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." "The whole process of disciple-making really begins best in friendship." "Outside of the New Testament, one...

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship, looking at active vs. passive posture in discipleship, and how Jesus discipled the 12. "Marshall McLuhan famously said, 'The medium is the message,' calling attention to the shaping power that our method of communicating has over the content of the message. If the sermon sits at the center of our imagination for discipleship, we risk having an overly passive view of growing as a disciple. This isn’t a critique on the sermon –...

Paul, Jon, and Liz start a new series looking at the topic of discipleship. "We are quite serious about what the Apostle Paul calls the mind of Christ. That's Philippians 2:5, where Paul said, 'Let this mind be in you which is also in Christ Jesus.' Paul then goes on to describe the story of Jesus' life: going down into death and up into resurrection. He's driving for something; don't learn this in the abstract, but let this mind be in you." "Within the world of Christian ministry,...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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…" "All acts of...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Paul, Robert and Liz take one last look at how we see Jesus as he relates to his mother, Mary, at the end of his life and in the last glimpses we get of Mary in Scripture. "This scene here in John 19 is quite something. If you think of the last 3 vignettes where we’ve seen Mary at work, the biggest difference between this one and those other scenes is that here, Mary is doing nothing. Each one of those scenes was a situation out of control, and we saw Mary coming in and exerting some form of...