Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller Paul Miller

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 – listening to sermons is an important way to grow. But we want to get our imagination for discipleship from how Jesus does this work…"
"The heart of Jesus’s ministry is mentoring the twelve." "Jesus often takes as much time in an incident or interaction as he does in interpreting the incident for others. Sometimes he goes through two layers of people, interpreting for the larger group of people, and then again specifically for the smaller. This slows him down a lot, but he's doing Christ formation with his disciples. He's not just on a healing ministry; he’s pivoting between a healing ministry, a teaching ministry, a discipling ministry, and his own prayer time. This pattern is all through the gospels. The discipleship of the 12 is the organizing structure of his day-to-day life."

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, formation tends to be a little vague: we are learning the Bible, learning doctrine, learning holiness, and all of those are important, but what you see in Paul, in the whole New Testament really, is this sharply defined telos or end goal: Christ's formation." "The Apostle Paul’s call to discipleship aims so high – it’s like he’s training Olympic athletes. What's so daunting and enchanting about it is that he’s not just saying this to the elites or the most naturally 'athletic' of the church. It's for everyone in the church, and he has this expectation that the Spirit who makes Christ present is so powerful that Christ's formation is realistic and it's doable, not in our own strength but in the spirit of Jesus."

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 didn’t you?' When all along, as they’ve seen already, they have this bread factory in the boat with them!"
"Faith is a habit of the heart where you look away from yourself, your wisdom, and your resources and turn to Jesus." "Oddly enough, a strong faith person is weak as they look to themselves. Strength of faith is measured by your ability to turn away from yourself. It's not looking inward to see if you have enough faith, but looking outward to the object of your faith. Faith, in that sense, is without energy. It's this is a habit of the heart where you look away from yourself and turn to Jesus."

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 be King. It's an intoxicating crowd that could sweep up the disciples, and so Jesus sends them off alone in the boat."
"Jesus doesn't rescue Peter until Peter says, 'Jesus save me!' It’s classic Jesus: he leaves space for us to move towards him." "Peter looks at Jesus by faith, and then he loses it and goes back again. All of the disciples take steps of faith and then show their weakness of faith. It’s like Jesus has them in a faith coaching camp. Every time he permits stress in their lives, he builds faith in them and points them to faith."

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 like crazy talk."
"The object of Peter's faith is Jesus, but it's the wrong Jesus. It's a Jesus who's going to make his life pain-free. It's not a Jesus who draws you into his death and resurrection." "There’s some beauty to John Mark walking away. He doesn't try to stop being himself immediately. Jesus is separating the wheat from the chaff. You either have to be hot for Jesus or cold. You can't be in the middle or lukewarm. John Mark is coming, in a sense, asking, ‘How can I be hotter for Jesus?’ Jesus’s answer is helping John Mark to see that he’s actually cold."

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, Peter.' It's just this encounter with the immense warmth and love and kindness of God -- His sheer goodness to us – that makes Peter turn and think of his sin."
"Peter is profoundly seen. He's encountered life at a level he never has experienced before." "In the scene on the boat in the storm, what we're looking at as Jesus sleeps is his faith. He rests completely in his Father and his Father's love for him. He is without fear; the disciples fear because they don't have that rest in the Father. The faith that allows him to sleep is as helpful for them as the miracle itself!"