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."

"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."

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."

"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."

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."

"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."

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."

"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."

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."

"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."

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about the resurrection of Jesus.

"It was the apocryphal gospel of Peter that helped me to realize how much space Jesus left in this Resurrection scene. If you follow what the gospel of Peter says, Jesus comes back from the grave like King Kong - he fills up all the space. You can't even see his head, because it is literally up through the clouds!"

"In the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in Luke and John, Jesus is the same size as Mary. He leaves space by quietly being there until she sees him – and even then he doesn't say who he is but asks her questions. And because of that, we discover some of what Mary’s like as a person. If Jesus had identified himself immediately, we’d have missed that glimpse of Mary."

Paul, Robert, and Liz begin looking at the first moments after the resurrection of Jesus, examining his interaction with Mary Magdalene.

"Mary Magdalene is the first person we know of who turns away from two angels, because they aren't helping her. She’s in pursuit, and the angels aren't helping her, so she starts looking around. We know from Luke that she had been demon-possessed, and Jesus had freed her, so what we're looking at in her single-minded focus is the depth of her love for Jesus."

"Sickness is going to end. Cancer is going to end. Meanness is going to end, murder is going to end, death's going to end. This is the biggest and best news in all of history, and Jesus is able to make her name and who she is as a person the center of how he shares the news with her."

Paul, Robert, and Liz finish their conversation about Jesus on the cross, slowly walking through his last seven statements.

"Notice how short Jesus' sentences are on the cross. He has to push himself up on his feet to catch a breath and then to be able to exhale that breath without dropping… it makes it all that much harder to talk."

"Jesus cries out, 'It is finished!' The job is done. In John 2, Jesus tells his mother at the wedding in Cana, 'My time has not yet come.' But now the battle's over. He's done the will of his father. For the disciples, at this point, it looks like everything has gone wrong, but they'll later realize that this is a cry of triumph."

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their slow walk through the last hours of Jesus' life, looking at Jesus and the cross.

"There are so many things that Jesus says that are memorable because they're pithy. 'Father, forgive them for they know not what they do' is certainly one that has implanted itself in our memories. But it’s very serious. Jesus is holding back the wrath of God. They don't realize that they're crucifying an innocent man, so Jesus is showing mercy on them."

"When Pilate said, ‘Where are you from?’ he was not asking for Jesus’ name. He knew this was Jesus of Nazareth. He wasn’t saying, ‘what's your hometown,’ but, 'are you actually God?' And of course, the main thing Pilate is mocking here is not Jesus, but the Jews, and they know it."

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about Jesus before Pilate, looking at how close Jesus gets to Pilate's heart.

"Jesus has taken Pilate from a mocking question into opening up his heart, then he’s received more mocking from Pilate and taken him to truth. The whole thing is kind of a journey, and Pilate follows Jesus."

"Pilate was not a fearful man. He was a crafty politician. He stayed longer, up to that point, than any other of the Roman procurators, so he's got good survival instincts; but here, he's afraid. In the end, he has a choice to save his career or to save Jesus' life; and as you know, in the end, he chooses his career."