June 28: 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: Hebrews 9:1-28

Now the first covenant had regulations for worship and also an earthly sanctuary. A tabernacle was set up. In its first room were the lampstand and the table with its consecrated bread; this was called the Holy Place. Behind the second curtain was a room called the Most Holy Place, which had the golden altar of incense and the gold-covered ark of the covenant. This ark contained the gold jar of manna, Aaron’s staff that had budded, and the stone tablets of the covenant. Above the ark were the cherubim of the Glory, overshadowing the atonement cover. But we cannot discuss these things in detail now.

When everything had been arranged like this, the priests entered regularly into the outer room to carry on their ministry. But only the high priest entered the inner room, and that only once a year, and never without blood, which he offered for himself and for the sins the people had committed in ignorance.The Holy Spirit was showing by this that the way into the Most Holy Place had not yet been disclosed as long as the first tabernacle was still functioning. This is an illustration for the present time, indicating that the gifts and sacrifices being offered were not able to clear the conscience of the worshiper. They are only a matter of food and drink and various ceremonial washings—external regulations applying until the time of the new order.

But when Christ came as high priest of the good things that are now already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not made with human hands, that is to say, is not a part of this creation. He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spiritoffered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!

For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.

In the case of a will, it is necessary to prove the death of the one who made it,because a will is in force only when somebody has died; it never takes effect while the one who made it is living. This is why even the first covenant was not put into effect without blood. When Moses had proclaimed every command of the law to all the people, he took the blood of calves, together with water, scarlet wool and branches of hyssop, and sprinkled the scroll and all the people. He said, “This is the blood of the covenant, which God has commanded you to keep.” In the same way, he sprinkled with the blood both the tabernacle and everything used in its ceremonies. In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence. Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. Otherwise Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

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Themes

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

• Hebrews: A new and Living Way

• Eternal Redemption Through the Blood of Christ

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• This passage gets to the heart of things. The heart of the letter. The heart of each person. The heart of the universe. The heart of heaven. It’s also mysterious — blood, hidden inner rooms, sacrifices, visions of heaven and an age to come.

• If A24 made a trailer for this passage it would be very creepy. I might have to look away. I don’t do well with scary movies — and A24 can make going to the furniture store scary.

• It can feel like eavesdropping on a high-level lecture to first-century Jewish believers. The imagery is unfamiliar. It may feel like Willy Wonka hid the Golden Ticket inside unseasoned Brussels sprouts. But it is so worth plunging down into. Because behind all the talk of covenants and tabernacle rooms and old priesthoods, this passage gives us an honest vision of God and a true picture of ourselves.

• The mystery at the heart of the universe: there is a type of life in God that cannot be approached casually. God is Holy, Holy, Holy — set apart, other. A concentration of life and light and power so intense you cannot stand in the full revelation of God and survive.

• So in Scripture God keeps holding back. The angel of the Lord. The burning bush. The back shoulder of God while Moses hides in the cleft of the rock. Isaiah sees a vision and is undone. Elijah gets a whisper and covers his face. The more of God someone encounters, the less they can handle it.

• God dwells in unapproachable light. And the late-modern assumption that science has neatly answered everything is a presumptuous lie — no real view of the world makes no room for weirdness. We are spiritual creatures on a planet uniquely suited for life in an ever-expanding universe.

• Here is the tension: God is love. God creates from overflow, not lack — makes people for relationship and joy in His presence. But after Genesis 3 we can no longer walk with God in the cool of the evening. The problem is not with God. It’s with us. We grasped for control, tried to be our own gods, and unleashed the thing that rips through the human story.

• Separation from God is separation from Life. That is death. It’s like being so sick we have to be quarantined from someone so well their life would overwhelm us. But God is determined to set the world right.

• The tabernacle was God’s way of teaching a rescued community to live with His presence at the center — how to approach Him, how to deal with the death ripping through their story. We are not starting from scratch. We are not the first to seek God or wrestle with these struggles. The tabernacle held a record of what had come before. But for all its good, it was limited — never meant to be the full revelation.

• One key access point to this mystery is our conscience — the powerful internal recognition that things are not right. Jiminy Cricket. Kafka’s Josef K, arrested but never told why. Lady Macbeth, unable to wash out the spot. Raskolnikov’s guilty torment. The old tabernacle could not cleanse the conscience.

• So never mind approaching a holy God — we struggle to live with ourselves. And it’s worse than sensing something wrong “out there.” We contribute to the brokenness. We do our own damage, and our conscience testifies against us. We lack peace. We carry guilt over what we’ve done and shame over who we are. Most of us know both.

• Here is what Hebrews is telling us, even if the form isn’t immediately attractive: what Christ has come to do is make it so we can live with God. Covered in mercy and redemption, able to stand one day before the full revelation of Yahweh, drawn near in the Holiest place. And Christ is cleansing our conscience — bringing us to peace in ourselves, making it well with my soul.

  • For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; He entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence.

    — Hebrews 9:24

• What Christ is doing is making everything right at every level.

• What the former tabernacle could do was teach three things:

  • Approach God with care — not because God is bad, but because God is so good, such a concentration of life.

  • Sin wrecks your life with God and with each other — there is an immense cost to sin.

  • God is already at work in revelation and in healing the world — the jar of manna, Aaron’s staff that budded, the stone tablets.

• The Holy of Holies is the innermost place — where we cannot go. And Christ is making us ready for it. A deep clue to that reality is our own conscience: the most inner, set-apart place of the human person. Christ is making peace for both.

• There is no forgiveness without someone absorbing the cost of the wrong done. The final outworking of sin is death — disconnection from Life. But the Deeper Magic is this: if an innocent one absorbs the cost and gives their life out of love, it can count on behalf of the condemned. It can make us right with God, with death, and even with the accusing voice of our own conscience.

  If the Son has set you free, you are free indeed.

• So — Jesus’ blood has accomplished an eternal redemption. There are stages: now we have Christ’s forgiveness and filling; one day, the fullness of God’s revealed presence in the age to come. The new covenant is grace realized. The ministry of Jesus goes on — intercession.

• Where is your conscience troubled? Where is your confidence located? Come boldly before the throne of grace in your time of need. We are going to be brought into the Holy Place. That is where God is. That is our hope.

Direct Quotes

• We are not easeful human beings who occasionally get restless, serene persons who once in a while are obsessed by desire. The reverse is true. We are driven persons, forever obsessed, congenitally dis-eased, living lives, as Thoreau once suggested, of quiet desperation, only occasionally experiencing peace.

  — Ronald Rolheiser

• We are more deeply flawed than we could ever dare imagine. But we are more deeply loved than we could ever dare hope.

  — Tim Keller

• What C.S. Lewis in Narnia called the Deeper Magic: if an innocent one absorbs the cost, gives their own life out of love, that can count on behalf of the separated and condemned.

  — on C.S. Lewis

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Where is your conscience troubled right now?

   Name the place that lacks peace — the guilt over what you’ve done, the shame over who you are. Bring it honestly to God rather than burying it. The conscience is the inner room Christ has come to cleanse.

2. Where is your confidence located?

   Notice what you reach for to feel right with the world — performance, approval, control. Ask whether your peace rests on your own efforts or on what Christ has already accomplished once for all.

3. Are you drawing near, or holding back?

   God dwells in unapproachable light, yet invites you to come boldly to the throne of grace. Consider where fear or self-condemnation keeps you at a distance, and what it would mean to approach as one already set free.

“But He has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of Himself.”
— Hebrews 9:26

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June 21: 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: Hebrews 7:11-8:13

If perfection could have been attained through the Levitical priesthood—and indeed the law given to the people established that priesthood—why was there still need for another priest to come, one in the order of Melchizedek, not in the order of Aaron? For when the priesthood is changed, the law must be changed also. He of whom these things are said belonged to a different tribe, and no one from that tribe has ever served at the altar. For it is clear that our Lord descended from Judah, and in regard to that tribe Moses said nothing about priests. And what we have said is even more clear if another priest like Melchizedek appears, one who has become a priest not on the basis of a regulation as to his ancestry but on the basis of the power of an indestructible life. For it is declared:

“You are a priest forever,
    in the order of Melchizedek.”

The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.

And it was not without an oath! Others became priests without any oath, but he became a priest with an oath when God said to him:

“The Lord has sworn
    and will not change his mind:
    ‘You are a priest forever.’”

Because of this oath, Jesus has become the guarantor of a better covenant.

Now there have been many of those priests, since death prevented them from continuing in office; but because Jesus lives forever, he has a permanent priesthood. Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to Godthrough him, because he always lives to intercede for them.

Such a high priest truly meets our need—one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself. For the law appoints as high priests men in all their weakness;but the oath, which came after the law, appointed the Son, who has been made perfect forever.

Now the main point of what we are saying is this: We do have such a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven,and who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by a mere human being.

Every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices, and so it was necessary for this one also to have something to offer. If he were on earth, he would not be a priest, for there are already priests who offer the gifts prescribed by the law. They serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: “See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.” But in fact the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, since the new covenant is established on better promises.

For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. But God found fault with the people and said:

“The days are coming, declares the Lord,
    when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
    and with the people of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant
    I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
    to lead them out of Egypt,
because they did not remain faithful to my covenant,
    and I turned away from them,
declares the Lord.
This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel
    after that time, declares the Lord.
I will put my laws in their minds
    and write them on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest.
For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.”

By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.

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Themes

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

• Hebrews: A new and Living Way

• Priest of the True Tabernacle

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• “We moved to New York when our kids were 1, 3, and 5. Do not recommend.”

  • While other parents hired coaches to prep their three-year-olds for the right kindergarten, we were screaming at ours not to eat pizza off the subway floor. Our whole parenting defaulted to the survival layer — don’t run into the road, don’t climb the train tracks. Rule one: stay alive. The mechanisms worked. Screen-time limits, hard rules, constant vigilance. But here’s the conundrum: if you cling to the thing that worked at first and transformation never comes, it ends up doing more harm than good. A guardian was only ever meant to get you to the real way in.

• Because Jesus is a better Priest, we have a better covenant, executed in a better tabernacle, giving us a better salvation — one that doesn’t just regulate sin but removes it and brings us near to God.

• Hebrews is a letter to people under pressure — pressure to go back to the old ways after they’d met Jesus. And the writer is a genius, building one slow case. Correct thinking isn’t the goal. Correct behavior isn’t the goal. They’re the pathway to something better: presence and closeness with God.

• The old priesthood was never enough (7:11–19). It was God’s design — but always temporary. A signpost pointing to something it could never reach. The Levitical priests:

  • Kept dying. Every death a disruption, every new appointment a reminder of mortality.

  • Could help in a moment, but couldn’t touch the ultimate problem.

  • Were qualified by ancestry — you had to be born a Levite.

  • Needed saving themselves.

• Jesus is different. Eternal — qualified not by genealogy but by resurrection, “the power of an indestructible life.” Death has no power over Him. He doesn’t offer reprieve; He removes sin. The law revealed sin, restrained sin, pointed to Christ — but it could never remove it. What replaces it isn’t another law. It’s a better hope, by which we draw near to God.

• Jesus is the guarantor of a better covenant (7:20–28). Other priests were appointed by lineage, no oath. Jesus was appointed by God’s sworn oath — the strongest guarantee there is, God’s own character on the line. So He becomes the Guarantor, the One who personally underwrites the promise. And He doesn’t merely help: He is able to save completely — to the uttermost, to the end. Not partially but completely. Not momentarily but perpetually. The ground of it? “He always lives to intercede for them.” Alive and pleading our case before the Father.

• How often do I wrestle with whether I’m enough — enough for my family, enough of a believer, enough of a servant? The question was never my sufficiency. It’s His.

