Introduction & ice breaker
Recall a most embarrassing moment in your life to your group.
Themes to Consider
At times the Good News about Jesus not being seen as Good news at all. It was seen as….
IMPOSSIBLE
OFFENSIVE
or IRRELEVANT
Salvation, Healing, Generosity, Joy, Meals, Friendship, Taking Care of Neighbors - these signs of the Kingdom of God were breaking out
LOVE that’s not just sentimentality ALWAYS INVOLVES LIMITING CHOICES.
THERE IS NO ONE WHO TRULY WANTS TO COME TO CHRIST AND SURRENDER TO HIS LOVE WHO IS NOT PERMITTED
If we peel back the layers and we end with a Americanized moral therapeutic deism (JESUS AS OPTIONAL LIFE COACH OR THERAPIST) instead of the fiery eyed wildly loving Jewish Messiah JESUS who became King through death we have lost WHAT IS TRULY LIFE
The early christians had been with Jesus
This was a movement of ordinary people made extraordinary by God’s presence and love
Being with Jesus is different that having the right ideas about God in your head….
THERE PLACES WERE SHAKEN THEIR LIVES WERE FILLED
To do:
Ask to be filled with the Spirit everyday
Have a group you expect God with
Have a group you process the trouble with
Know it is not too late for you - the man who was healed was 40
Be bold - people are bold for so much less
Discussion Questions
How do you feel about the Gospel seeming impossible, offensive, or irrelevant?
How do people normally find out you are a christian?
How do you react in life when people hear you are a christian?
Guided Prayer
In Acts 4, the believers faced great opposition to their faith. This was their prayer. Pray it with them today.
When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:
“‘Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the Lord
and against his anointed one.’
Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. 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.”
Supplemental Content
“It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. It means that we don’t believe in dinosaurs. It means that we’re dogmatic. That we’re self-righteous. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die. That we’re bleeding hearts who don’t understand the wealth-creating powers of the market. That we’re too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we uphold the nuclear family, with all its micro-tyrannies and imprisoning stereotypes. That we’re the hairshirted enemies of the ordinary family pleasures of parenthood, shopping, sex and car ownership. That we’re savagely judgemental. That we’d free murderers to kill again. That we think everyone who disagrees with us is going to roast for all eternity.”
“That we’re infantile and can’t do without an illusory daddy in the sky. That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in young minds. That we oppose freedom, human rights, gay rights, individual moral autonomy, a woman’s right to choose, stem cell research, the use of condoms in fighting AIDS, the teaching of evolutionary biology. Modernity. Progress. That we think everyone should be cowering before authority. That we sanctify the idea of hierarchy.”
““That we’re the villains in history, on the wrong side of every struggle for human liberty. That if we sometimes seem to have been on the right side of one of said struggles, we weren’t really; or the struggle wasn’t about what it appeared to be about; or we didn’t really do the right thing for the reasons we said “we did. That we’ve provided pious cover stories for racism, imperialism, wars of conquest, slavery, exploitation. That we’ve manufactured imaginary causes for real people to kill each other. That we’re stuck in the past. That we destroy tribal cultures. That we think the world’s going to end. That we want to help the world to end. That we teach people to hate their own natural selves. That we want people to be afraid. That we want people to be ashamed. That we have an imaginary friend; that we believe in a sky pixie; that we prostrate ourselves before a god who has the reality status of Santa Claus. That we prefer scripture to novels, preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason, law to mercy, primary colours to shades, censorship to debate, silence to eloquence, death to life.” —Unapologetic by Francis Spufford
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It cannot be stressed too strongly that first century Jews were not expecting people to rise from the dead as isolated individuals. Resurrection for them was something that might happen for all on that great future occasion when God brought history to an end and a whole new world was renewed. It will not do therefore, to say that Jesus’ disciples were so stunned and shocked by his death, so unable to come to terms with it, that they projected their scattered hopes onto the screen of fantasy and invented the idea of Jesus resurrection as a way of coping with their cruelly broken dream. That has an initial apparent psychological plausibility to 20th century people, but it will not work as serious first century history. There were lots of other messianic and similar movements in the Jewish world, roughly contemporary with Jesus. There were many situations in which a messianic leader died a violent death at the hands of authorities. In not one single case do we see the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew better. In the Jewish worldview an individual could not be resurrected in the middle of history and history just continue going. It was not something that was possible in their worldview. So Jewish revolutionaries whose leaders had been executed by the authorities had only two options, give up the revolution or find another leader. Claiming that your original leader had been resurrected was not an option, unless of course he was. —NT Wright
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We've been through a period when the dominant theology simply had nothing to do with discipleship. It had to do with proper belief, with God seeing to it that individuals didn't go to the bad place, but to the good place. But that developed in such a way that the predominant thought is that a person can have the worst character possible and still get into the good place if he believed the right thing. This disconnection became increasingly burdensome to the church until we came to the point that, as is widely discussed, there is not a clear difference between those who are Christians and those who are not Christians. —Dallas Willard
