What if we’ve spent so much time thinking about what Jesus has done that we’ve forgotten to linger over who Jesus actually is?

In this rich and deeply personal conversation, Stephanie welcomes author and Bible teacher Paul Miller, founder of seeJesus and author of A Praying Life, for an exploration of the person of Christ: his startling range, his humanity, his humility, his beauty, and the way seeing him more clearly changes the way we love, pray, suffer, and relate to one another.

Paul takes us inside several Gospel encounters almost frame by frame. We watch Jesus engage the Syrophoenician woman, wash his disciples’ feet, and stand quietly beside a grieving Mary outside the empty tomb. Again and again, a Jesus emerges who refuses our tidy categories: lion and lamb, astonishingly compassionate and piercingly truthful, deeply attentive to the person standing before him.

The conversation turns toward something the church can easily neglect: beauty. Paul describes the Christian life as a journey of “beautification,” as Christ forms his own likeness in his people. Beauty, he suggests, reaches our affections in ways that argument alone cannot. When we really see the beauty of Jesus, even the ordinary “foot washing” of our lives can begin to look different.

And then there is prayer. What happens when we’re disappointed with God, afraid to hope, or simply don't know how to pray? Paul’s answer is wonderfully uncomplicated: come like a child. Bring the real you to the real God.

Ultimately, this conversation is an invitation to know Jesus with the whole of who we are—to see him, love him, become like him, and discover his peculiar nearness even in suffering.

MORE ABOUT PAUL E. MILLER

Paul E. Miller has spent much of his life doing something remarkably simple, and increasingly rare: looking closely at Jesus.

Paul is the founder and executive director of seeJesus, a global discipleship ministry created to help Christians and non-Christians alike encounter the person of Jesus through Scripture. Today, seeJesus works in more than thirty countries through interactive Bible studies, seminars, mentoring, and discipleship resources. Paul is also the bestselling author of A Praying Life, J-Curve, Love Walked Among Us, A Loving Life, and A Praying Church, among other books and studies.

But Paul's work didn't begin primarily with books. He spent ten years teaching in inner-city Christian schools in Philadelphia and later helped start a school where he served as both principal and teacher. In the 1980s, he joined his father, pastor and theologian Jack Miller, in ministry and began developing discipleship courses. Eventually, Paul's fascination with the person of Jesus led him to found seeJesus in 1999.

Much of Paul's theology has also been forged in the ordinary, sometimes painful places of family life. He and his wife, Jill, have six children and fifteen grandchildren. Their daughter Kim was born with significant disabilities, including autism, and her life has profoundly shaped Paul's understanding of helplessness, prayer, love, suffering, and dependence on God.

In fact, some of Paul's deepest exploration of Jesus began with a question much closer to home. During a difficult season of marriage, Jill asked him, “Do you love me?” Paul realized that he knew he loved his wife, but he wasn't entirely sure he understood what love actually looked like. So he went back to the Gospels and began watching Jesus.

That practice—slowing down, paying attention, noticing how Jesus sees and loves people—has shaped Paul's ministry ever since. His writing invites us beyond merely knowing truths about Jesus into attentiveness to Jesus himself: his compassion and honesty, his dependence on the Father, his way of loving people, and the pattern of dying and rising that he invites us to share.

Paul and Jill live in the Philadelphia area, and Paul hosts the Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller podcast.

More at https://seejesus.net/

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