Thaw
- Have you ever made a team or been part of an organization and had no idea how you did it?
- Have you ever had a person show interest in you, and it didn't make sense; you couldn't understand what they saw. Maybe you even thought you were being tricked?
- Have you ever had a church experience where you reminded that you hadn't made the cut and were treated, as you perceived it, as an outcast? Explain.
- What stuck with you most from the message on Sunday?
- What's one thing that you feel like God is trying to get you to act on?
Read
- Matthew 4:23-5:16
- Thoughts?
- As you put yourself on that hillside, what do you imagine people were feeling? How about the poor people? Rich people? The Educated? The Illiterate? The Weak? The Mighty?
Leader note: You may want to note thatsalt has many uses: it's added to food to give it a lot more flavor, obviously. It's also added to meat in a pre-Frigidaire society to stave off rot and decomposition...catch that? Salt drives out decay! It also was added to manure for the purposes of creating hotter, brighter fire light. Again, another sermon in that use alone- salt makes waste useful!
- Where do you imagine Jesus proclaiming this today? What geographic place, and to what group of people?
Read
- 1 Corinthians 1:26-30
- Thoughts?
- Why would God recruit the seemingly unrecruitable to do the most important work on the planet?
- What about God's work is undone by reversing His method, and utilizing the upper tier of society to make His way known?
Leader note: Acts 4:13 is a great example of God using comparatively lowly people to do His work. The words "unschooled, ordinary men" in Greek are agrammatos kai idiotes....unlettered idiots.
Read
- Isaiah 53:2-3
- Hebrews 4:15
- Thoughts?
- What do you suppose changes for someone when they realize that Jesus entered into solidarity with humanity by way of real suffering, weakness, temptation and struggle?
- What do you think our view of Jesus would have been if He'd come in strength, comfort, respect and position?
Discuss
- What about your life communicates solidarity with humanity?
- What about your life communicates that you follow a jesus that descends down the mountain and into other's lives?
- What about your life would you guess others point to and and say "they've really been honest and real about where they come from, and Jesus seems to really have made an impact in them and through them"?
- What changes of thought and living need to happen in order for you to be more connected to your own reality, and the reality of others?
- What views do you hold about the church that are inaccurate based on their reinforcing the loftiness and perfection of it, as an inaccessible institution? What needs to shift in your mind and how does that affect your involvement with it?
- What areas are you hoping to "clean up" before you accept Christ's invitation to descend the hillside and dive into real life; yours and other's?
- How can this group help you take steps in surrendering yourself now, verses when you think you have it all together?
- How can this group work together to reclaim the beauty of Jesus' open invitation to be real, and get behind Him?
Prayer
- Spend some time reflecting on the mood on that hillside, and then thinking about our modern context. Pray that God would open our eyes and help us understand that God is not asking us to get fit before we start exercising, not is he asking us to come and fill our heads with a bunch of information and then pretend like that was the whole point. Pray that God would show you that this is about messy people walking behind perfection, and in so doing, being the most sincere, humble, honest and grounded people in the world. pray that we would be, in that, just like Jesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment