October 25: Groups Guide

About This Guide

The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.

Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.

pdf download

Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.

Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.

more Resources

Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.

Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.

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Love

Teaching Text: John 14:14–18

You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

“If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.

2 Corinthians 3:17–18

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his imagewith ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

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Themes

Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:

• A Living Communion

• The Invitation to Experience Communion – Friendship with God and Each Other

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• “Is the spiritual world real?”

• Not just real. God shapes and defines reality. That’s why we’re here.

• All fall we’re looking at: a living communion. Friendship with the risen Jesus as the lifeblood of our faith. Fr. Charbel Abernethy calls it:

  “The terrifying and beautiful possibility of becoming wholly alive in God.”

• The problem? For most of us, it gets compartmentalized. One box in a busy life. Pressure, distraction, busyness. Not outright rebellion. Just life.

• But what we look at matters. We become what we behold.

• The resistance is real. Scripture names three kinds: flesh, world, devil.

  • Personal. Our inner habits. Living as our own gods. Meeting our deepest needs from our own resources. Called sin.

  • Systemic. Evil ingrained in culture until we just call it life. Radical individualism. Economies built on exploitation. Porn out-earning medicine. More on bombs than education.

  • Spiritual. Real forces. Deception, temptation, accusation. The see-saw: “It’s no big deal, you deserve it, who will know” … then “What kind of person are you? You’ll never change.”

• It doesn’t look the same everywhere. Friends on the Tibetan frontier, in the slums of India after the tsunami: spiritual attack was a given. Moving back from Western China, the contrast was stark. We in the developed world just don’t expect it.

• The cost of not living in communion is real, too. Growing up I was warned about shows, music, movies. Didn’t take it seriously. Then: massive anxiety attacks in college. Years of rethinking. Gentle with myself, but I made changes. My mentor took me to Philippians 4:8 — whatever is true, noble, pure, lovely, excellent, think on these things. More worship music. More care in what I watched and read. And it helped. Not legalism. Like breathing fresh air.

• The Gospel in two texts.

  • First move: Jesus shows us what God is like. Michael Ramsey: “God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all.”

  • Second move: Jesus is leaving, and the disciples are shaken. He says: “I will not leave you as orphans.” Then the shocker: “It is for your good that I am going away.” Good?! Yes. The Spirit comes. The Spirit always lifts up Jesus.

    • “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled faces, contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image.”

• We look at Jesus. By the Spirit, we are transformed.

• Attention shapes life. Prayer is attention on God. Can’t focus? Start where you are. Pray how you can, not how you can’t.

• This week: “He rescued me because he delighted in me” (Ps 18:19). Do you think of God that way?

• Three implications:

  • Look to Jesus to know what God is like, especially when you forget. When the enemy whispers “Is God really like that?” When delay feels like cruelty. When you’re defined by your failure. The Son is the exact representation of God (Heb 1:3). The Cross: love crucified. “It is finished.” Not “it’s nearly done. Good luck. Be better.” The veil is torn. Look with unveiled faces.

  • Worship is lifting our gaze. Gratitude leads to worship. Worship leads to gratitude. Body and soul together. Romans 12: offer your bodies as a living sacrifice; be transformed by the renewing of your mind, then you can know and approve God’s will.

  • Prayer is the gift of attention, yours and God’s. Where does your mind go most? Can it come back to God each day? You can reset a day at any moment. The most important opportunity of every day: communion with God.

• Can’t see him? Ask. Look in the Gospels. Have a friend pray for you. Ask for a filling of the Holy Spirit.

Direct Quotes

• “Modern civilization, at least in much of the developed world, increasingly wages war upon the inner life itself. Attention fragments continually. Silence disappears. The imagination becomes saturated with images. The nervous system remains overstimulated. The person exists in a state of continual distraction and reaction. This warfare often appears invisible because it has become normalized culturally.”

  — Fr. Charbel Abernethy

• “[Fallen humanity] exists in a state of dispersion. The mind scatters outwardly through the passions. Attention fragments continually. Desire becomes unstable. The heart loses inward unity. Modern civilization intensifies this condition dramatically because technology now externalizes distraction on a civilizational scale.”

  — Fr. Charbel Abernethy

• “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.”

  — John Piper, Desiring God (1986)

• “Pray with your body at certain times each day, and your soul eventually catches up.”

  — Tish Harrison Warren

• “Act your gratitude; pantomime your thanks; you will become that which you do.”

  — Eugene Peterson

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Where does my attention go most often? Think about the last 24 hours: what filled your mind, your eyes, your ears? Ask Jesus to show you what’s been shaping you, without shame, and what one small change might feel like fresh air.

2. What do I really believe God is like? When you’re tired, behind, or ashamed, whose voice do you hear: Christ’s, or the see-saw of rationalization and shame? Bring the picture in your head to Jesus and ask him to show you the Father as he truly is.

3. How can I lift my gaze today? Worship might be gratitude, a posture, a prayer with your body at a set time. What is one simple, doable way to come back to God when the day scatters you? Pray how you can, not how you can’t.

“And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

— 2 Corinthians 3:18

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October 18: Groups Guide

About This Guide

The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.

Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.

pdf download

Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.

Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.

more Resources

Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.

Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.

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Love

Teaching Text: John 3: 12–17

I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

1 Corinthians 2: 1–2

And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

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Themes

Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:

• A Living Communion

• The Love That Is God

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• I like to imagine Nicodemus sneaking his way towards where he’d heard Jesus was staying. Scanning the street nervously. Did he try to disguise himself a little?

• Many of us know that feeling. Intrigued by Jesus. Heard some things. Maybe had some experiences of God. But not exactly hoping someone from work sees us walking in.

