CITY FOLK: To Everyone on the Hill.

Thaw

• Have you ever made a team or been part of an organization and had no idea how you did it?, or 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? You know, like Carrie. Share the experience.

• What stuck with you most from Sunday?
• What has shifted in your faith or outlook as you have considered the message?

Read

• Matthew 4:23-5:16
• Thoughts?
• As you put yourself on that hillside, what do you imagine people were feeling?

Leader note: You may want to note that salt 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. Yes, people used to burn poop for light and heat. Now we burn former dinosaurs!

Read

• 1 Corinthians 1:26-30
• Thoughts?
• Why would God recruit the seemingly unrecruitable to do what would be considered the most important work God would have people do?

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?

Read

• Matthew 22:34-40
• Thoughts?
• If love of others is the main idea, then why do so many of us think the main idea is to become the people God wants us to be, or else?

Discuss

• What about your life communicates solidarity and compassion with the human experience, rather than trying to be more moral, or trying to get others to be?
• 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? Where did you get the idea that this was "dirty" or offended God?
• How can this group help you take steps in being a person who loves and offers compassion now, verses when you think you have it all together?
• In what ways do you doubt that the "love of other as self" is powerful enough to deal with sin and error and foolishness and brokenness, to God's standard?

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.