• The better covenant is written on hearts, not stones (8:1–13). We have a high priest who sat down at the right hand of God. That matters — the Levitical priests never sat; there were no chairs in the tabernacle. Their work was never done. Jesus sat because His work is finished. Beware the chair. Jeremiah promised four things this new covenant would do:

  • Internalized law — written on hearts, not external compliance but inner transformation.

  • Intimate relationship — “I will be their God, and they will be My people.”

  • Universal knowledge of God — every believer knows Him directly. The veil is torn.

  • Complete forgiveness — God doesn’t just forgive; He forgets. The record is expunged.

• So why do we keep going back to the inferior, temporary systems? The familiar feels safer than the free. Grace offends our pride — performance flatters the self. Sin-regulation is easier; it asks no trust. Underneath it all: the never-subsiding temptation to be our own priest.

• Thank God we don’t need to be.

• Israel’s high priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year, alone, with blood — and the people waited outside. In Jesus, the curtain is torn. You don’t wait outside anymore.

• Come as you are. Ask for grace. Be with God. Draw near.

Direct Quotes

• I like to“Someone said our efforts to earn God’s favor are like stapling fruit to a tree — it looks fine for a photo, but there’s no life in it. What temporary mechanism have you leaned on too long?”

  — from the sermon

• “Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale… Love loves; this is its nature.”

  — Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

• “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

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Can I ever truly be made right with God?

   Where am I still trying to staple fruit to the tree — keeping up appearances, contributing my own performance, hoping it’s enough? The priest who never dies paid the price once for all. Rest is actually available to me.

2. What do I reach for when I fail?

   Notice the temporary mechanisms you run to for reprieve instead of the full rescue Jesus offers. When the question “Am I enough?” surfaces this week, can I let it land on his sufficiency rather than my own

3. Am I willing to be changed, not just corrected?

   It’s easier to measure my compliance than to let God transform my heart. Where am I settling for managing my behavior when he is offering to write his law on me from the inside?

“In Jesus, the curtain is torn. You don’t wait outside. You draw near.”
— Hebrews 7:19

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June 14: 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: Hebrews 6:13-7:10

When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, saying, “I will surely bless you and give you many descendants.” And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised.

People swear by someone greater than themselves, and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all argument. Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised,he confirmed it with an oath. God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.

This Melchizedek was king of Salem and priest of God Most High. He met Abraham returning from the defeat of the kings and blessed him, and Abraham gave him a tenth of everything. First, the name Melchizedek means “king of righteousness”; then also, “king of Salem” means “king of peace.” Without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, resembling the Son of God, he remains a priest forever.

Just think how great he was: Even the patriarch Abraham gave him a tenth of the plunder! Now the law requires the descendants of Levi who become priests to collect a tenth from the people—that is, from their fellow Israelites—even though they also are descended from Abraham. This man, however, did not trace his descent from Levi, yet he collected a tenth from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises. And without doubt the lesser is blessed by the greater. In the one case, the tenth is collected by people who die; but in the other case, by him who is declared to be living. One might even say that Levi, who collects the tenth, paid the tenth through Abraham, because when Melchizedek met Abraham, Levi was still in the body of his ancestor.

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Themes

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

• Hebrews: A new and Living Way

• Confidence in God's Promises

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• It started over breakfast. Sitting at an outside table before the work day, a friend with little church experience asked the question flat out:

  “Why did Jesus die on the cross?”

• The moment was almost comic — someone had been laughing at an absurd ad, a ripped, eight-pack-abs Jesus on a body pillow. But behind the joke was a real question she’d carried a long time without a satisfying answer. What does it mean that Jesus died for our sins? Why doesn’t God just forgive us? And how strange is it to wear a method of execution as jewelry?

• The answer runs through the whole story: God keeps His promises — even when the cost of keeping them is death — and He takes that death onto Himself.

• The Scriptures open with overflow. Teeming, bountiful life from a God who shares. The first lie introduced scarcity — that maybe God was holding out, keeping something good from us. And whatever sin is, it is movement away from God, His word, His presence, His promises. Move away from the source of life and what fills the gap is death. Death as an ending. Death as separation. It entered the abundant places and has stalked the human experience ever since.

• The old sacrifices — lambs, doves, bulls, grain — showed Israel the tangible cost. When you lie, steal, harm, envy, objectify, forget the poor, refuse to sabbath — something dies. Trust, peace, goodwill, a sense of abundance. When forgiveness is shared, someone is absorbing the cost. On the cross, Jesus absorbed the cost of death for all of us — and opened the way back to abundant life.

• After Eden, Genesis records two great devastations — the ravaging of death in the flood, and the tragedy of trying to be godlike without God at Babel. Then Genesis 12 turns everything:

  • God begins a deliberate work of repair, and starts by inviting one person to trust him.

  • He goes to a 75-year-old man, asks him to leave everything he knows, and to go.

  • He promises to bless him, make him a nation, and through him bless the whole world.

• The Kingdom of God moves along relational lines. And it moves through promises — promises made and promises believed. If you want an access point to the Kingdom this morning, take a promise from God and believe it. Live like it’s true, and you’ll discover that it is.

• In Genesis 15 God confirms the promise with an oath. By covenant custom, both parties walk the blood path between split animals: if I break my part, may this happen to me. But Abraham falls asleep, and God passes through twice — as if to say, I will keep my end, and when you fail, I will keep yours too. By two unchangeable things — God’s promise and God’s oath — and because God cannot lie, this hope is secure.

• Then God shows Abraham what it will cost. In the covenant of the animals, and later in the test with Isaac, God discloses the price of repair. Abraham sleeps on covenant night; Abraham is stopped before offering Isaac. God says: I will pay the cost myself. I will take this death — to give you life.

• And so God becomes for us both King and Priest. The one who makes the promise and the one who pays to keep it. The one who declares the way and the one who opens it. There are no priest-kings in the Hebrew Scriptures — except one strange blip. Abraham meets Melchizedek, King of Salem, whose name means king of righteousness, from the place of peace. The story gives him no beginning and no end. A picture of what was coming: a Priest and King of righteousness and peace, with no beginning and no end, who can be trusted forever.

• You can be confident in God’s promises. They are more true than your circumstances, your moods, your worst mistake or greatest failure. God’s character and promises are the foundation of reality. Sometimes the wait is longer than we’d like — Abraham was 75 when called, 100 when Isaac came. (The Knicks waited 53 years; it’s not always our chosen timeline.) But God keeps his promises.

• So here is what you can count on:

  • The hope of Christ is an anchor for the soul. An anchor goes down deep, where we cannot reach, and fastens to the rock. Christ has gone where we could not go, and our connection to Him holds firm — in the gentle tides of doubt and the sway of sin, and in tragedy, chaos, and grief.

  • This anchor is also a Priest who has gone into the inner sanctuary. Christ’s death made the way; His life holds our place. At His death the foot-thick veil tore from top to bottom — the way is opened. And at Pentecost, the presence of God comes to fill the temple of our lives by the Holy Spirit.

  • Mercy reigns. Jesus is King of righteousness and peace, both holy and the one who makes us holy. Mercy is on the throne of the universe. The highest authority anywhere is offering mercy.

• If God forgives me, then I can forgive me. There is no higher standard than God. So when shame comes knocking, when failures scream, when sorrow threatens to crush — speak back that the highest authority loves me, accepts me, welcomes me, and has declared it is finished. My life is His; His life is mine.

• And there is a generosity of grace that keeps going forever. Abraham’s joy at meeting the Priest-King overflows into a tenth of all he has — just a glimpse of the way of the Kingdom. What is sown in grace keeps going. When we give ourselves away, we join with God, and the share is unending. No one can take from you what God has given.

• The Kingdom moves along relationships. It is revealed when someone hears the promise of God and takes it as true. Why did Jesus die for us? Because the Love that is God knows what it will take to repair the world — and starting with us, God says: I will do this. I will take what is yours, and give you what is mine. And the share you have in my life will never end.

• It is an anchor for your soul. It is in the Holy of Holies. Your name is spoken there. Your future is with God.

• Come and believe the promise.

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

• I will take what is yours, and I will give you what is mine. And the share you have in my life will never end.

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Where am I being invited to take a promise from God and simply believe it — to live as if it’s true?

   The Kingdom opens when someone hears a promise and trusts it. Name the one promise you’ve been holding at arm’s length, and ask what it would look like to stake your week on it.

2. What cost am I trying to absorb on my own that Christ has already absorbed for me?

   We so often try to meet the deep needs of our soul out of our own resources. Where are you carrying shame, failure, or striving that the cross has already settled? Let mercy, not your own effort, be the foundation you stand on.

3. If mercy is truly on the throne, where do I need to extend that same generosity — to others, and to myself?

   There is no higher standard than the God who forgives you. Consider one relationship — possibly your relationship with yourself — where you’ve withheld the grace you’ve already received, and let it flow freely.

“We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf.”
— Hebrews 6:19–20

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June 7: 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: Hebrews 5:11–6:12

We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about cleansing rites,the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And God permitting, we will do so.

It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace. Land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God. But land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless and is in danger of being cursed. In the end it will be burned.

Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are convinced of better things in your case—the things that have to do with salvation. God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, so that what you hope for may be fully realized. We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.

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Themes

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

• Hebrews: A new and Living Way

• The Substance of Endurance

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• This passage contains some of the most intense warnings in all of Scripture. But the author of Hebrews is not a warning giver trying to make you afraid of him. He is a marathon coach who loves his runners — and refuses to hide the risks because he wants you to make it.

• Two things marathon runners learn:

  • Not knowing where you are in the journey is discouraging.

  • False hope — being told you’re almost there when you’re not — is also discouraging.

• Encouragement that doesn’t acknowledge difficulty, risk, or what’s at stake can feel like empty platitudes. The writer of Hebrews knows this. He knows some in his congregation are glazing over during the Melchizedek section — and he knows that’s evidence of a more serious problem.

• The path of immaturity — four stops on the way to soul-level danger:

  • You stop trying to understand. “You no longer try to understand” (5:11). You show up to the book club insisting on the ABCs. Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 — before the scroll existed. We now consume endlessly: brain candy instead of communion, taking instead of making. A day disappears into a phone. Over a decade — 50% fewer books, conversations, prayers, ideas wrestled with.

  • You stop living off what God has given you. Spiritual laziness. You can’t tell what’s life-giving from what isn’t. What sows death and what sows life. You lack discernment. You drift.

  • You only receive — no signs of growth. Thorns and thistles instead of fruit. The Dead Sea, not the Jordan River.

  • The opinions of unbelievers weigh more than God’s word or the community of Christ. This was the specific pressure on the first recipients of Hebrews. Different form, same pull today.

• The final stage: treating the love and sacrifice of Christ as a worthless thing — to be trampled. No confidence in Jesus, no confidence in his community.

• Can a Christian lose their salvation? We have to sit with the question honestly — this passage seems to raise it. Three world-class scholars help:

  • Scot McKnight notes the sin described is deliberate, conscious, Trinitarian, and behavioral — the sin of apostasy. Crucially: apostates don’t worry; they know what they have done. Those who worry are not the ones this passage is about.

  • Amy Peeler follows: if someone is heartbroken that they may have fallen away, that concern is evidence they have not.

  • N.T. Wright situates the passage in the full New Testament: Paul in Romans 5–8 gives the emphatic answer No to the question of whether a genuine Christian can lose everything — and advances detailed arguments to prove the point.

• Conviction from the Holy Spirit is evidence of God’s work in your life. Far more dangerous is a seared conscience — one that feels nothing and looks at Christ with contempt.

• If you are worried about apostasy, your concern is a clue you aren’t there.

• The substance of endurance — what maturity actually looks like:

  • You use what God has given you in constant use — treating his word as a treasured gift, training yourself to distinguish life from death.

  • You stay connected to the community of Jesus. God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people.

