Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation on Jesus' passion, looking at how Jesus begins to face his coming death. To celebrate the complete Person of Jesus series, we're offering $5 off of Unit 5: The Passion Leader's Manual (print or digital version) when you use promo code: POD5 "Paul's line on that from Romans 5 is actually a very stoic-like passage where he says rejoice in your suffering, because suffering produces perseverance, character – all the Greeks would have agreed with...

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation on Jesus' passion, turning their attention to Judas' betrayal. In this episode, Paul mentions a talk he gave on Judas several years ago, as part of an audio study called "The Love Course." You can listen to that talk here (or download it to listen to later, if you click on the triple dots.) "How do you know someone is troubled? He was agitated, and when someone is agitated, they're tense, they're restless, they fidget. And John, sitting...

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about learning from Jesus in his passion. "Contrary to the typical pictures on a Sunday school wall, Jesus comes down the hill on Palm Sunday weeping – the word is actually closer to 'wailing.' In our experience of humanity, people who wail and warrior kings are never the same person, but Jesus is a wailing warrior king. His heart is filled sadness over what his people will suffer, and he will fight to the death for them." "There’s a...

Paul, Robert, and Liz continue their conversation about seeing Jesus in his passion, turning their attention to what we learn from his sadness and grief over the people’s rejection of him. "Jesus’ words are so tender, 'Your house is left desolate.' We get a picture of broken intimacy or intimacy that never happened. It’s paired with this really true and honest image of how brutal they are. 'You who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you.' He’s going after the hardness of their hearts,...

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." "The place of humiliation is...

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...

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...

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...

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's 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...

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." "In general, I would say the weakness of the church is that it’s too quick, it’s 'low-bar discipling.' There's no...

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...

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." "The goal of discipleship is Christ formation." "You can't separate a teaching gift from the command to love. Otherwise, you've got a machine, and you can't create a...

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship. "Two thousand years after Jesus’s 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." "We laugh at the disciples for their clumsiness, but we miss the beauty of their lack of pretense." ...

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...