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  • Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about faith with an episode that looks at faith as a habit of the heart that turns to Jesus.

    "This is a little bit of an inference on my part, but what I think Jesus is irritated about, here in Mark 8 with the disciples, is that when they come across a problem, they don’t turn to him. They turned inward, and I’m sure started getting irritated with each other. We can easily imagine the discussion, 'You said you're going to bring the bread! Why didn’t you?' When all along, as they’ve seen already, they have this bread factory in the boat with them!"

    "Faith is a habit of the heart where you look away from yourself, your wisdom, and your resources and turn to Jesus."

    "Oddly enough, a strong faith person is weak as they look to themselves. Strength of faith is measured by your ability to turn away from yourself. It's not looking inward to see if you have enough faith, but looking outward to the object of your faith. Faith, in that sense, is without energy. It's this is a habit of the heart where you look away from yourself and turn to Jesus."

  • Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation about faith, looking especially at how Jesus develops the disciples' faith.

    "Right after the feeding of the 5000, Jesus dismisses his disciples. It's the only time he does this, and it’s a situation where it would appear he could use their help. But when you put all three of the gospel accounts together, you realize Jesus had to act fast. It was almost like he was getting them out of the drug world
 the 'drug' of 5000 people shouting for Jesus to be King. It's an intoxicating crowd that could sweep up the disciples, and so Jesus sends them off alone in the boat."

    "Jesus doesn't rescue Peter until Peter says, 'Jesus save me!' It’s classic Jesus: he leaves space for us to move towards him."

    "Peter looks at Jesus by faith, and then he loses it and goes back again. All of the disciples take steps of faith and then show their weakness of faith. It’s like Jesus has them in a faith coaching camp. Every time he permits stress in their lives, he builds faith in them and points them to faith."

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  • Paul, Jon and Liz continue their conversation looking at the development of faith in Jesus's followers -- this episode looks at the story of Peter rebuking Jesus and at Jesus's words to the Rich Young Ruler.

    "What we're thinking about now is the object of our faith. The object of Peter's faith is a traditional first century off-the-shelf messiah who has an army that destroys evil in Israel and throws the Romans into the sea. So it's very concrete. And what Jesus has just told Peter seems like crazy talk."

    "The object of Peter's faith is Jesus, but it's the wrong Jesus. It's a Jesus who's going to make his life pain-free. It's not a Jesus who draws you into his death and resurrection."

    "There’s some beauty to John Mark walking away. He doesn't try to stop being himself immediately. Jesus is separating the wheat from the chaff. You either have to be hot for Jesus or cold. You can't be in the middle or lukewarm. John Mark is coming, in a sense, asking, ‘How can I be hotter for Jesus?’ Jesus’s answer is helping John Mark to see that he’s actually cold."

  • Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about faith by looking at how the disciples learned about faith in the context of two boating adventures with Jesus.

    "To understand God, as Calvin says, you can either begin with yourself or with God. Because a true knowledge of yourself will lead to a true knowledge of God, and a true knowledge of God will lead you to a true knowledge of yourself. You see that dynamic happening here. Jesus hasn't said anything like, 'You’re a sinner, Peter.' It's just this encounter with the immense warmth and love and kindness of God -- His sheer goodness to us – that makes Peter turn and think of his sin."

    "Peter is profoundly seen. He's encountered life at a level he never has experienced before."

    "In the scene on the boat in the storm, what we're looking at as Jesus sleeps is his faith. He rests completely in his Father and his Father's love for him. He is without fear; the disciples fear because they don't have that rest in the Father. The faith that allows him to sleep is as helpful for them as the miracle itself!"

  • Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus's faith, looking at how he loves the disciples and the crowds over the course of a 24-hour period in his ministry.

    "This pattern of Jesus is all through the gospels: he sees a large crowd, has compassion on them because they're like sheep without a shepherd, and then he begins teaching and healing. So this vacation that Jesus and the disciples are taking is interrupted by 25,000 people
”

    "A life of faith will be filled with surprises and unexpected things!"

    "The reason Satan has no hold on Jesus is because the only thing Jesus wants is the love of his Father. So there's no hook, no crack in Jesus' armor; Satan has no leverage over him. I’ve often thought of that during times of suffering. If I surrender my job, my family, my career, my spouse, and my health, then Satan has no hold on me. He can't tempt me with something that I don't own. That's why suffering is so powerful in the Christian life; it strips us of something we might be tempted to own."

  • Jon, Paul and Liz begin a new series looking the central role faith plays -- in Jesus, in the disciples, and in us. These conversations will be framed around lessons in The Person of Jesus Study, Unit 4, Faith.

    "Jesus has a lot of conversations about the disciples' faith, and there are many fascinating nuances to it. But what you hardly ever hear anybody talk about is Jesus' own faith. That can wind up making Jesus kind of plastic. The reason that we don't talk about Jesus's faith is because we're so aware that he's God. In a sense, we think 'what on Earth does he have to believe?' But the reason that we've not really reflected on this is because we've not really reflected that much on how serious the embodiment of Jesus is."

    "Faith is everything. Without it, love is just so difficult."

    "Luke tells us that as Jesus is praying, right after his baptism, he hears this voice from heaven. 'This is my beloved son with him I am well pleased.' That's the Father building faith in his son. If you hear the voice of your heavenly Father saying, 'I am completely satisfied with you in Christ Jesus.' There's no other better place to be. It's not a temporary state -- it's unending. There's nothing that can separate you from the love of God..."

  • Jill Miller joins Paul, Jon and Liz for this conversation about what we can learn from the barnyard about how Christmas lands among everyday saints.

    "The ministry of the church happens through the hands and feet of everyday saints. So as we turn to Christmas, we thought it would be fun to both think about the Christmas story and also this idea of the saints. As we look at the Christmas story in Luke, we see that Christmas lands down among the saints."

    "The manger was so dirty, but Christ as a baby was laid in that. And now the Holy Spirit is in my heart, which so many times, is dirty just like the manger. He still dwells in manure!"

    "We were talking about Mary with the gang [our local Bethesda group for people affected by disability], and how there was no room in the inn and what one of the kids next to me whispered, “Kind of like there's no room for me. There wasn't any room for me in school.” And then another kid said, “Yeah, it's kind of tough to get into church.” They're used to low places and one day, hallelujah, they will be raised. I'll be the one washing the feet of these kids in heaven. It was really encouraging to them to see how Jesus entered the world and experienced what they feel!"

  • 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
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    "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."