  • Prayer, worship, service, love in action — and you become more and more sensitive to God’s heart, loves, and plans.

  • You show diligence — in hoping, in living in faith and patience to inherit what has been promised.

• Dallas Willard: God is not opposed to effort. God is opposed to earning.

• In Christ we have grace that saves us — and grace that leads us to live in an increasingly mature way. Not white-knuckle self-effort. Finished effort. His.

• I don’t think you are almost there. But I think you can make it in Christ.

Direct Quotes

• “The particular sin for this particular audience was willful rejection of God, his Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit in an open, conscious denunciation… Those who have committed apostasy not only know so, but they take delight and hubris in their decision. Those who worry over whether they have or have not committed this sin are not to worry. Apostates don’t worry; they know what they have done.”

  — Scot McKnight

• “If someone is heartbroken that they may have fallen away from the faith, that concern over one’s relationship with God is evidence that they have not fallen away.”

  — Amy Peeler

• “When he speaks of ‘falling away’… the writer seems to have in mind people who have belonged to the church, who have taken part in its common life, but who then decide it isn’t for them, abandon their membership, and join in the general public contempt for the faith… To this question Paul, in Romans 5–8, gives the emphatic answer ‘No!’, and advances detailed arguments to prove the point.”

  — N.T. Wright

• “God is not opposed to effort. God is opposed to earning.”

  — Dallas Willard

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Where have you quietly stopped trying to understand? It’s rarely a dramatic decision — more often a slow drift into consumption over communion. Think honestly about the last month: what has been shaping your mind most? Where has engagement with God’s word or hard questions of faith been crowded out? What would it look like to reclaim even one hour a week from the scroll?

2. Where is your conscience most active right now — and where has it gone quiet? The sermon draws a sharp distinction: conviction is a sign of life, a seared conscience is the real danger. Where do you feel the Holy Spirit’s nudge most clearly in your life? And conversely — is there an area where you’ve stopped feeling it? What might that silence be telling you?

3. What does “diligence” look like for you in this season — without slipping into earning? Dallas Willard’s line cuts both ways. Passivity can masquerade as grace, and striving can masquerade as faithfulness. Where is God inviting you into a more consistent, practiced engagement with him — not to secure his love, but to live more fully from it?

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?… No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
— Romans 8:35, 37

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May 31: 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 4:14–5:10

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approachGod’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Every high priest is selected from among the people and is appointed to represent the people in matters related to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness. This is why he has to offer sacrifices for his own sins, as well as for the sins of the people. And no one takes this honor on himself, but he receives it when called by God, just as Aaron was.

In the same way, Christ did not take on himself the glory of becoming a high priest.But God said to him,

“You are my Son;
    today I have become your Father.”

And he says in another place,

“You are a priest forever,
    in the order of Melchizedek.”

During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heardbecause of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek.

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Themes

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

• Hebrews

• The Priest Who Gets It

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• Story about Oscar: “Oscar had gone to several pastors and asked them to teach him to pray. They all gave different and not very satisfying answers… I’ve never forgotten his longing to be taught how to pray and feeling lost.”

• We live in a world of unreliable guides. In peacetime, it doesn’t feel like it matters much — intuition, Google, life hacks, friends’ best guesses. But when life is in deep conflict, profound grief, buried in shame or anxiety — what guides us then takes on different proportions.

• This passage puts Jesus forward as a priest. Not just any priest.

  • The highest, fullest, most complete Priest.

  • The forever priest — no beginning, no end.

  • The priest who is also a King.

  • The priest accessible to everyone who calls.

  • The priest who never fails to guide.

• And the author has one of the strangest moments in world history in mind: the Garden of Gethsemane.

  “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”

  — Hebrews 5:7–9

• Two strange things in this description of Jesus.

  • First: Jesus prayed in fervent cries and tears — asking God to let the cup pass — and the prayer was not answered in the affirmative. Yet we’re told he was heard.

  • Second: “Once made perfect.” This isn’t moral perfection — he had no sin. Scholar Kathleen Norris helps:

    “The word that has been translated as ‘perfect’ does not mean to set forth an impossible goal… It is taken from a Latin word meaning complete, entire, full-grown… ‘Perfection, in a Christian sense, means becoming mature enough to give ourself to others… mature, ripe, full, ready for what befalls us.’”

    — Kathleen Norris

• Before the Cross, God was a rescuer. In the Garden and on the Cross, we see something more complete: God as suffering servant. God absorbing the cost of all the world’s brokenness. Jesus lived this full revelation — and a large part of it was his suffering.

• He knows what it is to have a dark night of the soul. To face terror and anxiety. To ache in his gut. To feel the silence of heaven.

• This changes everything — in at least three directions:

  • On temptation. Jesus has been tempted in every way we are. Appetites of the body. Ambition and status. The hunger for approval. He faced the archetypes. And he shows us: it is possible to hang on to the promises of God through them. When you are tempted, bring your temptation before the compassion of Jesus.

  • On prayer. We approach the throne of grace with confidence — not because of our achievements or how early we got up or how many words we said. We come boldly because Jesus himself walks us into the holiest place. To pray in Jesus’ name is not a ritual closing line. It’s to pray through his sonship — and to realize that sonship makes us sons and daughters. God is never diminished by listening to your prayers. He never needs to regroup. He neither slumbers nor sleeps.

  • On forgiveness. What we receive in our time of need is mercy and grace. Mercy: forgiven without earning it. Grace: power to live a different way. The expression of this in a life is repentance. The Gospel says God forgives us because of the Cross — and fills us with the resurrected life of Jesus by the Spirit.

• The High Priest is making us priests ourselves. A priesthood of all believers.

• This book is written to Oscars. To those about to give up. Pressed. Suffering. Challenged.

• It is Pentecost. Ask God to make Jesus your High Priest alive and present to you by the Holy Spirit.

Direct Quotes

• ““For me, prayer is an impulse of the heart, it is a simple glance turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and love in the midst of trial as well as joy; finally, it is something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus.”

  — Thérèse of Lisieux

  “Prayer, Thérèse knows, is a dangerous business. Because it draws us into the reality of God, it also draws us into the pain and suffering of the world that God loves and, if we let it, stretches and even tears our souls so we can love the world in the way that God does.”

  — Frederick Bauerschmidt, The Love that is God

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Where are you most desperately in need of a reliable guide right now? Think about the areas of your life where you’ve been making do with substitutes — intuition, advice from friends, the path of least resistance. What would it look like to bring that specific need before Jesus as your High Priest this week? What would it mean to actually trust that he gets it?

2. How does knowing that Jesus prayed in fervent cries and tears — and felt the silence — change how you pray? It’s easy to assume that bold, confident prayer means prayer that feels good. But Thérèse kept praying through profound darkness. Where have you pulled back from God in prayer because it felt one-sided or unheard? What might it look like to keep going anyway?

3. In what area of your life do you most need mercy — and in what area do you most need grace? Mercy is forgiveness you can’t earn. Grace is power to live differently. They’re related but distinct. Sit with both. Where is the weight of guilt or failure heaviest right now? And where are you trying to change in your own strength, without leaning into the life of the Spirit?

“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” — Hebrews 4:16

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May 24: 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 4:1-13

Therefore, since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it. For we also have had the good news proclaimed to us, just as they did; but the message they heard was of no value to them, because they did not share the faith of those who obeyed.Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said,

“So I declared on oath in my anger,
    ‘They shall never enter my rest.’”

And yet his works have been finished since the creation of the world. For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: “On the seventh day God rested from all his works.” And again in the passage above he says, “They shall never enter my rest.”

Therefore since it still remains for some to enter that rest, and since those who formerly had the good news proclaimed to them did not go in because of their disobedience, God again set a certain day, calling it “Today.” This he did when a long time later he spoke through David, as in the passage already quoted:

“Today, if you hear his voice,
    do not harden your hearts.”

For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day. There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience.

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword,it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

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Themes

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

• Hebrews

• Enter His Rest

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

Sermon Summary

• EB White on New York City’s restless, sleepless energy — 

  • “There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.”

    — E.B. White, Here is New York

• It is possible to live with peace and identity intact in such a place? 

• The book of Hebrews answers with a surprising promise: God’s plan includes a people who enter His rest. That rest is not passivity or boredom, but the very rest of God Himself — offered to us.

• The word “rest” in Hebrews 4 carries at least three layers of meaning: 

  • (1) The Sabbath rest God took after creation and invited humanity into from the first day; 

  • (2) The rest of entering the Promised Land under Joshua (Yeshua); and 

  • (3) A future, eternal rest — the unshakeable Kingdom, the new heavens and new earth, the full transformation of creation in which we are called to participate.

• In Genesis 1–2, humanity’s very first day is a day of rest — they begin from completion, not striving. In Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with Abraham in a startling way: Abraham falls asleep and God alone passes through the divided animals twice, bearing the cost of both sides of the covenant. This foreshadows the gospel — we cannot keep our end, but God walks the blood path for us. In the Exodus, Israel repeatedly fails to trust and an entire generation dies in the wilderness. 

• The Promised Land is only a partial picture. Prophets like Jeremiah point forward to a new covenant written on the heart.

• Hebrews 4 culminates in a striking image: the Word of God is “sharper than any double-edged sword,” and the Greek word trachēlizō — translated “laid bare” — means to grab an animal by the neck to expose it for sacrifice. 

• But this same Word has itself been laid bare, hung naked on the cross as the ultimate sacrifice. 

• Jesus (Yeshua) is the one who finally leads us into rest — not merely by example, but by becoming the Passover lamb. Fifty days later, on Pentecost, the living Word filled his followers with the Holy Spirit — the down-payment of the Kingdom that cannot be shaken.

• Invitation: to enter God’s rest is to come through the curtain of Jesus — laying down both sin and self-achievement — and to receive the very life of God in the soul. Being a Christian is not a set of organised beliefs; it is the active experience of God’s love filling and transforming us. We are called not merely to believe, but to be filled with the Spirit — again and again.

Direct Quotes

• “For the believers, the final, ultimate goal of this life is eternal life in the world to come or the unshakeable kingdom of God or heavenly home, which is the same as the future city. Most today speak of this final goal as heaven, which it is, but the popular idea of heaven tends to be an immaterial world of spirits and songs rather than the new heavens and new earth coming down to earth. The ultimate goal is about the transformation of all creation, and we are called to participate in the transformation that has already begun.”

  — Scot McKnight

• “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

  — Jesus, John 7:37–38

• “Being a Christian is not having a certain set of thoughts organised in your mind about God. It is the active experience of God loving you to death and back.”

• — Sermon

Three Questions for Personal Application

1. Where in your life are you striving to earn rest — through performance, productivity, or achievement — rather than receiving it as a gift from God?

   The sermon reminds us that in Genesis, humanity’s very first day was a Sabbath — they began from rest, not from work. Reflect on what it would mean to start from a place of being loved and complete in God, rather than working toward it.

2. In what areas are you most tempted to “wrench back control” — to operate out of anxiety rather than trust, or worry rather than worship?

   Israel repeatedly failed to trust God’s provision in the wilderness. Where are you meeting your deepest needs out of your own resources instead of surrendering to God? What would it look like, in that specific area, to rest in His faithfulness today?

3. Is your faith primarily a set of beliefs about God, or are you actively experiencing the filling of God’s Spirit in your daily life?

   Our closing challenge is that we are called not just to believe, but to be filled — again and again. What might you lay down — shame, or self-sufficiency — to receive more of God’s life? Are there practices or postures that would help you remain open to the Spirit’s active presence?

“There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God.” — Hebrews 4:9

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May 17: 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 3:7-19

So, as the Holy Spirit says:

“Today, if you hear his voice,
    do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
    during the time of testing in the wilderness,
where your ancestors tested and tried me,
    though for forty years they saw what I did.
That is why I was angry with that generation;
    I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray,
    and they have not known my ways.’
So I declared on oath in my anger,
    ‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”

See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end. As has just been said:

“Today, if you hear his voice,
    do not harden your hearts
    as you did in the rebellion.”

Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies perished in the wilderness? And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed? So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief.

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Themes

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

• Hebrews

• Today, If You Hear His Voice

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• Hebrews is a book written to help urban followers of Jesus going through immense challenges and suffering and in some cases persecution to endure in love and faith. 

• Hebrews is written as a manual for endurance in the furnace of life’s pain.

• CS Lewis says he knows from experience what draws him away from God, what flags his motivations to love, what draws him into selfishness, how the power of distraction is often even better than some elaborate temptation to ruin your life, how small irritants in our relationships can be just as effective as causing love to die, and some great scandal or betrayal.

• There are these warning passages that say basically whatever you do, don’t let go of your hope, don’t let go of your love, your confidence in God’s love and promises. Hang on. You will make it. God will hold you. 

• The author takes us back to the exodus (this great picture and example and narrative or God’s Salvation in Torah) and walks us imaginatively through it and then says, in the same way, today if you hear His voice do not harden your hearts

• God speaks. God is a communicator. God is a revealer. God’s heart consistantly runs towards relationship. God is love.

• God speaks, and Hebrews is asking if we are willing to listen?

• Lewis highlighted a very similar thing in The Screwtape Letters. He says…

  For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

  – CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

• Lewis is echoing Hebrews —-> Today if you hear His voice…

• Do not harden your hearts as in the days of the great rebellion. NT Wright translates that “Do not harden your hearts as in the days of the great bitterness” 

• And so we are invited into this story of God’s salvation.

• The people get bored, the people get scared, the people get annoyed, the people get comfortable quickly not being in Egypt, but they don’t live on gratitude. They turn to complaining.

  • The Great Rebellion. The great bitterness was basically saying we don’t trust Moses and we don’t trust God has good things for us, we’ll take care of us, we’ll protect and provide for us. 

  • And what happened to Pharaoh’s heart, happens to the peoples’ hearts. They hardened their hearts.

• Sin’s deceitfulness works along these lines. Do you really think God is gonna provide for you? If so do you really think it will be what you want? 

  • It will be boring and dull and on a timeline you don’t control

  • “If you want the real deepest needs of your soul met you are going to have to do that on your own, out of your own resources.” 

• What the enemy doesn’t want is today you hear His voice. Today you trust His love. Today you trust His provision.

• These are warning passages of Hebrews and this one in particular is telling us there is a cost to unbelief. 

  • The people didn’t lose God’s love. They didn’t have to go back to Egypt. But they did lose their joy and the sense of their freedom and a whole generation was defined by wandering instead of receiving their inheritance. 

• Recognizing the state you’re in spiritually and morally is something few Christian teachers have had anything to say about in recent years, at least in the parts of the church where I work. We have heard so much about ‘following your own spiritual path’, and ‘continuing your own journey of faith’, that we can easily get the impression that we should merely do whatever feels best at the time, and hope that it’ll all work out somehow. Well, it may, but it may not.

  – NT Wright

• So what do we do? The passage gets very direct with us…

  See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end.

  – Hebrews 3:12–14

• Watch Your Heart - (see to it) when it turns away from the living God, it turns to things that bring death.

  • Death of trust, gratitude, confidence, joy, connection, love 

  • The root of temptation to sin is always a temptation to not trust God 

• Encourage One Another - there is such tremendous power in this

  • When you are grumbling and doubting and veering towards selfishness or indulgence or back towards your addiction or towards bitterness or getting even or anger and revenge or apathy and boredom or cynicism - we need each other

  • Be the friend willing to say I love you but I think you are lying to yourself or believing a lie

• As long as it’s called today - we only have to trust God on days ending in Y.

  • The present is the only point you can exercise faith 

  • The enemy will pull you into the past, the enemy will pull you into future anxiety and worry

• So we have to build rhythms to today 

  • Ways to listen for God’s voice

    • Process of taking what we hear and putting it into action.

    • Scruipture reading, daily prayer, real community (be known enough to be encouraged), the prayer of examen. (daily inventory) 

• Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts

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May 10: 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 3:1–6

Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledge as our apostle and high priest. He was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was faithful in all God’s house.Jesus has been found worthy of greater honor than Moses, just as the builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself. For every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything. “Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s house,” bearing witness to what would be spoken by God in the future. But Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house. And we are his house, if indeed we hold firmlyto our confidence and the hope in which we glory.

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Themes

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

• Hebrews

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• The book of Hebrews is written for exactly these reasons to show people who are suffering the story they are in, and how to rely on resources beyond themselves in the moments of their lives.

• It’s so important to remember this book is not just a theological treatise on how Jesus fulfills Torah. It is an endurance manual for people in the furnace of life.

• Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledge as our apostle and high priest.

  – Hebrew 3:1–2

• Hebrews is a book that helps define faith for us, it is a book that helps define home for us, and it keeps giving us this beautiful and powerful instruction …

• Fix your thoughts on Jesus. Let them return there over and over again. Not merely as some religious duty but as way to return each day, moment by moment to the love of God, to the person of our salvation.

  • To Christ who is here described as an Apostle and High Priest.

• To fix your thoughts on Jesus is to consider this One who has been sent to us.. To show us what God is like, what God cares about, how God loves …

  • But also this Apostle is our High Priest

  • One who represents God to us  - the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being and also One who represents us to God - the High Priest

  • To the One sent for us - to show us God

  • And to One who has been through what we have been through and now represents us to God - as a Priest...

• ...we learn that faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God. Believing, then, is directing the hearts attention to Jesus. It is lifting the mind to "behold the Lamb of God," and never ceasing that beholding for the rest of our lives. At first this may be difficult, but it becomes easier as we look steadily at His wondrous person, quietly and without strain. Distractions may hinder, but once the heart is committed to Him, after each brief excursion away from Him, the attention will return again and rest upon Him like a wandering bird come back to its window.

  – AW Tozer

• Moses has to get to know this God - that’s a huge part of his vocation - burning bush and bygone 

• And then Moses has to let the people know this God - Apostle and Priest 

• We have been saying that Hebrews was written in particular to urban followers of Jesus who were experiencing tremendous resistance and challenges to their faith. 

• They needed resources for strength, for endurance in suffering. 

• And the author is saying fix your thoughts on this Jesus.

  • The One who is building the house God has been building all along. 

• Know you are connected to this story 

ALONE AND TOGETHER

• The instructions here are to fix your thoughts are something we can do on our own at any moment and in any situation with no equipment or privileged information or years of training.

• You can fix your thoughts on Jesus at any moment. Turn the 'gaze of your soul to Christ or back to Christ.

• We to know that we can do that on our own at any time and in any condition, but the next part we cannot do on our own. 

• We are the house of God together

• As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him—you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

  – 1 Peter 2:4–5

• This is our home. To know we are God’s home. And we are being built together. United as those who fix the gaze of our souls on Jesus.
  

• Lets turn the gaze of our souls to Him 

• Know you are not alone. We are being built together into the house of God.

• We together are a fuller picture of God and God’s love than any of us could be on our own.

• “In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter….

  The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

  – C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

---

May 3: 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 2:10–18

In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. He says,

“I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters;
    in the assembly I will sing your praises.”

And again,

“I will put my trust in him.”

And again he says,

“Here am I, and the children God has given me.”

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants.For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

---

Themes

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

• Hebrews

• Brothers and Sisters Set Free

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• The book of Hebrews is written for exactly these reasons to show people who are suffering the story they are in, and how to rely on resources beyond themselves in the moments of their lives.

• It’s so important to remember this book is not just a theological treatise on how Jesus fulfills Torah. It is an endurance manual for people in the furnace of life.

• This section of Hebrews that we read this morning has one of the most astounding asides in all of the Scripture.

• The author is busy telling us about why and how Christ has to suffer. He is writing to early urban followers who are facing immense challenges for their faith in Christ.

• And in telling them about the suffering of Jesus, he drops this little wonder...

  • God, for whom and through whom everything exists.

• He is the Source, the Sustainer, the Destination of life.

  • Poetically He is the Beginning and the End

• God is a creator and when the world He made was ruined by sin and death and violence and evil, it was revealed that He is also a Savior.

• In an unfallen world you don’t see the aspect of God. In allowing for choice, God also allowed for many to choose other than God.

  • And so it is now also revealed that God is One who will suffer for healing, for reclaiming, for redemption.

• There is a word in the passage that is translated "pioneer” in the NIV …

  • It is the Greek word archēgos - it has a wide lexical range and is hard to translate with one English world, but it means

    • Pioneer, Champion, Author

      • Pioneer, one who goes ahead where there is no known way and makes a way for others

      • Jesus is the Archēgos of our salvation

        • He has gone ahead to make a way where there was no known way

        • He has faced an enemy and force we could not face on our on and won a victory we have a share in

      • And He is telling a new story of how the world is healed and we have a share in a new type of life united to God.

• Christ has become an Archēgos, a Pioneer, Champion, Author who gives

  • Freedom from the fear of death

  • Atonement for sin

  • Help in temptation

FREEDOM FROM THE FEAR OF DEATH

• My question--that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide--was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live as I had found by experience. It was: "What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?"

  Differently expressed, the question is: "Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?" It can also be expressed thus: "Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”

  – Leo Tolstoy

• Jesus has gone ahead of us into death. And He has not made it so that we don’t have to die, but He has made it so we can share in the victory He won over death.

• 1 Corinthians 15 puts it like this...The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:56–57)

Atonement for sin

• He has made atonement for our sin, for the ways we are separated from God

• We are going to talk in Hebrews about many of the beautiful ways that we understand the Atonement

• But it is a ransom given to one who held us captive. It is a victory that we now have a share in, it is something Christ did on our behalf that we could not do on our own. It is the lamb of sacrifice and the scapegoat of Yom Kippur. Our death is faces and our shame is carried away.

• And now we are made family. Christ is not ashamed to call us brother and sister.

Help in temptation

• And Christ is a help in temptation

  • In all the ways we are drawn to doubt, and fear, and letting go of our confidence.

  • In all the ways we are tempted to do what we swore we wouldn’t do again,

  • In all the ways we feel trapped by patterns of thought and behavior. Addictions and little compromises of our integrity.

  • Our imaginations of vengeance or indulgence or laziness or workaholism.

• Christ is able to help us when we are tempted.

• When Christ was tempted (Matthew 4, Luke 4)

  • He clung to the hope that God would meet His needs better than the short cut or the substitute

  • He held on to His identity as a beloved Son

  • He spoke truth back to the lies from the Word of God

  • He received comfort from heavenly resources

• How are you at using these mechanisms to help you in times of temptation?

  • Jesus it the Archēgos of our salvation - Pioneer, Champion, Author

  • He confronts our fear of death

  • He has made atonement for what separates us from God

  • He gives us help in temptation

---

April 26: 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 2:1-9

We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For since the message spoken through angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation? This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord,was confirmed to us by those who heard him. God also testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.

It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. But there is a place where someone has testified:

“What is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    a son of man that you care for him?
You made them a little lower than the angels;
    you crowned them with glory and honor
    and put everything under their feet.”

In putting everything under them, God left nothing that is not subject to them. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to them. But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honorbecause he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

---

Themes

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

• Hebrews

• Crowned

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• What we believe at the deepest level matters.

• Hebrews 2 begins with a warning. It’s the first of several warnings in Hebrews and in my opinion they get more intense from here. 

• But this one starts very directly…

  • We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.

    – Hebrews 2: 1

• The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful Word.

• And what Jesus has done…

  • After He had provided purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.

• The author is suggesting that we need to pay the most careful attention to this revelation, to what we have heard.

