Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

  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."