Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about the humility Jesus calls us to, looking at what taking the lower place might look like in an everyday moment.

"Humility is when your heart is humbled, it's a virtue, a character trait. Humiliation is when your circumstances are humble. It's helpful to distinguish between the two, but having experienced some of the dying of humility in my life, I slowly learned that these two things are deeply connected."

"You do not learn humility abstractly. You have to be in a humbled place. The story I'm going to tell here is made up, but it's the kind of thing that happens everyday. I've made the husband the bad guy, but I've also told it where I flip the husband and wife. But everybody gets mad at the husband in this no matter which way I do it!"

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their discussion of Jesus’ humility, looking at the foot washing scene in John 13.

"This scene reads like a YouTube video. John gives us every move of Jesus, and the effect of it is riveting… especially since he does it all in silence. John's writing this probably 60, 50 years later, from what Eusebius tells us, and he remembered every single move Jesus made because he wasn't talking. It just sealed it in his mind – like the scene itself was a visualization of the mind of Christ."

"Jesus is acting out his atonement. He's showing us that the example of his dying love leads to the atonement. It's a beautiful balance between what we might call 'the example of Jesus' and 'the atonement of Jesus.' And it's just so important how we constantly need to bring them together and not pull them apart. Liberalism tends to sit on the example and our conservative churches, while they really do both, tend to weigh the atonement above the example. And it’s true, you never get at the example unless you have the atonement. But that makes it easy to miss the foot washing. But the sheer physicality of the gospels shows us Jesus' beauty."

Paul, Jon, and Liz start a new series, talking through the Passion unit of our Person of Jesus Study, which looks closely at how all the aspects of Jesus as a person that we've looked at before (his compassion, honesty, dependence on God, and faith) come together in the intense last few weeks of his life on earth.

"Jealousy is a sin that is often hidden from the person who is jealous, because it always speaks about what the other person is doing wrong. So it is powerful and deceptive. It is like cancer within. I have seen churches and families torn apart by this sin. The antidote for it is dying with Jesus – the antidote is to lose, to take the downward path of Philippians 2."

"You can picture it like a graph where Jesus' line would be going down and the disciples, their hearts, and their desires are moving up. There’s a point where they crisscross, and there's a rub. That rub is working against our own minds and hearts, our own ways of thinking and being. It’s the mind of Christ grating against ours in a very gentle but an obviously honest and truthful way."

Paul, Liz, and Robert continue their conversation about the woman at the well, looking at the second half of their conversation.

"Jesus has already said he has water. Now he says the character of the water is not just spring water. It’s not well water that's been sitting there forever. It's not spring water – it’s water that if you drink it, you'll never be thirsty again. This is like a super drink. Then he ramps it up once more: the water I give will become a spring of water. So when you drink this water that I give, it's going to transform your heart so you become a gusher."

"Jesus is now beginning to give her living water, and he does it by saying, 'Go call your husband and come back.' You can feel the conversation shifting at this point; she gives a much shorter answer. This is the hardest part of the conversation for me to go to. I can do the compassion part, the intrigue part, but this coming in with this honesty is just hard…"

With the Discipleship series complete, we circle back to our Faith series (based on the Person of Jesus Faith Study) to cover a story we had not yet discussed: Jesus' conversation with the woman at the well. Paul Miller, Liz Voboril, and Robert Row look at how this story showcases Jesus' compassion, honesty, and dependence on the Father -- themes we've discussed in previous episodes.

"The conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well is remarkable. It’s the longest conversation that we have recorded between two people that are of the non-elite class, which is the top 1%. It is the longest conversation between everyday people that we have in antiquity."

"You can pick up the woman’s personality almost immediately. When people do awkward things, like Jesus does here, most of us try to gloss it over. But she states the exact awkwardness: 'How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman for a drink?' It’s kind of like she's just met a Martian."

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their discussion of discipleship, talking about how the discipling process is a process of moving people out of lukewarm into hot or cold.

"The discipling process is a process of moving people out of lukewarm into hot or cold, and that's a good process. You're calling them to greatness, and you want to move them to hot. You don't want them lukewarm."

"But there is a danger at the opposite side of where the training can get too obsessive or oppressive. The gnostics believed that there was this secret inner knowledge, and it kind of created a hierarchy. And you had to become an insider. It's really important for those of you who are leading discipling and those who are discipling others to guard against the intrusion of personal and institutional pride."

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their discussion of discipleship, talking about the history of discipleship practices.

"By about 200 AD, every person who wanted to become a Christian went through a year of discipleship. They did this through a form of catechism, or questions and answers, and then the graduation was on Easter. That's when you were baptized. I think one of the reasons the church does that is I'm sure they had experience with converts just being light and fluffy, so they had actually gotten stricter as far as we can tell than the New Testament."  

"The discipleship era we live in has been profoundly shaped by the revolution begun by Charles and John Wesley. They really are the fathers of modern pietism. They popularized the prayer meeting, the small group. They didn't invent these things, but they certainly made them worldwide. Methodism as a strategy went way beyond Methodism and captured the imagination of the whole church. That’s why we still have prayer meetings, discipleship groups, and even the idea of discipleship with individuals."

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship.

"At the heart of discipleship is not just seeing Jesus and becoming like him abstractly, but actually entering into the patterns of his life. One of the central principles of interpretation of the New Testament is that what happens to Jesus happens to us."

"You can't separate a teaching gift from the command to love. Otherwise, you've got a machine, and you can't create a discipling machine!"

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship.

"Two thousand years after Jesus’ death, the Church of Jesus Christ is absolutely massive—there are three billion confessing Christians. If you're going to start the world's biggest, most enduring organization, how would you go about it? It's striking that Jesus doesn't go to the rabbinical schools or to the elites."

"Probably the most important thing in hunting for people to disciple is hunting for teachability. You just don't get teachability when people are on a hierarchy. I love schooling; I've been a supporter of Christian schools my whole life. I'm not knocking school or systems of learning, but you really have to be careful that you don't create hierarchies of knowledge. Jesus is always tearing down these hierarchies, and he does it with the kind of people."

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship.

"One caution with a focus on discipleship practices is that it can be like making an amusement park about going on a ride. But you don't just go on a ride at Disney, you are immersed in an experience. Discipleship without an overall goal of growing in Christ-likeness is just getting a lot more Christian information."

"Outside of the New Testament, one of the best descriptions of the telos of the Christian life is in Warfield’s sermon called 'Imitating the Incarnation.' He says, 'It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives,' because the love of Christ draws us into sharing in so many other people’s stories."