• We live in a self-proclaimed attention economy. We live with more potential distractions than any era in history. We can make entire lives in our phones, in digital fantasies, in the ever increasing power of the artificial.

• Pay attention so you do not drift away.

  • So you don’t look up and realize you are miles off course. You are no where near where you thought you’d be or where you want to be.

• For since the message spoken through angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation? This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. God also testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will. 

  – Hebrews 2: 2-4

• In the law of Moses 

  • There was a personal cost to ignoring the words and way of God

  • There was communal cost to ignoring the words and way of God 

• The warnings in Hebrews were to be pretty intense. Some of them have been straight up scary to me in parts of my life. 

• And what I want to ask is are the warnings harsh or are they loving?

• How we hear a warning can really depend on the heart behind them. Is this an expression of violence, threat, pride, and control? Or is this an expression of loving care?

• The warning here is from the loving heart of God. Do not ignore too great a salvation. 

  • Don’t ignore the mercy, don’t ignore the friendship, don’t ignore guidance, don’t ignore the love.

• This salvation, if it is anything, is union with God in a real relationship.

• There is cost, now and forever, to living without God.

• So the warning comes - pay close attention.

  • Don’t let this get shoved off the priority list for all the shouting urgency of everything in our world. 

  • There is real resistance. The complexity of sin in the scriptures is profound. It is not simply obviously bad things we do from time to time out of selfishness or boredom.

  • Sin is a way of seeking to be your own God or to put something in the center of your life that functions like God.

    • That might look like all our sex, drugs and rock-n-roll rebellion or it might look like a much quieter life of anxious and distracted workaholism

• Pay attention to God.

• Pay attention to how you are living.

• Pay attention to to what has your attention 

• Pay attention to what God has given you.

• Pay attention to the relationship in prayer

• Paying attention is listening to word.

• Pay attention to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit. 

• There is a cost when we do not pay attention.

  • I’ll just tell you somethings you can lose awareness of or connection to that are mentioned here.

    • You can lose your wonder.

    • You can lose a sense of your vocational inheritance.

      • The Psalm speaks of humankind in general as set in authority over the world, with ‘everything subjected to him’. But, says Hebrews, this clearly hasn’t happened yet. Humans are not ruling the world, bringing God’s order and justice to bear on the whole of creation. Everything is still in a state of semi-chaos. How then can this Psalm be taken seriously?

        The answer is that it has happened—in the case of Jesus. He is the representative of the human race. His exaltation as Lord, after his earthly ministry, suffering and death (in which he was indeed ‘lower than the angels’) has placed him in the role marked out from the beginning for the human race. He has gone ahead of the rest of us into God’s future, the future in which order and justice—saving order, healing justice—will come to the world. The exaltation of Jesus, and the fact that we who follow him can celebrate that and live in the light of it, is one of the major themes of the whole book.

        – NT Wright

    • You can lose a sense of the mercy of Jesus

Consider:

• Have you lost any of your wonder? 

• Do you have a strong sense of your inheritance in God?

• Are you aware of the gift of mercy available to you daily?

---

March 29: 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: ‭Zechariah 9:9-13

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!
    Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
    righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey,
    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
    and the warhorses from Jerusalem,
    and the battle bow will be broken.
He will proclaim peace to the nations.
    His rule will extend from sea to sea
    and from the River to the ends of the earth.
As for you, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
    I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit.
Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope;
    even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you.
I will bend Judah as I bend my bow
    and fill it with Ephraim.
I will rouse your sons, Zion,
    against your sons, Greece,
    and make you like a warrior’s sword.

---

Themes

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

• Cry of the Prophet

• Zechariah – Behold Your King

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• And the picture leaves us with a decision to make.

• Jesus is a King unlike any other 

• Here is one who is a Prophet a Priest, and King 

  • Prophet - telling us God’s heart 

  • Priest - making atonement with His own life  

  • The King - raising us to a new type of living. 

• The Crowd is a crowd like any other 

  • They cheer Jesus when hHe is healing and parading and representing a possible new hope for them. 

  • Within the week the chants will turn to crucify Him. 

• He rearranges the furniture in God’s house like its His, He confronts death. He is a threat to the status quo of how power works. He storms into the temple, Tells tress to never bear fruit again and then stand silent before His accusers.

• The crowd loves Him till they can’t control Him, can’t get what they expect from Him, and then they turn. 

  • I love Jesus as a helper, a healer, a giver of encouraging words. BUT AS A KING?

• Palm Sunday shows us a King moving in humble love but also staggering demands on our allegiance and devotion.

• Palm Sunday gives us a picture of our fickle hearts.

  • I want help. But I want to remain in control.

• Jesus keeps giving up His options. He keeps letting His world narrow down until he is fastened to one place to die.
  

• If we pay attention on Palm Sunday…

  • We are moved to a place of decision
    

• Honestly one of the most miserable and disappointing places in the world is trying to be a little bit Christian. 

• Jesus gets it. It’s like … crown Him or kill Him.

---

March 22: 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: ‭Isaiah 6:1-8

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
    the whole earth is full of his glory.”

At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

---

Themes

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

• Cry of the Prophet

• Isaiah - An Undone Prophet Seeing in the Dark

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• Isaiah begins - In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord

• Judah has had the same King for 52 years and much of Uzziah’s rule has been prosperous and peaceful, but the rumblings of corruption, and mighty foreign powers, and the tension of the transfer of power makes for a troubling national moment.

  • This is the time that Isaiah has a vision of God.

    • A vision that changes the world

    • This is a vision that can change your life

    • It shows us...

      • Why the actual God is better than the one we make up

      • Heads up, God might show up when you are sure you already know what to expect

The Vision

• Isaiah sees the Lord.

  • I saw the Lord high and exalted.

• There is a reality of the full revelation of God that seems impossible to fully take in.

• The angels sing holy, holy, holy and I will give you Alec Motyer on this but this is a sentiment you will hear often repeated about this song...

  • “Hebrew uses repetition to express superlatives or indicate totality. Only here is the threefold repetition found. Holiness is supremely the truth about God, and His holiness is in itself so far beyond human thought that a 'super-superlative' has to be invented to express it...

    ... the question arises what it is that makes Him unapproachable or what it is that constitutes His distinctiveness. The answer is that it is his total and unique moral majesty.”

    – Alec Motyer

• To really see God is to come into contact with Holiness and it somehow both ruins us and saves us.

• Everything else we know about God, His love, His justice, His anger, His compassion is holy.

• It is set apart. Unlike any other. Unique to God and pure and brilliant and strong to the point we cannot stand it.

• And this is a problem.

  • Isaiah doesn’t join in the angels song. He gets a sense of what God is really like and he realizes everything is shaking.

  • And what happens when we encounter God is shaking and unraveling

  • At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

    “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

    – Isaiah 6:3-5

• When we really get a sense of God’s nearness, it gives a shake to everything we hold dear and have been counting on as our security, significance, meaning.

• Isaiah doesn’t start singing. He starts confessing.

• If you really look at this, it may be hard to imagine this as good thing.

• We live in a world where we have many practices to boost our self-esteem, where our egos feel fragile and need regular refilling, where we only want positive self-talk.

• And here is a vision of God that brings an unraveling.

• Why is this good?

  • Because a God who is really there is better than a god you make up.

• He says I have unclean lips.

• When we really see God for who He is we don’t just confess our sins, we confess our strengths. We confess the ways we try to distinguish ourselves and make a life out of our own resources.

• Isaiah was a man with the right family connections, the right education, the right set of skills, the obvious gifts and ability.

• And he gets a vision of God that unravels him.

• Isaiah gets no comforting words in his vision.

  • In fact, in contrast to God’s majesty he can’t confess fast enough

  • And it’s the best thing that ever happens to him

• Isaiah is about to step into joy and courage and creativity and endurance and the life he was meant to live with transcendent impact across the world that we still marvel at

  • But it starts with this unraveling.

  • For some, God’s love falls lightly on our hearts because we don’t really grasp the scope of it

    • Is this you?

  • For some of us, we are bored with God’s love, like its just the hallmark sappiness we know they sing about in church, because you haven’t had a vision of God’s holiness.

    • Is this you?

    • If you do, it will shake the foundations of your life and it will be the best thing that could happen to you.

• But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him.

  – Philippians 3: 7-9

• And in becoming unraveled, of confessing sin but also anything that rooted his life and identity other than God

• We cannot rightly envision God without holiness but we cannot stand holiness, so we have to have mercy.

  • And mercy comes from the altar.

• Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

  – Isaiah 6:6

• When we part ways with God, death is what enters. And death and separation has ripped through the human story and human heart.

• And God taught Israel something of the cost in the temple system, but all along as a place holder.

  • If you have a god who loves you but isn’t Holy - his mercy will always be light. His love will become boring to you.

  • If you have a god who is holy without love - you can’t stand before him. You are only undone.

• But here is a God who is majestically holy and is Himself undone so we can be changed, so we can be made holy.

• He goes from unraveled to unstoppable.

• He is ready for whatever God would ask of him. If you read on and get his job description, it is not one you would agree to lightly.

  • But Isaiah says “Here I am. Send me.”

    • Let me be a representative of this God who has changed and healed me. Let me show what God is really like even if it costs me.

• God gives this vision to Isaiah as an act of mercy even though it begins with unraveling and as we close I want to say that if you want get a true vision of God it must include God’s holiness.

  • If you want that you can ask for it.

  • And you can put yourself in places revelation.

    • Look into His Word

    • Come into the company of worship at the house of the Lord

    • Go into prayer

    • Look at the natural world with wonder and gratitude

    • See your neighbor

    • Live a life of compassion

---

March 15: 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: ‭Lamentations 3:18-26

So I say, “My splendor is gone
    and all that I had hoped from the Lord.”

I remember my affliction and my wandering,
    the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them,
    and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind
    and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
    for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
    great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
    therefore I will wait for him.”

The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
    to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly
    for the salvation of the Lord.

---

Themes

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

• Cry of the Prophet

• Jonah - When We Hate God's Instructions

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• Can you think of a time in your life when you wanted to give up? When you felt crushed by disappointment? When you felt you could not believe any more. Trust anymore. Love anymore. Go on anymore?

• Jeremiah is a prophet who teaches us something about endurance. About reliable maturity.

• Endurance and reliable maturity don’t sell much ad space in our culture.

• Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet

  • He found a way to cling to God’s love and faithfulness even in the middle of despair, in the middle of what looked like failure, when his spirit was crushed, when surely he wished he could give up.

• Anybody can say God you are my portion when you have as many portions of whatever else you want. But your city is crumbling and your life work lies in ruin and you can say to God...

  • You are enough for me. Your mercies are new every morning. You are my hope.

  • That type of prayer in the middle of despair is profound.

• How do we do that?

  Jeremiah had sense of being known by God

  • The word of the Lord came to me, saying,

    “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

    before you were born I set you apart;

    I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

    – Jeremiah 1:4-5

• One of the first things after God calls Jeremiah by name is God tells Jeremiah that He has known him well before Jeremiah became aware of it.

• God is an object about which we have questions. We are curious about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We get into late-night bull sessions about God. We drop into church from time to time to see what is going on with God. We indulge in an occasional sunset or symphony to cultivate a feeling of reverence for God.

• “But that is not the reality of our lives with God. Long before we ever got around to asking questions about God, God had been questioning us. Long before we got interested in the subject of God, God subjected us to the most intensive and searching knowledge. Before it ever crossed our minds that God might be important, God singled us out as important. Before we were formed in the womb, God knew us. We are known before we know.”

  – Eugene Peterson

JEREMIAH KNEW GOD HAD CALLED HIM AND HAD A VISION FOR HIM

• Jeremiah has insecurity and he told it to God... This is the exchange...