• And out of this nervous, curious conversation at night comes the most famous verse in the New Testament: John 3:16. Followed by John 3:17: God did not send His Son to condemn the world, but to save it.

• What needs saving in the world? And how does God go about it?

• Nicodemus asks: Who are you? Jesus goes a level under the question: No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.

• You are born in the natural. Then you are born of the Spirit.

• The teaching text gives us three movements:

  • The Son of Man must be lifted up.

  • God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.

  • This gift is for salvation and eternal life.

• We were created for communion with God. What’s broken is that we don’t live that way. We live only by human resources (water birth), not alive in God. A Living Communion is what the Kingdom of God looks like in a life. And the climactic moment of that Kingdom is Jesus lifted up: the love that is God revealed as crucified love.

• “Jesus died for my sins.” True. Essential. But often heard as merely transactional. Slate wiped clean, now go try harder. Morally striving. Modifying behaviour. Grateful, maybe guilty. But living from relational distance.

• Jesus says it’s about being born in an entirely new way. A way that restores communion.

• Forgiveness without ongoing communion? We know from experience something’s missing.

• Ways the Church has seen the Cross:

  • Substitution (Yom Kippur): he who knew no sin became sin for us, so we might become the righteousness of God.

  • Ransom (Exodus): brought out from the hold of sin, death and evil.

  • Recapitulation: Jesus became what we are so we could become what he is.

  • Christus Victor: Christ’s victory over sin and death, which we share through union with him.

  • Representation (Second Adam): Jesus identified with us “all the way down.”

  • Supreme Expression of God’s Love: a love that generates regenerative love in us, so we take up the cross and serve.

• Don’t pick one. Scripture holds them all (see Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement). The redemption we need, and the world needs, is thorough and complete.

• Colossians 2 puts several together. The Cross:

  • Forgives us

  • Cancels our legal indebtedness

  • Removes condemnation

  • Publicly disarms the powers and authorities

  • Wins a victory that faith gives us a share in

• Much American Christianity holds a mainly courtroom vision. God lets us off the hook, and we go our way grateful. But we don’t walk in the victory. We don’t live in restored communion. We barely believe how ongoingly loved we are.

• Sin is not only transgression. It’s an illness of the soul. And the gospel is for healing.

• So what does this mean for your salvation?

• Forgiven. Free. Victorious. Known by name. Sharing a future with God. Born of the Spirit. Able to resist what once held you captive.

• And being healed. Slowly but surely. Old wounds. False identities. Crushed by shame. The Cross addresses these.

• Jesus says: come and die, and live.

• For you. For me. For the whole world. At every level.

• And it shapes us as a community. We come to the Cross as a healing community. We go into the world in sacrificial love, laying our lives down to really receive them. For our neighbours. Dare I say, even our enemies.

• The Cross is not just a legal argument, though it can be that. It’s an invitation into communion. To walk in the Garden, like the thief heard.

• Broken and poured out? You’ll need the endless supply of the Holy Spirit. But friends, this is life to the full.

Direct Quotes

• “The ‘kingdom of God’ is a way of talking about the restoration of creation through God’s will being done in this world in the same way that God’s will is accomplished in heaven; it is an image of how the darkness of this world could be lifted if people would turn away from—repent of—living solely for themselves and turn back to living for the God who is love. What Jesus calls the good news is his proclamation that this is beginning to come to pass, the kingdom is drawing near. It is drawing near in the words and actions of Jesus himself.”

  — Frederick Bauerschmidt

• “The healing and transfiguration of the human person through communion with the living God.”

  — Fr. Charbe Abernethy

• “Through the forgiveness of sins the gospel breaks through the compulsive acts of sinners which are the enemies of life, cutting sinners loose from sin, and creating the possibility of ‘conversion,’ a turn to life. Through the justification of sinners, the gospel brings men and women who are closed in upon themselves into the open love of God. Through rebirth from the Spirit, it brings people who have been subject to death into touch with the eternal source of life, setting them in the closer framework of the rebirth of human community and against the wider horizon of the rebirth of the cosmos.”

  — Jürgen Moltmann

• “The kingdom of God, in short compass, is the society in which the will of God is established to transform all of life. The kingdom of God is more than what God is doing ‘within you’ and more than God’s personal ‘dynamic presence’; it is what God is doing in this world through the community of faith for the redemptive plans of God—including what God is doing in you and me. It transforms relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the world.”

  — Scot McKnight

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Am I living forgiven but distant?

   Have I treated the Cross as a transaction, a clean slate, and then gone back to striving on my own? Where do I feel relational distance from God, even though I believe I’m forgiven? What would it look like to come close instead of just trying harder?

2. Do I believe I am ongoingly loved?

   Not loved once, at a moment in the past, but loved today, right now. Which old wound, false identity or shame still speaks louder than the Cross? Can I bring it to Jesus this week and let him begin to heal it, slowly but surely?

3. Where is Jesus inviting me to die so that I can live?

   The life of communion is a poured-out life. Who is the neighbour, or even the enemy, God may be asking me to lay my life down for? And am I drawing on the Spirit’s endless supply, or running on my own resources?

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October 11: Groups Guide

About This Guide

The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.

Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.

pdf download

Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.

Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.

more Resources

Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.

Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.

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Love

Teaching Text: John 17: 1–5

After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:

“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

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Themes

Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:

• A Living Communion

• The Rich Welcome and Deep Belonging in the Heart of Christ

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• A wedding photo, twenty-two years old:

  There’s a shot across the room at our wedding reception where my dad and I are giving each other thumbs up. It could be nothing really. The simplest gesture… My dad is crying, which I had not seen him do for most of my life… My father would be dead in six months. Things were culminating. Things were changing forever. There was celebration. There were tears. There was a kind of grief at an era’s ending. And the picture shows a thumbs up.

