Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

"One quality of all the high points is perfection. You see it in Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount's 'Be perfect, even as your Heavenly Father is perfect.' In other words, when you do these things, do them really, really well."

"Really, perfection is a whole style of the New Testament. Like, we're really in this for real. Toyota and Honda really struggled when they brought their plants to America, because they could not reach the perfection the Japanese machinists could reach in terms of clearances on the parts. Americans couldn't get any closer than two 1/100ths of an inch of perfection, and the Japanese got to one 1/100th. Every good trade has these perfections in it. Where are these perfections in Christianity, in our faith? That's what you see in the high peaks."

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about the quiet role of beauty in discipleship.

"Often, we don't see and feel the reality of God's created order, because we've not cultivated an eye for beauty. And that it gives everything a kind of a frivolity. D.C Shindler describes it, 'We don't feel the weightiness or givenness of things. There's a kind of a lightness of being.' The loss of a sense of reality is just all over; it's a subtle way that the culture is impacting the church. Even the church doesn't feel the weight of beauty, the weight of goodness."

"I was leading a cohort for a group of leaders who were prayer resistant, and one of the leaders who has since become a good friend said, 'I'm only here because I'm paid to be here.' And that was an experience of beauty for me. I actually got excited. It was real. I have longed for more reality in the church because the temptation to pretense in religious things is so powerful."

Paul, Jon, Adam, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship, looking at the role of beauty.

"Our first tagline at seeJesus was 'helping people see the beauty of Jesus,' and people really struggled to understand what we did. I thought that was because the beauty of Jesus is hard for people grasp if they don't understand the person of Jesus. But I've come to realize, that the church is actually weak on beauty itself…"

"They say if you can get a kid excited about reading, then you've opened up a world to them for life. I've seen a similar dynamic in discipleship, where if you get someone excited about Jesus and the beauty of Jesus, then discipleship is downhill, not uphill. Beauty puts energy into obedience."

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."