  • Jeremiah 1:6–15

  • God met Jeremiah’s insecurity with two visions

    • The first was an almond tree branch - and there is little world play here...

      • The word “almond” and the word “watching” are nearly identical in Hebrew. “What do you see, Jeremiah?” I see a “shaqed” (“almond”). “Good eyes! I’m sticking with you. I am “shoqed” (“watching”) my word to make every word I give you come true.

      • God told Jeremiah that even the most difficult of unlikely things he had to say he wasn’t saying alone. God was watching his promises to make sure they were fulfilled.

    • The second vision was a boiling pot - Jeremiah had a difficult word to share: because God’s people had ignored His covenant with them and broken it over and over again finally that brokenness was going to become their defining reality.

      • God speaks to Jeremiah in these everyday items.

  • Do you believe God has a call on you?

  • Do you believe God has vision for you?

  • Is your vision for your life so manageable that you can go about pulling it off whether God is involved or not?

  • Jeremiah knew God knew him and knew God had plans for him....

  • One of the most famous verses of Jeremiah is 29:11

    • For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

      – Jeremiah 29:11.

Jeremiah ACCELERATED HIS MATURITY THROUGH OBEDIENCE

• There can often be a huge gap in what we know about God and what we walk in.

• There can be huge gap in what we want most for our lives and how we live on the daily.

• Our maturity grows in leaps and bounds by following through on what God is asking us to do.

• Jeremiah learned to trust and know God more and more by taking God’s invitations and following God’s commands.

• Jeremiah became a new every morning person

• He came to know by experience in the worst possible circumstances that....

  • Because of the Lord’s great love ,we are not consumed,

    for his compassions never fail.

    They are new every morning;

    great is your faithfulness.

    – Lamentations 3:22-23

• Jeremiah endured wicked rulers, humiliation, set backs, failure, war and exile to keep showing up God is still at word, God is still showing mercy. The headlines are not all there is.

---

March 8: 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: ‭Jonah 3:10 - 4:11

When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relentedand did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.

But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered.When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”

But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”

“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”

But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”

---

Themes

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

• Cry of the Prophet

• Jonah - When We Hate God's Instructions

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• Two mentions of Jonah outside of these 4 chapters that make up the book with his name.

  • In the Gospels, Jesus seems to be frustrated that people keep demanding more and more external phenomena from Him while not experiencing a real change of heart and mind. 

    • He answered, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here. 

      – Matthew 12:39-41

  • In 2 Kings 14 - Jonah, son of Amittai, was a court prophet to Jereboam II. While other prophets of Yahweh in his time, Amos and Hosea, criticized the royal administration for its injustice and unfaithfulness…

    • Jonah had supported Jeroboam’s aggressive military policy to extend the nation’s power and influence.

    • Tim Keller gives a helpful comment on this story and it begins to shine some light on how Jonah ends up running from God…. 

      • The original readers of the book of Jonah would have remembered him as intensely patriotic, a highly partisan nationalist. And they would have been amazed that God would send a man like that to preach to the very people he most feared and hated.

        – Timothy Keller

• So from these two mentions outside of the book of Jonah we learn some crucial things about the story…

  • Jesus saw this as an essential sign of God’s plan bringing salvation to the world, for breaking healing and redemption to a broken world.

  • We learn a little something about why Jonah was so reluctant to follow through with what God asks of him. 

  • Parallels in the story: 

    • In 1:1 - God’s words comes to Jonah – In 3:1 - God’s Word comes to Jonah

    • In 1:2 - the message is conveyed – In 3:2 - the message is conveyed

    • In 1:3 - the response of Jonah – In 3:3 - the response of Jonah 

    • In 1:4 - a warning is given – In 3:4 - a warning is given 

    • In 1:5 - the response of non-believers – In 3:5 - the response of the non-believers

    • In 1:6 - response of the leader – In 3:6 - the response of the leader 

    • In 1:7 unbelievers respond better than Jonah  – In 3:7 - unbelievers respond better than Jonah 

    • In 2:1-10 How God taught Jonah grace through the fish – In 4:1-10 How God taught Jonah grace through the plant 

• Few things that bear on all of us…

  • Why we do not want to do what God says

  • How we return to God when we’ve gone our own way

  • Why our anger new tells the whole story

  • And from all that a few things we learn about how God works…

    • The Conflict of Identity: Jonah’s primary significance was found in being a Hebrew and a nationalist rather than a servant of God. This caused him to flee to Tarshish because he feared God might actually forgive the "wicked" Ninevites.

    • The Storm of Disobedience: The sermon posits that every sin has a "mighty storm" attached to it. For Jonah, the storm was mercy—a visible picture of the chaos that comes from trying to manage the world without God.

    • The Death and Resurrection Pattern: Jonah’s journey "down" (to Joppa, to the ship, to the sea, to the fish) represents the end of self. Jesus later calls this the "Sign of Jonah," pointing to His own death and resurrection.

    • The Cliffhanger of Grace: The story ends with God asking Jonah if he should not love the great city. The sermon suggests the story ends abruptly to force us to answer: Will we be angry at God’s mercy toward others, or will we walk in the grace we’ve been given?

• You may sincerely believe that Jesus died for your sins, and yet your significance and security can be far more grounded in your career and financial worth than in the love of God through Christ.

• Shallow Christian identities explain why professing Christians can be racists and greedy materialists, addicted to beauty and pleasure, or filled with anxiety and prone to overwork. All this comes because it is not Christ’s love but the world’s power, approval, comfort, and control that are the real roots of our self-identity.

  – Timothy Keller

• Sin: 

  It [has qualities like] an addicting drug. At first it may feel wonderful, but every time it gets harder to not do it again. Here’s just one example. When you indulge yourself in bitter thoughts, it feels so satisfying to fantasize about payback. But slowly and surely it will enlarge your capacity for self-pity, erode your ability to trust and enjoy relationships, and generally drain the happiness out of your daily life. Sin always hardens the conscience, locks you in the prison of your own defensiveness and rationalizations, and eats you up slowly from the inside. All sin has a mighty storm attached to it.

  – Timothy Keller

THINGS WE LEARN ABOUT GOD

• God is not just the God of your nation, and group , and people, and politics. God really loves and cares about your enemy. (Be very careful if you imagine God is always cheering on American missles and drone strikes)

• God can meet us where we are even when we run away. (But running away always costs dearly) 

• God redeems through the sacrificial love of death and resurrection. This we see most fully in Jesus. 

• Jonah wanted Ninevah to pay for all their evil and wrong. God wanted to warn them and offer them mercy. 

• This fight between justice and mercy is raging in Jonah - God keeps finding shocking ways to be merciful 

• And ultimately God would say I will be just and the Justifier by going to the cross.

Application Questions

• Where is your "Tarshish"? Jonah ran to Tarshish because God’s command conflicted with his personal politics and national identity. Is there an area of your life (career, political conviction, or personal comfort) that you prioritize over God’s direction?

• Are you "praying your anger"? The sermon notes that Jonah was "rage-filled" but at least he prayed his complaint. When you feel resentful toward God’s timing or His mercy toward people you dislike, do you hide that away, or are you honest with Him about your bitterness?

• How do you view your "enemies"? If God moved powerfully in the life of someone you consider a "villain" or a rival, would you be glad for them, or would you be like Jonah—jealous, resentful, and bitter? How does the "Sign of Jonah" (the Gospel) challenge your view of who deserves mercy?

---

March 1: 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: ‭1 Kings 19:1–I9

Now Ahab told Jezebel everything Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, “May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them.”

Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep.

All at once an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” He looked around, and there by his head was some bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again.

The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.” So he got up and ate and drank. Strengthened by that food, he traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. There he went into a cave and spent the night.

And the word of the Lord came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”

The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”

The Lord said to him, “Go back the way you came, and go to the Desert of Damascus. When you get there, anoint Hazael king over Aram. Also, anoint Jehu son of Nimshi king over Israel, and anoint Elisha son of Shaphat from Abel Meholah to succeed you as prophet. Jehu will put to death any who escape the sword of Hazael,and Elisha will put to death any who escape the sword of Jehu. Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him.”

So Elijah went from there and found Elisha son of Shaphat. He was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen, and he himself was driving the twelfth pair. Elijah went up to him and threw his cloak around him.

---

Themes

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

• Cry of the Prophet

• Elijah - The Still Small Voice

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• Now the cultural moment that Elijah is living through is important to mention. Ahab was King in Israel and this is mid 800s BC. Ahab was in a string of not ideal Kings.

  • There’s a little refrain in the book of 1 and 2 Kings where it will say and so and so did more evil than all the previous Kings before them. 

• There was a progression of moving away from Yahweh, and Ahab accelerated that again. He had a political marriage to a woman from the kingdom of Tyre and Sidon, and she has her own reputation that has spilled the pages of Scripture. 

• Ahab was married to Jezebel, and Ahab and Jezebel were on an intentional strategic path towards pluralism in Israel - that’s a nice way to say it. 

  • They had killed prophets of Yahweh and brought in prophets of Ba’al. 

  • And there were many Ba’als but the major one worshipped here was thought to be a god of the storm, a god of the rains. 

• And so Elijah the Tishbite shows up and says, OK well the real God says there isn’t gonna be any rain, there isn’t gonna even be any dew.

  • Like Yahweh had challenged the gods of the Empire in Egypt in the Exodus, he challenges the Ba’al of the storm with a drought. 

• And in a very real way Elijah is hanging on to faith in Yahweh in Isreal at a time when there is very real chance of it dying out.

• Without the turning point of Elijah’s life and ministry - the way of Yahweh and His covenant in Israel was in real threat of dying out.

ELIJAH TALKS AND LISTENS TO GOD 

• A prophetic life, a life that reveals what God is really like is a life that has learned to talk and listen to God.

ELIJAH PRAYS HIS LACK

• Then the word of the LORD came to Elijah: “Leave here, turn eastward and hide in the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan. You will drink from the brook, and I have directed the ravens to supply you with food there.” 

  So he did what the LORD had told him. He went to the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan, and stayed there. The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook. 

  – 1 Kings 17:2–6

• If this was the end of Elijah’s story it would make a great sermon. But God told Elijah to proclaim a drought, but then provided for him with Ravens and a Brook. 

• But just a little while later. The Brook dried up. 

• God is interested in us learning to trust God. And often God will give us something as a gift, but then there is a risk that that thing God has given us becomes what we actually put our confidence in.

• Some time later the brook dried up because there had been no rain in the land.”

  – 1 Kings 17:7

• And Elijah prays his lack. And however he names it, it isn’t in the scene. What we get instead is God’s response.

• Elijah prays his lack. But God knows his need.

• What do you do with your Lack?

• Then the word of the LORD came to him: “Go at once to Zarephath in the region of Sidon and stay there. I have directed a widow there to supply you with food.”

  1 Kings 17:8–9

• It seems harsh that the brook that God provided dries up

• But Jezebel was from Tyre and Sidon. God sends Elijah to the territory of his enemy. If he keeps providing for him with the magical Brook we never get this story, and (SPOILER) its going to be a story of resurrection.

• But Elijah goes to the widow. He asks her for some water and bread. He has to humbly ask for the thing God has been providing. 

• And she says I have no bread, I am going to make a meal for my son and I and then we are going to die.

• Elijah receives more direction from God in his lack…

  Elijah said to her, “Don’t be afraid. Go home and do as you have said. But first make a small loaf of bread for me from what you have and bring it to me, and then make something for yourself and your son. For this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the LORD sends rain on the land.’ ” 

  1 Kings 17:13–14

• the woman’s young son dies.

• And she asks the question many of us ask in tragedy? Is this my fault? Has God been against me the whole time? Did you just come to hurt me?

• And then Elijah asks for her son and takes him away to or pray, and he prays basically the same question
  
  

ELIJAH PRAYS HIS QUESTIONS

• When life is really difficult and tragic for us, where we go with our questions matters.