• A simple moment holding layers of story. That’s John 17.

• Jesus goes to prayer, as His custom was. But this prayer gathers threads from across the ages. And it opens with: “Father, the hour has come.”

• The meal is done. A betrayal is underway. Soldiers are coming. Agony, a false trial, a cross. All ahead.

• But “the hour” means more than this one night. As far back as we have record, this hour has been on its way.

  • The Garden. God makes garments of skin and clothes ashamed, hiding people. Tender and brutal. Something dies. God covers them, and there is a cost.

  • Abraham. A farmer walks out of Ur into the dark desert, toward a nameless, unseen God. God will pass healing through relationship. Through promises kept.

  • Jacob. On the run. Wrestles God. Gets a new name.

  • Moses. A shepherd in hiding becomes a liberator. Slowly. Almost against his will. And still, a lamb is slain.

  • The Prophets. The nation can’t carry its vocation. God never gives up. The best kings and prophets keep speaking a secret: a Servant who will be a light to the nations. Pierced for our transgressions. By his wounds we are healed.

• Hundreds of promises, all sketching the same face. All showing the fountain in the heart of God.

• Then in John 17 the curtain is pulled back further. We hear the conversation in the heart of the Trinity.

• Most of us piece God together in fragments. (Ask the sheep in The Sheep Detectives: a shepherd, a lamb, invisible, made of bread.) But is there a better place to learn God’s heart than listening in on the Son praying to the Father?

• God’s heart is to share God’s eternal life with us.

• Eternal life is to know God. Not just later. Right here, now.

• Jesus is finishing the work that has been in God’s heart from forever past.

• So what does that mean for us?

  • Bring this into the moments you question God’s care.

    Jesus asks for something he doesn’t get. Jesus experiences the Father turning away. How committed is God to healing the world? To healing your soul? This committed.

  • See the pattern for how God heals the world, and where we join in.

    Faithfulness. Sacrificial love. Integrity.

  • The commitment in the heart of God is our salvation. And it is our call to join in the renewal of all things.

• Is God’s heart showing up in ours? Our time. Our money. Our energy. How we pray. How we live.

• God keeps promises. God will finish what God started.

• Not so life gets a little better. So we share in the life of God. In actual choices.

• Pray. Communion.

Direct Quotes

• I like to imagine Abraham, looking every bit the madman, staring out into the frightening void of the dark desert. Feeling a pull, a powerful tow toward a nameless, unseen God. Behind him, all the might of the city, the walls of the grain storehouses. From the towering pyramid shaped temple he can hear the drums, screams, and pagan chanting. In his gut, the doubt, the conflicting emotions, the fear that everything he has believed until now is wrong. The city represented safety, comfort, the known. In front of him, the desert representing death, darkness, mystery, and the unknown. Then the resolution, the determination, the trust, followed by the first step, away from the city, away from Ur. The first step of faith into the unknown, into the arms of God.

  — Mark Sayers

• This ‘eternal life’, this life of the coming age, is not just something which people can have after their death. It isn’t simply that in some future state the world will go on for ever and ever and we shall be part of it. The point is, rather, that this new sort of life has come to birth in the world in and through Jesus. Once he has completed the final victory over death itself, all his followers, all who trust him and believe that he has truly come from the father, and has truly unveiled the father’s character and purpose—all of them can and will possess ‘eternal life’ right here and now.

  — N.T. Wright

• The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who…are identified as “Christians” will become disciples—students, apprentices, practitioners—of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.

  — Dallas Willard

• “So god is a big invisible lamb beaver made of bread?” “Yes, and they eat him on Sundays.” “Poor God.”

  — The Sheep Detectives

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Where am I questioning whether God really cares?

   Name the place where God has felt distant or silent. Then remember that Jesus prayed for a different cup and felt the Father turn away, and God’s commitment didn’t waver. Ask God to meet you there.

2. Do I know God, or only facts about God?

   Jesus says eternal life is knowing the Father and the Son. Think about whether your faith is built on fragments, or on time spent in his presence. What would it look like to listen in on his heart this week?

3. Is God’s heart visible in how I actually live?

   Look honestly at your calendar, your spending, your prayer life. Where are faithfulness, sacrificial love, and integrity already showing up? Where is God inviting you to join his work of renewal?

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October 4: Groups Guide

About This Guide

The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.

Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.

pdf download

Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.

Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.

more Resources

Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.

Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.

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Love

Teaching Text: Genesis 1:1-4

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty,darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

Matthew 3:16-17

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened,and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heavensaid, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

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Themes

Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:

• A Living Communion

• The Communion at the Heart of God

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• This year they made a movie of the Odyssey. Big posters. Jason Bourne as Odysseus. But the line that matters is buried in the middle. Odysseus goes down to the Underworld, and Achilles, the greatest Greek hero, tells him it wasn’t worth it. Dr. Martin Shaw sees Christ arriving right there:

  • I’ve long held the strange idea that the arrival of Christ begins in the middle of Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus visits the Underworld and Achilles tells him the following, the game is up for the old order: “Sooner be a slave to a poor man than King of the Underworld.” With these words, from the greatest of Greek heroes, the world turns… A shield is hurled on a stone floor. A fresh consciousness. Yeshua, the God-Man is coming. The last shall be first.

    — Dr. Martin Shaw

• Glory through heroic violence, chased all the way to the end. The telos had to change. The Odyssey is saying something about what breaks the world.

• Two scenes, creation and new creation, and in both we see God in conversation with God. What Dallas Willard called the Divine Conspiracy.

  • The Trinity at work in creation.

    • Bereshit bara Elohim. Elohim: plural, used as singular. A Creator (bara). A Spirit hovering over the deep like a fluttering bird. A Word speaking light into being.

    • Creator. Spirit. Word.

    • Order out of chaos. Tohu va-vohu, the formless void, separated and filled. Beauty. Majesty. Swarming, teeming abundance. Then: “Let us make humans in our likeness.”

    • The Trinity is creating not as a display of power or to make up for some lack, but in overflowing abundance.

    • Every other ancient Near Eastern story starts with gods at war. Not this one. No other conceived deity is like this.

    • But we forget. Give us long enough and we make God in our own image.

  • The Trinity at work in redemption.

    • The world breaks. And God sets out to repair it, not in spite of relationship, but through it. Pagan farmers get invitations. Sons become family, become a nation, become people of covenant. Isaiah speaks of one to come. Homer may even hint.

    • Then Yeshua shows up and breaks the categories again. Humble birth. A craftsman for thirty years. Baptized by His more famous cousin.

    • Heaven opens. The Father speaks. The Spirit descends like a bird, again. The Son comes up out of the water.

    • The Trinity, all the way at work in repair. In salvation. In healing.

    • Not arms crossed. Not petty and too busy. In the river. Under the water. Praying. Resisting the old liar from the Garden. Calling apprentices. Opening the way home for anyone who wants it

• We put scarcity in God. What if God isn’t too busy at all? It’s us that’s too busy, chasing kleos, imperishable glory, our own way.

• What if God abounds in so much love and attentiveness you could never reach the end of it?

• Shaw again. Years after a Lakota medicine man told him not to give up on Jesus, he spent 101 days offering stories in the forest as prayer. Last night, he looked up. A light fell from the sky, aimed straight at him. He went home sensing an invitation. Pursued. A month later, baptized in the river.

• If you’re looking for a world that isn’t a little strange, you’ve come to the wrong place. Or maybe you’ve mixed up what’s strange and what isn’t.

• You are made for communion with God. Not just church attendance. Not just a respectable life, good vacations, enough for retirement. Full communion with a God who loves you all the way.

• I am broken and poured out for you.

• May you be in this Triune Love. And may you learn to be broken and poured out too.

• Pray. Communion.

Direct Quotes

• “What comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

  — C.S. Lewis (as cited)

• “This is of particular significance in light of the fact that one of the inherent characteristics of all other ancient Near Eastern cosmologies is the internecine strife of the gods. Polytheistic accounts of creation always begin with the predominance of the divinized powers of nature and then describe in detail a titanic struggle between the opposing forces. They inevitably regard the achievement of world order as the outgrowth of an overwhelming exhibition of power on the part of one god who then manages to impose his will upon all other gods.”

  — Nahum M. Sarna

• “Jesus. We knew he was coming. We’d heard his words. Long before white folks told us. He was in Turtle Island too. Don’t give up on him now, he hasn’t given up on you.”

  — Wallace Black Elk

• “This is not what you expect to hear from a shaman. This is the last thing I would have wanted to hear. Having abandoned Christianity with full vigor at seventeen, coming from a house of preachers and signs and wonders, well, this was a wonder too much. I didn’t want to see the slim finger of the medicine man pointing to what I’d been running from.”

  — Dr. Martin Shaw

• “Then I did something I never do. I looked up. Past the trees into the sky. And it was then that I saw it… It was painfully beautiful, seemingly impossible. An arrow falling from the sky. I just couldn’t move… I sat up for the rest of the night, agape, ecstatic. I wasn’t frightened. I even danced.”

  — Dr. Martin Shaw

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. What comes into my mind when I think about God, and have I made Him in my own image?

   Notice the picture of God you actually carry day to day. Is He distant, annoyed, too busy for you? Hold that up against the delighting, abundant God of Genesis 1 and ask Him to show you who He really is.

2. Where am I still chasing my own version of imperishable glory?

   Achilles got to the end and found it empty. Name the achievement, image, or security you’re quietly building your life around. Ask what it would look like to trade it for communion.

3. Do I believe God has enough love and attention for me, right now?

   Maybe you’ve been saving God for when you’ve tried everything else. Sit with the Father’s words over the Son, “whom I love; with him I am well pleased,” and let yourself be invited home.

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September 20: Groups Guide

About This Guide

The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.

Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.

pdf download

Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.

Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.

more Resources

Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.

Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.

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Love

Teaching Text: John 13: 1–5

It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet,drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

Act 2: 42–47

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

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Themes

Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:

• In Brooklyn As It Is In Heaven

• Vision Series 2 | Formation x Tables

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• “The human spirit is an inescapable, fundamental aspect of every human being; and it takes on whatever character it has from the experiences and the choices that we have lived through or made in our past… The most despicable as well as the most admirable of persons have had a spiritual formation.”

  — Dallas Willard

• We don’t opt in or out of formation. It happens to all of us — family, wounds, friendships, stories, daily habits. They shape the spirit whether we notice or not.

• The real Gospel isn’t a transaction to believe your way into heaven — it’s an invitation into a lifelong, relational union with Jesus, formed at His table and in His body.

• American Christianity often reduces the Gospel to: believe in Jesus, get forgiven, go to heaven when you die. True as far as it goes — but it lets people become “Christian” without ever becoming a follower of Christ.

• That reduction causes real damage:

  • It’s barely in the New Testament — you have to strip verses out of context to build it.

  • It produces people who are passionate about being Christian while mostly ignoring Christ.

  • It confuses outsiders, who watch professed believers act nothing like Jesus.

  • It leaves believers bored and fruitless — same old life, no love, joy, peace, patience.

• A friend’s line captures it: Paul said to live is Christ and to die is gain. We’ve reversed it — to live is gain, to die is Christ. We live for ourselves and just expect Jesus to cover us at the end.

• Jesus never opens with a prayer to say. He opens Mark’s Gospel announcing the Kingdom is here — repent, believe, reorient your whole life. Then He teaches it, demonstrates it, lives it, and invites others into it. And when He calls His first followers, He doesn’t say “pray this and don’t forget my name.” He says:

  • Follow me.

  • That’s apprenticeship — being with Him, becoming like Him, doing what He did. And when He commissions the disciples at the end, He doesn’t send them to collect converts. He sends them to make apprentices — baptizing them into the life of the Trinity, teaching them to obey everything He commanded.

  • This is deeply relational grace. It’s a shared life, not just a forgiven one. We’re invited into union with the Triune God — the same life the Father, Son, and Spirit have shared from before time.

• And this union gets formed at the table. Jesus’s last, most formative night with His friends is a meal — where He gets up and washes their feet, showing them exactly what God’s love does: it takes the low place. Then the Spirit falls, the church is born, and they live it out — devoted to teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, prayer, radical generosity, showing up at each other’s tables. They were being formed in community, not on their own.

• You are being formed right now, whether you’re paying attention or not.

• So — the invitations:

  • Be formed by the meal of Jesus.

  • Don’t go alone — commit to a group to grow with.

  • Practice hospitality — invite others to your table.

  • Practice the way of Jesus intentionally, or be pulled by the currents of culture.
    

Direct Quotes

• To many in the West, a Christian is just someone who mentally ascribes to the bare bones of Christianity (a word never used in Scripture) and may or may not occasionally attend church.

  — John Mark Comer

• The word Christian is used only three times in the New Testament. To put that in perspective, the word disciple (or apprentice) is used 269 times, which comes as no surprise since the New Testament was written by apprentices of Jesus, for apprentices of Jesus.

  — John Mark Comer

• This is the gospel: God has drawn near to us in Jesus—us, we who are sinful, broken, wounded, mortal, dying, and incapable of self-saving… to draw us into His inner life, to heal us by immersing us within the fold of his Trinitarian love, and then to send us out into the world as agents of His love… This, then, is spiritual formation: the process of being formed into a person of self-giving love through deepening surrender to and union with the Trinity.

  — John Mark Comer

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Who or what has actually been forming your spirit lately? Not who you’d like to name, but the honest answer — the habits, screens, relationships, and stories shaping you day to day. .

2. Have you settled for believing in Jesus without following Him? Consider whether your faith has quietly become a belief you hold rather than a life you’re living with Him. Ask God to show you where “follow me” has gone unanswered.

3. Who’s at your table, and who is God inviting you to add? Think of one relationship where you could practice the kind of hospitality and foot washing love Jesus modeled. Ask Him for the courage to actually extend the invitation.

---

September 13: Groups Guide

About This Guide

The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.

Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.

pdf download

Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.

Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.

more Resources

Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.

Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.

---

Love

Teaching Text: Luke 23: 44–46

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.

Luke 24: 28-35

As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread.

Acts 4: 29-31

Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”

After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.

---

Themes

Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:

• In Brooklyn As It Is In Heaven

• Vision Series 1 | Presence x Altars

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• One of the first people we ever baptized was Emerson. He’d left TGC — back when we still met in the evenings — biking off to watch the series finale of Lost with friends. On the way, God overwhelmed him. He pulled his bike over, right there on the street, and surrendered his heart to Jesus.

• The curtain has been torn. God’s presence is no longer sealed off in a room — it’s ours to seek, every day, in the ordinary places of our lives.

• Trinity Grace turned 17 this week. Baptisms. Freedom from addiction. Marriages restored. Neighbors fed, rent paid, gardens grown out of abandoned lots. Mistakes too — ego, impatience, seasons of talking about prayer more than praying. Through all of it, God kept speaking. Break through will come in hospitality. Breathe. Pray. Prune. You are acquainted with grief, but anointed with joy.

• Every September we pause to remember who God has called us to be. In 2009, our first Sunday, we prayed Moses’s prayer: if your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. In 2019 God clarified our vision — Presence, Formation, and Love. In 2024, turning 15, that became Altars, Tables, and Gardens. Places we seek God. Places we grow together. Places we sow love.

• Three stories carry us there.

  • The curtain torn. When Jesus died, the temple curtain — the barrier that kept God’s holiness safely apart from an unholy people — tore in two. God’s presence was no longer confined to an inner room. It was loosed into the world.

  • The road to Emmaus. Two grieving disciples walk seven miles home, certain it’s over. Jesus walks with them before they recognize Him. Jesus might be with you before you even know it. Their hearts burned before their eyes opened.

  • The wait that became fire. The disciples don’t rush to the streets after seeing the risen Jesus — they wait. Then the presence that once filled a temple room fills a prayer meeting instead. Acts 2. Acts 4. A shaken room, a bold church, a Gospel that spreads because people got near to God first.

• The presence of God didn’t just give the early church a nice feeling — it gave them courage in the way of love.

• We can meet God anywhere now. But we still build altars — intentional places to seek Him: the bread and the cup, prayer with other believers, worship, the face of a neighbor in need.

• Complacency is deadly to spiritual growth. If deep longing for God feels far off, start there. Ask for it.

• Let’s receive the gift Christ has won for us. Let’s seek His presence — starting now.
  

Direct Quotes

• God wills that we should push on into His presence and live our whole lives there. This is to be known to us in conscious experience. It is more than a doctrine to be held, it is a life to be enjoyed… At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for his redeemed children to push into conscious awareness of His presence.

  — A.W. Tozer

• The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same. There can be one without the other. God is here when we are wholly unaware of it. He is manifest only when we are aware of His presence… If we cooperate with Him in loving obedience, God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face.

  — A.W. Tozer

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. How do you seek God’s presence? Think honestly about your week — where does seeking God actually show up? Not the ideal version, the real one. Is there a rhythm you could return to, or start?

2. How might God be reaching out to you right now? Before you rush past this, sit with it. A conversation, a burning heart, an unexplained nudge — where has God possibly already been walking beside you, unrecognized?

3. What distractions are keeping you from saying yes to God? Name them specifically, not generally. What would it look like to put one aside this week, on purpose, to make room?

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

— Luke 24:32

---

September 6: Groups Guide

About This Guide

The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.

Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.

pdf download

Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.

Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.

more Resources

Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.

Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.

---

Love

Teaching Text: Hebrews 13: 20–25

Now may the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him,through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Brothers and sisters, I urge you to bear with my word of exhortation, for in fact I have written to you quite briefly.

I want you to know that our brother Timothy has been released. If he arrives soon, I will come with him to see you.

Greet all your leaders and all the Lord’s people. Those from Italy send you their greetings.

Grace be with you all.

---

Themes

Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:

• Hebrews: A new and Living Way

• The Last Word

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• “Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now.” — The Dark Knight

  “So long, partner.” — Toy Story 3

  “I hope.” — The Shawshank Redemption

• Last words are weighty. It’s what you want to leave someone with — what holds together everything that’s gone before and ushers in what’s next. This closing benediction is the author’s last word: first about the God we’re engaging with, then to us, His hearers.

• Grace has the final word — not our circumstances, our ability, or our achievements.

• Five things this passage tells us about God:

  • The God who raises the dead (v. 20a) — our peace is secured through resurrection, not calm feelings or circumstances. If the worst thing that can be done to us has already been conquered, circumstances no longer master us.

  • The Shepherd who leads (v. 20b) — His nature is to be a present help, not to leave us alone once we’re in trouble.

  • The covenant that holds (v. 20c) — eternal, sealed in Christ’s blood. We trust the covenant because we trust the One who made it.

  • He equips for the task (v. 21a) — His nature isn’t to expect too much of us; He supplies what He commands.

  • The glory that is due (v. 21b) — doctrine should end in doxology. What we believe about Christ should end in praise, not just information.

• From there, five takeaways — the author’s last word to us:

  • Trust God who finishes what He starts (v. 20) — resurrection and eternal covenant guarantee permanence, not just a good start. Don’t lose heart in the middle.

  • Need equipping, not just effort (v. 21) — sanctification is God “working in us,” not self-generated willpower.

  • Receive correction well (v. 22) — spiritual maturity includes the ability to bear with exhortation instead of resenting it.

  • Need people, not just principles (vv. 23–24) — Timothy, leaders, saints, strangers “from Italy.” Faith is communal to the last line. The kingdom of God moves along relational lines, far and wide.

  • Grace as the last word (v. 25) — the letter that warned most sternly (chapters 6, 10, 12) ends in unearned favor. That’s the gospel pattern — not karma.

• Grace means it’s okay to wrestle with the “am I enough?” questions. Grace means I’m not alone. Grace means I’m equipped by an outside force to be more than I’d be on my own.

• We have a God who raises the dead, who remains near to guide, who secures the future by covenant. He finishes what He started. And most tangibly, that grace has come in the form of human beings — this community, through immigrant journeys, children’s milestones, hardship, sickness. Christ in you.

• Not my circumstances. Not my ability. Not my resources or reputation. Not my achievements. Not my enoughness.

• Grace has the final word.
  

Direct Quotes

• “Grace is something you can never get but only be given… There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.”

  — Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

• “I do not at all understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are, but does not leave us where it found us.”

  — Anne Lamott

• “Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.”

  — Karl Barth

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Am I resting in the resurrection, or trying to manufacture my own peace? Think of whatever feels overwhelming right now. In light of eternity — and the resurrection — how does it actually measure up? Ask God to help you place it inside that bigger reality rather than let it be the final word.

2. Where am I resisting equipping in favor of relying on my own willpower? Sanctification is God working in you, not you white knuckling your way to holiness. Where have you been treating grace like a self improvement project instead of a gift you receive?

3. Who have been the conduits of grace in my life — and have I told them? Name the people who showed up for you in hard seasons: who encouraged, prayed, cried, or celebrated with you. Consider reaching out this week just to say thank you.

“Now may the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

— Hebrews 13:20–21

---

August 23: Groups Guide

About This Guide

The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.

Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.

pdf download

Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.

Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.

more Resources

Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.

Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.

---

Love

Teaching Text: Hebrews 12:18–29

You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm; to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them, because they could not bear what was commanded: “If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned to death.” The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, “I am trembling with fear.”

But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

See to it that you do not refuse him who speaks. If they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we turn away from him who warns us from heaven? At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” The words “once more” indicate the removing of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our “God is a consuming fire.”

---

Themes

Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:

• Hebrews: A new and Living Way

• Unshakeable Kingdom

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• “I have found it to be rather inscrutable — just quite difficult for me to read and understand.”

  That’s the honest confession Jackie opens with about Hebrews. It’s a letter written to people who aren’t us — shared language, shared culture, a world of Old Testament “hyperlinks” we don’t catch anymore. But read straight through, one thing leaps off the page: urgency. The author is grabbing his friends by the shoulders, looking them in the eye, and saying: don’t turn back now.

• Don’t give up on Jesus. Fix your eyes.

• Three Old Testament hyperlinks carry the argument:

  • We have not come to a mountain that can be touched, but to Mount Zion (Hebrews 12:18–24). At Sinai, Israel stood far off, terrified — touch the mountain and you die (Exodus 19–20). Under the new covenant, that distance is gone. Jesus’s blood speaks a better word than Abel’s — it says “it is finished.” The veil is torn. We get to come all the way in.

  • Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens (Hebrews 12:26–28). This echoes Haggai’s word to a discouraged, rebuilding people, and Daniel’s vision of a kingdom that crushes every other kingdom and never ends. What we build for God’s kingdom — however small it looks — cannot be shaken. Sandwiches made, prayers prayed, strangers welcomed as family: it lasts forever.

  • Our God is a consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:23–24; Hebrews 12:29). A warning against idols, but also a promise. The closer you get to God, the more He burns away what isn’t useful — not to destroy you, but to refine you.

• Pain and suffering now? Last gasps of a kingdom that’s passing away. Keep building.
  

Direct Quotes

• “It may not look like what you thought it would look like, but KEEP working, God is WITH YOU.”

  — Unshakeable Kingdom

• “These things might seem small, but God is saying over every bit of work you do to build the kingdom: it’s good and that goodness will last forever.”

  — Unshakeable Kingdom

• “In Jesus, the promise is refinement, not destruction.”

  — Unshakeable Kingdom

• “We were made for loving communion with God. And anything that we seek to replace that essential relationship with — all other things we run after or give our hearts to (even good things) — will be a destructive force in our life.”

  — Unshakeable Kingdom

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Where am I still standing far off from God, afraid to come all the way in? Think about the areas of your life you keep at arm’s length from him — shame, fear, the need for control. Ask him tonight what it would look like to walk past the veil.

2. What am I building that feels small but might be exactly what God calls good? A meal served, a prayer prayed, a stranger welcomed. Sit with the truth that faithfulness in hidden things is never wasted in his kingdom.

3. What is God trying to burn away in me right now, and can I trust it’s for refinement, not destruction? Name the discomfort or trial you’re facing. Ask whether you’re resisting God’s fire out of fear, or letting it produce a genuine, proven faith.

“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you.

— Isaiah 54:10

---

August 16: Groups Guide

About This Guide

The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.

Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.

pdf download

Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.

Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.

more Resources

Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.

Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.

---

Love

Teaching Text: Hebrews 12:4–17

In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son? It says,

“My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline,
    and do not lose heart when he rebukes you,
because the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
    and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.”

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all.Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. “Make level paths for your feet,” so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.

Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many. See that no one is sexually immoral, or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son. Afterward, as you know, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. Even though he sought the blessing with tears, he could not change what he had done.

---

Themes

Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:

• Hebrews: A new and Living Way

• The Faithfulness of Christ

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• Pastor Tyler opened with Mike Schur — the guy behind The Office, Parks and Rec, and

  Brooklyn Nine-Nine. In 2015, NBC gave him a blind 13-episode order, no pitch required.

  What he came back with was strange:

  • A woman named Eleanor Shellstrop dies and realizes she has accidentally been

    sent to “The Good Place” due to a case of mistaken identity. To avoid being sent to “The Bad Place,” she must hide her deeply flawed past. She convinces her

    designated soulmate, a moral philosophy professor, to secretly tutor her in ethics

    so she can earn her spot and learn how to be a truly good person.

  • Four seasons in, there were plenty of moments where viewers had no idea where the plot was headed. But trust in Schur as the showrunner kept people watching to the end.

• That’s the posture Hebrews asks of a tired, persecuted church: trust the ultimate Director, even when the plot of your life feels painful, confusing, and overwhelming.

• Our faithfulness doesn’t rest on our strength or willpower — it rests on the faithfulness of Christ.

  • The call to faithfulness — our duty (vv. 4, 12–14). The Hebrews have been shamed, stripped of property, imprisoned — weary but still alive. “Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees” (v. 12) picks up the race language from 12:1. Fix your eyes on the track. Keep going. The call is to be faithful to Jesus no matter the cost — for some, to the point of martyrdom.

  • The cost of faithfulness — our struggle (vv. 5–11). Discipline sounds harsh to modern ears, especially given how these verses have been twisted to justify abuse. But in the ancient world, discipline meant education, training, formation. God isn’t striking in anger — He’s training us for endurance, and He’s in the fight with us as it happens. Illustration: watching other people’s kids at the park, deciding how much to invest — and Sandy Cohen taking in Ryan Atwood on The O.C., giving him both the privilege and the accountability of being a true son. That’s how God parents us: not as orphans, but as children He refuses to leave untouched.

  • The community of faithfulness — our shared responsibility (vv. 14–17). Faithfulness isn’t just personal — it’s a team effort. Pursue peace: not passive silence, but active peacemaking with everyone. Watch for bitterness: it doesn’t stay contained, it defiles the whole group. Guard against the “Esau Syndrome” — trading a lifelong inheritance for a bowl of soup, a short-term appetite satisfied at the cost of the long-term promise.

  • The faithfulness of Christ — His accomplishment (vv. 1–3). Here’s the turn. Everything in verses 4–17 depends on verses 1–3. We don’t strive for holiness to earn God’s love — we endure because we are already His beloved children. Jesus didn’t just teach us how to run the race. He ran it first, bore the weight of sin, and sat down victorious at the right hand of God.

