Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

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.”

Paul Miller and his son John, along with their friend Tim, discuss the power of confession and prayer in overcoming sexual temptation. They share personal experiences of seeking accountability, texting prayers, and the importance of creating new habits of grace. The podcast explores the power of evil, the significance of prayer and accountability, and the challenges of overcoming cynicism and doubt in prayer.

"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."