• Are you able to take your questions to God? 

• Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried out to the LORD, “LORD my God, let this boy’s life return to him!” 

  The LORD heard Elijah’s cry, and the boy’s life returned to him, and he lived. Elijah picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house. He gave him to his mother and said, “Look, your son is alive!” 

  – 1 Kings 17:21–23

• When he saw Elijah, he said to him, “Is that you, you troubler of Israel?” 

  “I have not made trouble for Israel,” Elijah replied. “But you and your father’s family have. You have abandoned the LORD’s commands and have followed the Baals. Now summon the people from all over Israel to meet me on Mount Carmel. And bring the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table.” 

  So Ahab sent word throughout all Israel and assembled the prophets on Mount Carmel. Elijah went before the people and said, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow Him; but if Baal is God, follow him.” 

  But the people said nothing. 

  – 1 Kings 18:17–21

• In confidence do you still turn to God?

ELIJAH PRAYS HIS CONFIDENCE

•  He prays in stages for the rain.

• Rain came. 

• But look what happens instead….

  Now Ahab told Jezebel everything Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, “May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them.” 

  Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die.

  – 1 Kings 19 v 1–4

• He doesn’t want to go on.

• He thinks he is a failure. 

• He wants God to end his life.

ELIJAH PRAYS HIS DEPRESSION

• He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep. 

  – 1 Kings 19:4–5

• And we see the incredible wisdom of God here. 

• Elijah goes to the same place Moses went to look for God. To ask to see His Glory.

• And there Elijah prays his desperation

ELIJAH PRAYS HIS DESPERATION

• He makes Elijah food and lets him rest.

• God knows what we need.

• Strengthened by that food, he traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. 9 There he went into a cave and spent the night. 

  And the word of the LORD came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 

  He replied, “I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.” 

  The LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” 

  – 1 Kings 19:8–11

GOD COMES AS A WHISPER. A STILL SMALL VOICE.

• Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. 

  Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 

  He replied, “I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.” 

  – 1 Kings 19 v 11–14.

• Elijah asks the same question, but now the Lord is speaking.

• Elijah is told that God has had a plan, he is not alone. He is gong to receive help. He is given a friend, someone to walk with. Elisha.

• As Elijah learns to pray. Elijah Walks in Wisdom.

Pray your lack

Pray your questions

Pray your confidence

Pray your depression, your anxiety, your illness

Pray your desperation

Pray and walk in wisdom

---

February 22: 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: ‭Daniel 5

King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them. While Belshazzar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken from the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines might drink from them. So they brought in the gold goblets that had been taken from the temple of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines drank from them. As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone.

Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his legs became weak and his knees were knocking.

The king summoned the enchanters, astrologers and diviners. Then he said to these wise men of Babylon, “Whoever reads this writing and tells me what it means will be clothed in purple and have a gold chain placed around his neck, and he will be made the third highest ruler in the kingdom.”

Then all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or tell the king what it meant. So King Belshazzar became even more terrified and his face grew more pale. His nobles were baffled.

The queen, hearing the voices of the king and his nobles, came into the banquet hall. “May the king live forever!” she said. “Don’t be alarmed! Don’t look so pale! There is a man in your kingdom who has the spirit of the holy gods in him. In the time of your father he was found to have insight and intelligence and wisdom like that of the gods.Your father, King Nebuchadnezzar, appointed him chief of the magicians, enchanters, astrologers and diviners. He did this because Daniel, whom the king called Belteshazzar, was found to have a keen mind and knowledge and understanding, and also the ability to interpret dreams, explain riddles and solve difficult problems. Call for Daniel, and he will tell you what the writing means.”

So Daniel was brought before the king, and the king said to him, “Are you Daniel, one of the exiles my father the king brought from Judah? I have heard that the spirit of the gods is in you and that you have insight, intelligence and outstanding wisdom.The wise men and enchanters were brought before me to read this writing and tell me what it means, but they could not explain it. Now I have heard that you are able to give interpretations and to solve difficult problems. If you can read this writing and tell me what it means, you will be clothed in purple and have a gold chain placed around your neck, and you will be made the third highest ruler in the kingdom.”

Then Daniel answered the king, “You may keep your gifts for yourself and give your rewards to someone else. Nevertheless, I will read the writing for the king and tell him what it means.

“Your Majesty, the Most High God gave your father Nebuchadnezzar sovereignty and greatness and glory and splendor. Because of the high position he gave him, all the nations and peoples of every language dreaded and feared him. Those the king wanted to put to death, he put to death; those he wanted to spare, he spared; those he wanted to promote, he promoted; and those he wanted to humble, he humbled.But when his heart became arrogant and hardened with pride, he was deposed from his royal throne and stripped of his glory. He was driven away from people and given the mind of an animal; he lived with the wild donkeys and ate grass like the ox; and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven, until he acknowledged that the Most High God is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and sets over them anyone he wishes.

“But you, Belshazzar, his son, have not humbled yourself, though you knew all this.Instead, you have set yourself up against the Lord of heaven. You had the goblets from his temple brought to you, and you and your nobles, your wives and your concubines drank wine from them. You praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or understand. But you did not honor the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways. Therefore he sent the hand that wrote the inscription.

“This is the inscription that was written:

mene, mene, tekel, parsin

“Here is what these words mean:

Mene: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.

Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.

Peres: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.”

Then at Belshazzar’s command, Daniel was clothed in purple, a gold chain was placed around his neck, and he was proclaimed the third highest ruler in the kingdom.

That very night Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians, was slain, and Darius the Medetook over the kingdom, at the age of sixty-two.

---

Themes

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

• Cry of the Prophet

• Fasted Life

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• The goal of the series is to look at the voices of the prophets and their impact as those who critique from the inside. 

• We look at the prophet as a “watchman,” whose job is to call for honesty and to stop the Israelites from relying on anything other than God 

• Richard Rohr says,

  “In this way, they introduced a completely novel role into ancient religion: an officially licensed insider critic, a devil’s advocate who is tasked to call out and expose their own shadow side! Few cultures, if any, develop such a counterintuitive role.”

  – The Tears of Things

• Their work is sometimes labeled “Creating holy disorder” for confronting injustice and exposing abuses of power. 

• Rohr:

  “Prophets, then, are full truth-tellers, not fortune-tellers. They pull back the veil to radically reframe our preferred storyline of history. “

• We need this in the church because:

  • The Christian religion has sought to achieve its own innocence rather than act in solidarity with suffering and sinners.

• “TEKEL, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting”

  – Daniel 5:27

• King - has a moment of being measured

  • Will you honor the truth you have been taught about God and the true story of the world?  

  • He says no…I’ll worship what I want, in fact,  I’ll use the very things that were intended to affirm God’s sovereignty and drink from them while praising the idols that I have chosen instead of God to satisfy me. 

• But Daniel is also being measured in this moment

  • After 65 years of captivity and indoctrination - what would he do? He could be killed in this process if he tells the king the wrong thing.

  • He honors the God of his origin. He holds to the true story of the world. He calls out the king for neglecting to heed the warning of the past. 

• Memory is an engagement with fidelity from a God who takes endless initiatives in life-transforming, life-guaranteeing actions of generosity.

• “It is inescapable if one's past tense is burdened by self-invention and one's future tense is limited to self-sufficiency. It takes no imagination to see that technological consumerism, unable to host past miracles or future promises, has given us a present tense of greed powered by anxiety and issuing in shameless brutality against our neighbor.” 

  – Bruggeman

• For it is only when the past is brimming with miracle and the future is inundated with fidelity that the present can be recharacterized as a place of neighborliness in which

  • Scarcity can be displaced by generosity

  • Anxiety can be displaced by confidence

  • Greed can be displaced by sharing

  • Brutality can be displaced by compassion and forgiveness

• The recovery of the true story of the world includes the daring, pervasive conviction that God's fidelity outlasts every circumstance.

• Daniel was able to hold onto the truth for 65 years in a hostile pluralistic environment. 

  • Honor the past (the king didn’t honor the lessons his grandfather learnt) Daniel held to the faith and devotion of his heritage

• Trust God for the future - his fidelity will outlast every circumstance!!!!

• Be courageous in our moment - order your life around that reality. God is faithful and will continue to be.

• Daniel did this through forming daily life habits that immersed him in the truth. They connected him with God. 

  Here’s a practical outline for building these habits by Alice Bohn. 

• A Well-Ordered Life: Practical Steps – Daniel’s prophetic clarity was the result of a life oriented toward God. We are all "ordered" toward something—the question is whether it's anxiety, money, etc, or our Creator.

• The Purpose of Ordering

  • We reorder our lives to plug into God, our ultimate Source, and join His work in renewing all things.

• How to Start

  • Establish habits that seek Jesus’ presence. Lent serves as a communal opportunity to audit these routines with the support of the Church.

  • The First Step: Fasting

    • Fasting reminds us of our dependence on God and creates margin for other spiritual practices. Beyond food, consider fasting from social media, late bedtimes, or digital noise.

  • Pillars of an Ordered Life

    • Prayer: Use "in-between" moments like commuting, brushing teeth, or Emmanuel Prayer at bedtime.

    • Scripture: Try a verse a day, audio Bibles during chores, or family devotions.

    • Worship: Practice "Worship Walks," gratitude lists, or daily singing.

    • Confession: Schedule weekly friend calls, spouse check-ins, or pastoral confession/counseling.

    • Service: Integrate rhythms like trash pickup, meal trains, or plugging into TGC service opportunities.

    • Obedience: Be intentional; a well-ordered life requires a plan. Tithe. 

  • We reorder our lives to live in the Presence of God. If this is daunting, start by asking God for help this Lenten season.

---

February 8: 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: ‭John 1:35-51

The next day John was there again with two of his disciples. When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!”

When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”

They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?”

“Come,” he replied, “and you will see.”

So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about four in the afternoon.

Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus. The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah” (that is, the Christ). And he brought him to Jesus.

Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas”(which, when translated, is Peter).

The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, “Follow me.”

Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. Philip found Nathanaeland told him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”

“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked.

“Come and see,” said Philip.

When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.”

“How do you know me?” Nathanael asked.

Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.”

Then Nathanael declared, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel.”

Jesus said, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than that.” He then added, “Very truly I tell you, you will see ‘heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on’ the Son of Man.”

---

Themes

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

• By Your Life We See Light

• Come and See

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• Sometimes, we hear things at exactly the right moment.

• This opening chapter of John's Gospel account begins with something like cosmic/meta level poetry, about Creation, about the personhood of God, about the deep questions of human philosophy, about our most ancient hopes as a human race, about Israel's prophetic expectations …

  • It's breathtaking in its scope when we really hear it.

  • The Logos became flesh and blood and skin and bone and set up a tent in our midst.

  • The Eternal Word became a person and tabernacled among us.

  • God moved on to the block. 

• The chapter ends with what is almost like a kids’ game of telephone.

• In 50 verses from the highest heights of divine poetry, and human thought and longing to what appears on the surface like a very pedestrian series of conversations.

  • But these brief and initially simple encounters between friends change the world because they change these lives.

• They hear, ‘Look the Lamb of God’, right at the moment where they register the weight of what is being said and when they can walk right along follow after Jesus.

• People come to Jesus, and they want some information. They want a little clarity on who He is or what He thinks about something, or what they should do and Jesus will say “Come and See.”

  • Or “Follow Me” or “Let’s Go”. 

• And journey of relationship begins, a walking together begins. 

• The Kingdom of God moves along relational lines.

  • Because God’s very nature is relational.

• So God insists not on doing things all on His own. He insists on involving us in relationship and participation, even if as it often does, it gets messy. 

• That meant I have chosen you to be My disciple - to live in the dust of Rabbi

• “Follow me” was a really loaded phrase in Jewish culture at this time.

