Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

[DISCIPLESHIP] 11. Prayer and Love

Paul, Adam, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship, considering how learning to pray is related to learning to love. "You could look at prayer kind of like an onion, where the outer layer might be prayer and the next layer is being faithful in prayer, and then all of a sudden you're discovering the Spirit at work. Things are happening that weren't in your categories. And there's work in your heart that's beginning to happen." "You're beginning to enter the mind of Christ. You're living in this world of love. You're getting to know God." "And then you find yourself praying all the time. And pretty soon, all these things become habits, which makes sense of Paul's phrase, to be in step with the Spirit. So it's this life of continuous prayer to the Heavenly Father, where you’re waiting on the Spirit and he's constantly making Jesus present."

[DISCIPLESHIP] 10. The Will is Where the Interior and Exterior Meet

Paul, Adam, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship, looking at the role of the will. "Life is filled with these polarities: Grace or truth? Do I leave space, or do I draw near? At the crux is my communion with my Heavenly Father. Discipleship puts these decisions of daily life under a magnifying glass." "Your will is controlled by what you love, and the grip of that love is so powerful that you often don't even realize you're exercising your will." "When you slow down, you begin to uncover your will. You're really beginning to unmask your heart to yourself…. De-centering yourself and connecting that self with God is what the work of discipleship is. That’s why teaching someone to pray is the foundational work of discipleship."

[DISCIPLESHIP] 9. Learning to Pray is Learning to Love

Paul and Liz continue this new series with Adam Barker, Director of A Praying Life. "You can try to teach someone to love and give them all the pieces, but if they don't love from the heart, nothing will happen…. Jesus is driving at creating a community of God followers around him, his life and his teaching. He's driving for perfection. That’s why things like the Sermon on the Mount are really important, because it's a sermon on the perfect Christian." "When I'm teaching people to pray, I'm teaching them to love, and if they don't understand that, their praying life will become self-centered." "Don't misunderstand me – Jesus knows you won’t be perfect this side of heaven, but he's driving after it nonetheless. He's driving for this beauty of Christ to be formed in us. And without that passion for change, without the goal of the church looking like Jesus, then discipleship just gets boring. But if people are really changing, if they're really learning to love their wife or their husband in a difficult marriage, then they're on the front lines every day. Discipleship is calling people to a life of love that's honest and compassionate and prayerfully dependent."

[DISCIPLESHIP] 8. Discipleship is Not Passive

Paul and Liz begin a short new series sharing lessons learned over the years about discipleship. Adam Barker, Director of our A Praying Life Ministry, joins us. "One of the things I do when discipling Christians is I hold them individually accountable. I just go around and ask, ‘Did you do the assigned reading?’ Why do I do this? Probably because I have learned that my evangelical Christian friends in suburbia are no different than the inner city kids I used to teach when it comes to doing homework." "In the modern American church, we're so concentrated on gathering people and making them feel good about that gathering, and that often kills discipleship." "I was leading cohorts in a church that had a passive learning paradigm, so it took me a couple of weeks to even begin to break into that. When I got some negative comments from a participant during the second or third week, I was delighted. That was honest engagement, so I knew where he was at! You can't disciple unless you know where someone is really at."

[PASSION] 17. The Glory of Jesus (POJ 5.11)

Paul, Robert, and Liz wrap up this study of Jesus by reflecting on what Jesus tells us about his glory... and what that means for how we follow him. "We would think the glory would be the resurrection, that it would start Sunday. But Jesus says the glory starts Friday… which is just so different than how we think of glory." "Most of the time you only see glory in retrospect. When you're enduring quietly with no cheering crowd, that's your glory." "What's Jesus going to do at the wedding feast of the lamb? He's going to be the center of the feast, and he's going to also be the host and the servants. He's going to be around checking people, checking their drinks, serving food. He just loves to love. He loves to wash feet."