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: 1 Corinthians 15: 1-11

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you,which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also,as to one abnormally born.

For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.

Themes

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

Built Up in love
Equipped to be Ambassadors of Reconciliation
Series Intro:
- So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
  Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.
  From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
  – Ephesians 4:11–16
- The Kingdom of God is most accurately represented when all the saints are equipped and participating in the mission of God to love show his love to our world.
- The word EQUIP was used to refer to…
  - THE SETTING OF A BROKEN BONE - things are are broken in our lives being healed.
  - THE TEACHING OF A SOLDIER TO FIGHT - to be made ready of for struggle of life and the way of love in Christ by the Spirit
  - THE SUPPLY OF WHAT IS NEEDED FOR ALONG JOURNEY - that we would have what is need for the long journey of life
  - THE RESTORATION OF SOMETHING TO ITS ORIGINAL CONDITION - maybe its been worn out, beaten down, damaged, and it gets restored to like new…

Formation

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

“But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”
– Matthew 17: 27

In this story, Jesus is a son of the house and seems to think He is not subject to the house tax, but He pays it anyway.
So Jesus is paying something for someone else that He doesn’t owe to take away the offense.
But the thread goes deeper.
- In the biblical cosmology, the waters represent chaos. An undoing. Death. Fear.
- The waters were seen as place of unruly chaos and fear.
- And Peter is told to pull a fish out of the chaos. And inside the fish’s mouth he will find coins that are exactly what he needs.
Order out of chaos. Provision Out of fear.
Order out of chaos. Provision out of fear. Abundance out of scarcity.

God is a storyteller.
- Not first an idea sharer.
- Not first a budgeteer or sin accountant
- Not a ted talk giver.
- Not a ruler maker.
- God is a storyteller.
“In every experience of beauty we are being prepared for eternity.”
– Martin Shaw

When we reduce the Gospel down to a set of controllable propositions meant mostly to help you escape life into heaven one day - we do the story a bit a disservice.

The Gospel of Jesus is a story of abundance in a world or scarcity.

We live in a world of reduction
- We live in particular moment of history that has squeezed to drain the wonder out of the world.
But it is recoverable.

Identity is something that is more and more primarily understood as difference. Identity is to be different than whatever that you are in reference to.
Identity is defined in some sense by what you are rebelling against.
You can trace this in our culture in so many ways.

Christianity is an ontological structure - a way to understand the world. A way to understand reality
“To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: It is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.”
– T.S. Elliot

We have the best story.
- It’s not a machine.
- It’s not a marketing scheme,
- It’s a body made alive with love.
- It’s story passing through darkness back into light
- It is resurrection from the dead.

I want to invite us to recapture our confidence in Christ.
- As our Savior and as the story of the whole world.
We pass on what we have received … Listen ….
- Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
  For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, i and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
  – 1 Corinthians 15: 1-8

We have a Storytelling God. We are a Storytelling People
You are equipped to live and speak the good news …
- Honesty and Curiosity
  - Tell people what you believe and listen for what they believe
- Make and Celebrate Beauty
  - Get the stories in our you heart and mouth
  - Make beautiful things
  - Pottery, a dinner table, a collage, a workspace, a hospital
- Power of Invitation
  - learn the power of invitation
- Love in Action
  - The Gospel has no credibility when we are selfish power grabbing photocopies of our culture
  - Love lights the way. It points to the nature of God
- Know the Story