• “Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” 

  “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked. 

  “Come and see,” said Philip. 

  • Andrew found Simon, and now Philip finds Nathanael.

  • Nathanael cracks a joke about Nazareth. And Phillip says Come and See.

• The Kingdom of God is moving along relational lines.

  • These friends are passing on what they have received

• One of the most joyous things as a follower of Jesus is to be able to pass on to someone else what Christ has given you. And you don’t have less for it, you have more.

• Our world has a strong resistance to proselytizing

• We should talk about our most deeply held beliefs.

• There is tremendous joy in passing on what you have received from God

• You can often tell when someone is talking about God in a way that is more about them feeling like they must say it than any concern for who hears it.

• People talk about what they love. We pass on what is meaningful to us. 

• “But the most obvious fact about praise -- whether of God or anything -- strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise. ... The world rings with praise -- lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game. ... I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.”

  – C.S. Lewis

• We praise the things we enjoy. We want others to see the good in them. 

• We praise what we care about. 

• When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, He said of him, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” 

  “How do you know me?” Nathanael asked. 

  Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.” 

  Then Nathanael declared, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; You are the King of Israel.” 

  Jesus said, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than that.” He then added, “Very truly I tell you, you will see ‘heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on’ the Son of Man.” 

  – John 1:47-51

• Nathanael is initially skeptical. He makes fun of Jesus’ home town. 

• But then Jesus reveals that He knows something true about him. The smallest detail. Where he  was sitting before Philip got to him.

• It is deeply moving to know we are seen by God.

• The Kingdom of God moves along these relational lines.

• We pass on what we have received

• We tell what has happened to us.

• Occasionally, we write it all down.

• Sometimes we meet people who have been through something just like us and need to hear how God met us there.

• If you’re embarrassed to identify with Jesus because some people publicly take His name in vain and attach it to things Christ has nothing to do with 

• All the more reason we are invited to humble integrity in following Jesus.

• We are invited to live in the dust of the Rabbi - to do what we see Jesus doing, to follow what we see Jesus teaching.

---

February 1: 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: ‭John 1:19-34

Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.”

They asked him, “Then who are you? Are you Elijah?”

He said, “I am not.”

“Are you the Prophet?”

He answered, “No.”

Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”

John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’”

Now the Pharisees who had been sent questioned him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”

“I baptize with water,” John replied, “but among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”

This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.”

Then John gave this testimony: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One.”

---

Themes

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

• By Your Life We See Light

• Baptizing with the Spirit

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• There is light in Epiphany, even if it’s still dark pretty early.

• There are powerful reasons for hope.
  

• Sometimes we can read the Bible like a nice clean devotional book, and treat the Gospels like everyone was just curious religious thinkers walking in small groups in robes and debating ideas.

• But - There were powerful and dark political forces at work. Jesus wasn’t executed because He carried lambs around and said love your enemies.

  • Leaders thought He was a threat.

  • And so they come looking for John because he was drawing crowds.

• John keeps pointing away from himself and playing his part in the redemption story. 

• The Words of the Prophet

• The Work of the Lamb

• The baptism of the Spirit

• The Words of the Prophet

  • John does use a quote from the prophet Isaiah to describe what He is up to…

  • “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’ " 

  • Isaiah 40 in fact where the quote comes from is about Yahweh coming to His people and a highway being made for Him. John is applying that to Jesus.

• The Work of the Lamb

  • The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.” 

    Then John gave this testimony: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One.” 

    – John 1:29–34

  • Jesus is….

    • The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world

      &

    • The One who baptizes us with the Holy Spirit

      • The Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world, sets us free by dying without any sin of His own from the law written into the universe of sin and death.

  • Do you realize that? The Law of Sin and Death is as real as gravity and it not an arbitrary thing that God set up to keep people really moral and threaten them with death if they didn’t behave.

  • God is the source of life.  God is life.

• If you part ways with God (which is what sin is) You part ways with life and death comes into the story. 

  • In big and small ways.

  • Death of trust, death of love, death of peace, death of relationships. 

• NT Wright’s comment this is helpful …

  • “The death of Jesus takes place, in this gospel, on the afternoon when the Passover lambs were being killed in the Temple. Jesus is the true Passover lamb. John, like many New Testament writers but in his own particular way, wants us to understand the events concerning Jesus as a new, and better, Exodus story. Just as God brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, so God was now bringing a new people out of an even older and darker slavery.”

• Maybe you are like “How can this old tribal barbaric violent way of thinking still be relevant our modern world?”

• Friends, sin is still bringing about death. God gave His people a visceral costly picture to work with. So they could grasp what sin does to a person and community….

  • But every time forgiveness is given, someone has to absorb the cost of the wrong done.

• Christ is saving and healing the world because He took that cost on Himself. 

• If you want a commentary on this read Hebrews 9 and 10 but I’ll give you this one highlight…

  • “How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!” 

    Hebrews 9:14

• The Lamb who is slain sets us free

  • And the Spirit poured out – the Spirit we are baptized with makes us alive
    

• The Cross in our forgiveness, the Spirit brings our realization of it.

• The Cross sets us free, the Spirit helps us walk in freedom.

• The Cross in our mercy that changes our view of God and the world, the Spirit helps us walk in humility and courage.

• Be free and be baptized by the Spirit. 

• Whatever life we can muster on our own, it is nothing compared to life Christ is offering.

  • It is a life of freedom - where nothing ensures you

  • It is a life of union, of friendship, of fullness …

• There’s a million ways I want the world to be different. Christ brings this new creation to our lives and says ‘You be different.”  Here is forgiveness and my Spirit. Now show up in the world in a new way.

---

January 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.

---

Love

Teaching Text: ‭‭John 1:1-13

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

---

Themes

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

• By Your Life We See Light

• True Light

---

Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• The intro to gospel of John is a tremendous resource for this type of reflection. We open with it this first Sunday of Epiphany because it is such a powerful guide.

• The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

– John 1:9–11 

• Do you ever think of God as experiencing grief? That rejection impacts us profoundly, but God feels it as well? 

• Why would God arrange a situation where God would show up in a place and not be recognized?

• If you are watching there is plenty of God’s obvious power in what Jesus does but its not like sky writing in the clouds so everyone can read.

  • Instead he goes small first, shows up in weakness initially, hyper local, specific. Relational.

• In the beginning - we are clued in right away that whatever he is doing he is harkening back to the original creation story.

• NT Wright has a helpful comment on the connection to Genesis…

• Whatever else John is going to tell us, he wants us to see his book as the story of God and the world, not just the story of one character in one place and time. This book is about the creator God acting in a new way within his much-loved creation. It is about the way in which the long story which began in Genesis reached the climax the creator had always intended.

– NT Wright

• John is telling us using the opening lines of of Torah (of Genesis) that God has made and is remaking the world. 

• And the way that is happening is for God to show up in person.

• He is telling us that nothing in the natural world was created without relationship - without through-ness. 

• Creation was not a lonely endeavor.

• John is saying there is a light that is a light to whole human race.

• There is a true light that gives light to everyone and it has come into the world.

  • And no matter where you have started in life, whatever your life is up to this point, you can be Born of God.

• The reality of God’s life can be born in your life. This is something more than just a  new idea in your head about God.

• This is a transformation where what is true about God’s life begins to fill your life.

  • The light, the love, the perspective, the future of God becomes yours to share in.

• This passage says it hinges of our part on recognition and reception.
  
  
  

• He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God

John 1:10–12

• We recognize Jesus - this word made flesh 

• We receive him 

• We become family - born of God

• So lets ask ourselves…

  • How do you recognize Jesus?
    

• In this text, in your life, on a Wednesday, in your goal setting and resolutions, in your budget, on the F train, at your life group, at Monday night English language conversations, in the news?

• How do we recognize Jesus the first time or the millionth time?

• Ask for help to recognize Jesus

• How do you receive Jesus?

• Trust that he is who he says he is

• Believe in his name. - In means Yahweh saves.

• Sit with him, eat with him, speak to you him, trust his guidance.

• Be born of God - are you living like someone born of God? Like family?

• What is animating your daily life?

• What is guiding your discernment? decision making?

• Are you led by love?

• By the Holy Spirit. Pray for the filling of the Holy Spirit

• Recognize Him

• Receive Him

• Be family

---

December 14: 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 1: 5-38

In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly. But they were childless because Elizabeth was not able to conceive, and they were both very old.

Once when Zechariah’s division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside.

Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

Zechariah asked the angel, “How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years.”

The angel said to him, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their appointed time.”

Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah and wondering why he stayed so long in the temple. When he came out, he could not speak to them. They realized he had seen a vision in the temple, for he kept making signs to them but remained unable to speak.

When his time of service was completed, he returned home. After this his wife Elizabeth became pregnant and for five months remained in seclusion. “The Lord has done this for me,” she said. “In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people.”

In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth,a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.

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Themes

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

• Watching for the Light

• PEACE: See a light—God's unchanging Character Across the Ages

• Series Intro: 

  • God is near

  • God is saving and rescuing

  • God is filling and healing.

  • But that can be confusing or disillusioning because life has quite a lot of waiting, some real season is difficultly, loss, grief. Life has what feels like delays. It has uncertainty, pain, and longing.

  • And so we need the darkness of Advent also.  We need the wilderness and waste places of Lent, we need the confused grief of Holy Saturday when Christ has died but we see no sign of resurrection.

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Formation 

Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:

• Types of Silence

  • Silence of despair

    • Sometimes suffering can make us forget, and that moment of forgetting is despair.  It is the moment we forget that God is a God who hears the cry of his children.

    • And in the story of the Hebrew/Israelites: hope was a groan and a cry 

    • If your silence with God is one of despair, then it is time to cry out.

  • Silence of shame/unacknowledged sin

    • When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.

      – Psalms‬ ‭32‬:‭3‬-‭5‬ ‭NIV‬‬

    • Jeremiah 31:3 : “I have loved you with an everlasting love;

      I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.

    • The hope of Advent is a God who is coming all the way to you. All we have to do is not hide

  • Silence of awe

    • The silence of awe is also present in the advent story at the birth of Jesus.  The shepherds who heard the announcement of the angels and who saw the newborn Jesus, shared with their neighbors what they had seen and heard.

    • Luke writes in his gospel:

      And all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.

      – Luke 2:18

    • The ESV better here it says: “And awe came upon every soul…”

    • Awe is our most reasonable response to the presence of the trinitarian God or to witnessing the direct activity of God in the world.

• Tyler Staton: “Fear of the Lord is the willed choice to give my attention to God—to listen to the story He tells about who I am, who He is and where we’re going together—and then live in a contested world of competing fears like God is in fact the only one telling the truth.”

• Are you building your life on God’s faithfulness?  Do you believe the story He is telling in the world? Because if you do, if you can live in the fear of the Lord, then you can experience what I will call the silence of trust.

• Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

  – Exodus‬ ‭14‬:‭13‬-‭14‬ NIV

• ESV renders it: you need only be silent.

• The enemy you fear no longer has any power over you (fear of death, fear of failure, fear of abandonment). You just need to be still. Stand in the place where you are (keep worshipping, keep serving, keep living into the Messiah’s picture of human flourishing)--stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord.

INVITATIONS

• Perhaps we need silence to determine what kind of silence we are in. When the quiet comes and you’re alone, what are the thoughts that comes? Are they of love, trust, hope? Are they of fear, shame?

• Sometimes I don't know what my thoughts are toward God until I’m alone with them. I need to be still first. And sometimes that’s when the trembling truth comes: I’m angry with you. I’m disappointed that you let this happen. Or sometimes: thank you, I love you. And sometimes quiet: just being together. And I imagine a hand on my chest. A face next to mine. Ah, there you are. I’ve been waiting.  Let’s go on our walk.

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