• Where are you resisting faithfulness because the cost feels too high? Where are you tempted to trade the long game for a little relief right now?

• Lift your drooping hands. Strengthen your weak knees. Stop staring at your exhausted legs

  — fix your eyes on Christ. Trust the story God is writing, even in the chapters you’d love to skip. The faithfulness of Christ has already secured your finish line.
  

Direct Quotes

• “In this remark the author braces the addressees for what their imitation of

  Christ’s endurance might ultimately involve.”

  — Harold Attridge, Hebrews: A Commentary

• “By portraying God as the one who disciplines... the author places God in the

  midst of their difficulty. Not as its cause — the ultimate problem is sin — but as its

  Sovereign. God is not distant, simply watching the child struggle; God is in the ring

  with the child, allowing and shaping the blows so that they do not destroy but

  only strengthen... God’s complete knowledge and trustworthiness assert that

  God’s use of discipline will never succumb to anger or foolishness... God knows

  all things and is working them for the best.”

  — Amy Peeler, Hebrews: Commentaries for Christian Formation

• “...a very hard text...” that “...certainly has been misused.”

  — Amy Peeler, on Hebrews 12:4–17

• “Sometimes the best intentions are in need of redemption.”

  — Ben Gibbard, “You Are a Tourist,” Death Cab for Cutie

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Where am I resisting God’s call to faithfulness right now because the cost feels too

   steep? Name the specific struggle, relationship, or obedience you’ve been avoiding. Ask God

   honestly whether you’re protecting yourself or actually trusting him with it.

2. Am I leaning on my own strength to endure, or resting in the faithfulness of Christ?

   Notice where you’ve been trying to white-knuckle your way through discipline or hardship.

   Consider what it would look like this week to fix your eyes on Jesus instead of your own

   effort.

3. Is there a root of bitterness taking hold in me — toward God, toward the church, or

   toward my circumstances? Bitterness rarely announces itself; it grows quietly. Ask God to

   show you where it’s already spreading, and what it would mean to pursue peace instead.

“Looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was

set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right

hand of the throne of God.”
— Hebrews 12:2, NRSV

---

August 9: Groups Guide

About This Guide

The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.

Join a weekly group for a meaningful way to connect to our community.

pdf download

Download this PDF to help you make a plan to follow Jesus in your everyday life, including diagnostic questions to help get you started.

Pickup a print version at our weekly in-person Sunday gatherings.

more Resources

Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.

Questions about the series or looking for a way to get involved? Contact us.

---

Love

Teaching Text: Hebrews 12:1–3

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

---

Themes

Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:

• Hebrews: A new and Living Way

• Fixing Our Eyes on Jesus

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• “I remember sitting at the old Fairway grocery in Red Hook, telling Allison: I want to write a letter to our closest friends for why we are staying.”

  • That’s where this week’s message started — a train ride back from a concert in 2015, word arriving that close friends who’d helped plant the church were leaving New York. It wasn’t the only exit. 2017 brought a painful reorganization. 2018 brought tragedy — children in the congregation dying suddenly. 2020 brought a pandemic and a racial reckoning. 2023 brought the loss of four staff members. Each departure understandable. Maybe even right, for them.

• There is a compounding joy in staying — in continuing, in not giving up. Hebrews 12 calls us to run our race the same way: remembering we’re not alone, throwing off what entangles us, and fixing our eyes on Jesus.

• Eighteen weeks in Hebrews, since Easter. The letter has shown us Jesus as messenger, as fulfillment of the law, as the true tabernacle — pulling every thread of the story together. Now, after walking through the hall of faith, the author turns and says: now you.

  • Know you are not alone. “Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses.” The enemy loves to isolate — to convince you that no one else has faced what you’re facing. But a great cloud of witnesses has endured every shade of pain, disappointment, and grief before you. They would tell you it’s worth it.

  • Be ruthless with what hinders your freedom. “Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.” Not just the obvious sins — the addiction, the temper, the envy — but the hindrances too. The wasted time. The good things used to avoid your calling. The excuses built to dodge the growth that’s supposed to be painful. Sin that we repeatedly choose drains our life.

  • Fix the gaze of your soul on Jesus. “Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” He is the Author and Finisher — the place we’re going and the way we get there. He endured the cross for the joy set before Him: the joy of completing our redemption, the joy of bringing us into the family.

• We’re being invited into a kingdom that cannot be shaken, into friendship with our King, into a family with all the redeemed — and we get glimpses of it now. In baptisms. In meal trains. In back-to-school drives. In sunlight on the water at Jacob Riis.

• Don’t give up. Don’t let go. Don’t turn back. Sometimes the very best thing you can do is keep your eyes on Jesus and not give up.
  

Direct Quotes

• “A long obedience in the same direction.”

  — Eugene Peterson 

• “Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.”

  — A saint of a previous generation 

• “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no human mind has conceived the things God has prepared for those who love him.”

  — Quoted from 1 Corinthians,

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Where do you feel most alone in your struggle right now? Sit with the truth that a great cloud of witnesses has walked through this same shade of pain before you. Ask God to help you feel less isolated in whatever you’re carrying, and consider who in your own life might be part of that cloud for you.

2. What is weighing you down or costing you the freedom Christ has given you? Not just the obvious sin, but the hindrances — the distractions, the excuses, the good things you use to avoid growth. Ask God to show you honestly what needs to be thrown off.

3. Where has the gaze of your soul been fixed lately? Notice what you’ve actually been looking at — circumstances, comparison, fear — versus Jesus. Ask Him to draw your eyes back to Him in your imagination, your prayer, and your reading of Scripture this week.

“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.”
— Hebrews 12:1–2

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