As such, consider strongly this particular message on the temple of God and how it pertains to our view of what it means to participate in God's life. In your group time, as the leader, look for ways to help your members step more into what it means to be part of what God is up to, to cease from an observational role in the church, and to stop discounting themselves because of the seemingly natural inclination to rate themselves up against what they assume to be super-christians.
Additionally, this would be a great week to take communion as a group. The paradox of the Body of Christ is that it celebrates membership by consumption of the Body of Christ. Many of us have grown up in Christian contexts where this is a foreign concept. Communion, or the Eucharist, can only be headed by someone with the clearance for such a job. However, in the scriptures and in the truest tradition of the early church, communion is the eating of bread and drinking of juice/wine and celebrating what Christ, the head of the Body, has been doing in our lives. We need to celebrate every time LifeGroups take on the function of the church where study, prayer, service, growing mindfulness, baptism and communion are concerned. Enjoy! (It is not recommended that you drink wine, or any other alcohol for that matter, until you are 100% confident that none of the members of your group struggle with addiction or have loved ones that do and feel negatively about it. Grape juice is equal to fine for communion.)
Thaw
- Where is your childhood home? What is special about it?
- Did you have friends that had houses that were known by other kids as "the go to" house? What made it special?
- Why are living spaces so important to human beings?
- When you think about how much of human history has to do with buildings to dwell and live in (from castles to holes in the ground), what might the absence of any mention of Jesus' house in the scriptures be teaching us?
Read
- Gen 1:2 (God's Spirit is immediately present over creation from the beginning.)
- Gen 3:8 (In the midst of the Fall, we see God's dwelling is with people directly)
- Exodus 25:8-9
- John 1:14
- Rev 21:1-3 (a return to what was originally intended)
- Thoughts?
Leader note: The New Testament word translated "dwell" or dwelt" is actually the verb form of tent. "Tabernacled" is the idea.
Read
- 1 Corinthians 6:19
- Thoughts?
Discuss
- A progression of understanding seems to take us from the idea that God lives in a tent, to God lives in us even as we make tents. Do you consciously live as though God lives in and through you, or do you hold to the older idea that God lives somewhere else?
- What are the implications of your answer to the previous question?
- What are the implications for members of your group, or a church, or a faith tradition, having different answers to this question?
Read
- Acts 17:22-28
- Thoughts?
- Many of us want to hold to the idea that God only lives in or near good people, or forgiven people. But Paul taught people seemingly "far from God" that they aren't as far as they thought. Discuss the idea that Christian people are aware (where other people are less so) of the God that is always in our midst and what that means for our real, day-to-day, outside the tent and temple lives.
Apply
- What happens to our faith and our real life as we begin to believe that we actually harbor God's Spirit, whether we were previously awake to it or not?
- How can we help each other wake up to this?
- How does our unity play into our discovery that Alight God wants to be known in our collective midst?
Leader note: This may be a good time to talk about forgiveness between us, a lack of gossip, the removal of cynicism and divisiveness, etc. All of these things separate us and block our awareness that a united Humanity was always God's goal.
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