narrative, is about what is important…. Being seen and honored and known is what life is about here. What Paul counters the Corinthians with is a different narrative. "For the Apostle Paul the cross is not just our salvation, it is the narrative of our life." "Opposing the Babbius narrative is the cross. They could not be more different. The cross is at the bottom of the Failure-Boasting slide. Babbius is going up. He's made it in life and he's announcing it. Paul is coming in and telling the story of a poor Jewish peasant who was rejected by his own people and crucified at the cross. But it is in that weakness that the power of God lies."

This is the fourth and final episode in a series called Hope and Direction in a Time of Crisis. These episodes have been excerpted from free webinars hosted by Paul Miller and conversation partners Jon Hori, Liz Voboril and Keith Grant. "Generally speaking the emphasis within our therapeutic world is either improving the self with some kind of wisdom or improving the self's environment. So we making 'good choices', staying away from draining people, do lots of self-care, etc. But at the very center of Christianity is Jesus. His journey leads to the cross. "The cross is not a place for improving the self, it's a place for the death of self." "I think it's a right desire that we can't wait to get back to our pre-pandemic "normal," but it can become almost an expectation that if we if we aren't in a normal situation then we can't be fully human. But, in fact, it's in the embodiment of our living in the particular place that God has put us right now where the beauty of Jesus begins to emerge."

This is the third episode in a series called Hope and Direction in a Time of Crisis. These episodes will be excerpted from free webinars hosted by Paul Miller and conversation partners Jon Hori, Liz Voboril and Keith Grant. To view upcoming webinars, visit seejesus.net/events. "Sometimes it's hard for us to get into touch with what the Apostle Paul was like as a person because he's either so exalted that he's almost Jesus number 2, or he just kind of floats. I want to drill down a little bit in into this particular way that Paul has of looking at life." "Paul is not an optimist, he's a realist." "Paul sees life exactly as it is. When Paul was on that Damascus Road, he was stunned by the presence of the resurrected Jesus—the blazing light of the risen Savior—and that blazing light is still with him in his prison cell.

This is the second episode in a new series called Hope and Direction in a Time of Crisis. These episodes will be excerpted from free webinars hosted by Paul Miller and conversation partners Jon Hori and Liz Voboril. To view upcoming webinars, visit seejesus.net/events. "One of the tendencies that we have as believers is to edit our prayers to get them all balanced and it can freeze people. There's a real beauty in beginning with what's on your heart. It doesn't mean that doesn't have to be reshaped and grown, but you've got begin with what's on your heart." "The gospel gives us permission to be ourselves. That doesn't mean that ourselves don't need some work, we all know that, but it lets us sort of relax." "I've likened this tendency to a kind of a perfectionism with prayer to creating an avatar. You create a spiritual being that you aren't and try to get that person to pray right. When you're no longer yourself, as messy as you may be, then you can't connect with God because it's not the real you connecting with the real God."

This is the first episode in a new series called Hope and Direction in a Time of Crisis. These episodes will be excerpted from free webinars hosted by Paul Miller and conversation partners Jon Hori and Liz Voboril. To view upcoming webinars, visit seejesus.net/events. "We're separated from this text by 2,000 years, but you can feel Paul's emotions. They are vivid. Emotions are a function of what it is to be human. It's kind of a human flourishing you're looking at. Human flourishing is not escaping or being pulled somehow above the emotions of life. Paul is completely embedded in love in the hearts of the Thessalonians. They are on his heart, so therefore he feels anxiety. It normalizes good anxiety." "Anxiety is like anger. It is potentially sinful. But it's not inherently sinful. That's the simplest way to say it." "We tend to put anxiety and human flourishing in two different buckets, as if they are enemies of one another. What dying and rising with Jesus does it mixes the buckets. It puts them together. In fact, it's anxiety, a life of stuff coming at you, that is the way you get to know Jesus. The things that are making me anxious are my door to knowing Jesus. And that's true human flourishing: being in Jesus."

In this final episode in our Lenten series, we turn our attention to the resurrection. "The way Jesus announces [his resurrection] is pure Jesus. We discover that Jesus has been just standing there quietly with Mary, saying nothing. I love that. It's so like him to just be present with Mary. Generally speaking the more powerful our voice is, the more market share we have in a conversation, the more we use that. No one has more market share than Jesus. No one has more powerful voice, and yet he's the quietest person in the room." "Jesus's sign is his spent-ness." "Jesus's sign is his spent-ness. He loves to the very the end, the Telos. He's completely drained of everything at the end of his life. His scars, his wounds, reveal the completeness of his love. And for us, it's our scars that bind us to Christ and that reveal Christ in us to others. Christianity is not some sort of scar management or plastic surgery. That would be taking the American dream and draping it over true Christianity and missing the real thing."

Jesus doesn't say he's troubled in spirit. John, who is just to his right, picks it up. If you are aware of someone—you love them, or you are just an astute observer of people—you can tell when they are anxious. I think this is one of three references that John has to Jesus' anxiety. And they are all surrounding the passion. What I love about it is that it normalizes anxiety. So much of our modern world either tries to escape anxiety or feels guilty about it. But Jesus was anxious." "If you are a lover of people, and I mean that in the broadest sense of the biblical love, it's going to lead you into tension." "What I love about this whole scene [when Judas and the Jewish leaders arrive at Gethsemane], is that when you put it all together, Jesus is like Bruce Lee or Jason Bourne. Everything's a weapon. He's rebuking, loving, protecting, challenging, healing, commanding. He is the prince of peace. So this person that we saw all agitated is in complete command of himself. Even now he's probably feeling anxiety, but he's not trapped by his emotions. He is a vibrant lover of the people around him. And that's what makes the passion so beautiful. The camera has moved to slow motion on Jesus life we can see incident after incident where Jesus is loving, rebuking, caring, comforting, lamenting. He's showing us what it is to be a person."

"God in his wisdom is kind of bringing a poverty on the entire world. It's striking, especially in America. We have a Declaration of Independence so it's written in to our seminal documents that we should not be constricted by anybody. And yet God is constricting us." "I'm not saying the virus is a beautiful thing, but all suffering for those of us who are in Christ can be drawn up into the dying of Jesus." "The only way he can make us weak is to overload all our well-oiled systems. And that's what's happening in all of our lives to different extents. And we are surrounded by people who are also overloaded. People are losing their work, coming under financial stress. So it's not only something that teaches us to love, it opens up doors, opportunities to love."

In this episode, we look at how Jesus' sadness as he nears the cross is another window into his personhood. "It really is true that Jesus is present. He's present with not only their rejection of him but with himself. He's comfortable being sad. And I don't think as Christians we're that comfortable or we hear much teaching on the negative emotions." "It's just a remarkable window into Jesus heart that he's looking outside of himself at a time like this." "One of the neat things about Jesus' sadness is that he doesn't get self-entangled. That is, if there's a problem in Christianity with stoicism, in the broader culture there's increasingly this problem of getting self-entangled in your grief. If emotions can be a bit suppressed within Christianity, within the broader culture they have almost become sacred."

This episode begins a new series on Jesus' Passion by looking at how the disciples want to go higher, but Jesus is focused on going lower. "James and John get their mother to try to get them the number 1 and 2 places in the Kingdom. And the other disciples don't say 'You know I don't think that is Jesus way.' They are just mad that James and John beat them to it! They are all fighting for the top. But Jesus is remarkably gentle through the whole thing. The disciples are functionally Epicureans—hunting for the shortcut across the 'J' of the J-Curve. That's our natural desire." "The disciples want suffering-free glory and Jesus says it doesn't exist." "One of my favorite phrases from Jesus in Luke 15 is where Jesus says take the lower place. I just love that. There is an act of the will where you take the lower place. You are deciding that you are going to go lower. I just think the opportunities that we have to do that at the big and the small level are enormous. It's as simple as a moment in conversation at the family table, letting someone else interrupt me so my idea takes the lower place..."

This episode wraps up our series on J-Curve: Union with Christ by looking at how the J-Curve helps in a mini-crisis. "The Apostle Paul introduces the J-Curve as a kind of a master story 'let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus' (Philippians 2:5). And then he describes the downward journey of Jesus all the way to death on a cross." "Every community has a narrative." "The J-Curve normalizes the bumps. There's a kind of perfectionism now in our culture that sort of demands that life should be bump free. Paul the Apostle is a perfectionist, but his perfectionism is in his ability to reenact the dying and rising of Christ. It's the perfection of love. It's the perfection of faith. And it's not in my situation. So it allows me to have this calm center in all kinds of circumstances."

This episode continues our series on the J-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ." "When we think of idolatry we think about how it affects our relationship vertically with God and that is obvious and good but we're not necessarily attentive to how it affects the horizontal relationship with those around us." "Ministry is particularly subtle idol because it's got Jesus written all over it." "Paul sits on the word 'know' in Philippians 3. Because in the J-Curve you get to know Jesus in ways you would never have known him through teaching or study. The good shepherd gets very close to you in the dying because it's his story. It's his spirit and his presence. So Jesus becomes your friend in the dying."

This episode continues our series on the J-Curve, looking at what it means to be "in Christ." "You can see two different loves operating here. Field hockey is a lesser love, but it is still a valid love. It was taking more time and energy than my greater love for Emily to know Jesus. But nevertheless, that greater love was shaping how I responded to failures in the lesser love." "There's this whole world of lesser loves that are just delightful. Becoming like Jesus is not the dissolution of those lesser loves, but them rightly ordered." "My imagination was captured by the idea that I wanted Emily to be in Jesus. I knew that the way to become in Jesus was to travel his journey and out of that would come resurrection. And it worked! It's so powerful! It was an imaginative vision of the beauty of Jesus coming into my family that had been mastering me for some 20 years."