25 Sep Discussion Guide: (IN) BREAKING Week 6
Prayer
Take the first 10 minutes of your time together to listen to what God is doing in one another’s lives and pray for any specific needs people in your group may have.
Today we continue our series titled (In) Breaking. We will be working through the gospel of Matthew and learning how God desires to have His Kingdom come, and His will be done, in our lives as in Heaven. God wants to break into our hearts, our emotions, our actions, our existence so that we might know Him, and be known by Him, in ways that we will never be the same.
Discussion Questions
Tell us about a time you have renovated, or paid someone to renovate, something (house, car, painting, clothes, etc.). Why did you renovate that thing? What was involved in that process of renovation?
Genesis 1:26-28
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image,in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Colossians 1:16
For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.
Matthew 22:36-40
And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
According to Scripture, what was God’s original design for humanity? Creation?
Scripture tells us that our original design was to image God, to act like a 45 degree angled mirror that reflects who God is to the world and in response to his glory reflect the praise and adoration of creation back to God. In other words, we are meant to live life in such a way that gives people a glimpse of who God is and what His Kingdom is all about. To do that we have to love God above all else and love others as ourselves.
What would you say has gone wrong with that design? In other words, what’s the problem with humanity and creation today?
There are many reasons that can be listed here, but speaking in a general sense the issue with humanity is we have flipped the design on its head. Rather than loving God and loving others as we love ourselves as a means of imaging who God is, we have taken the reigns and have decided to reflect our own glory to the world and worship creation (typically ourselves) as god, use others to obtain what we feel we need, and remove God from the equation all together.
What solution has God provided to deal with those problems? What has God done to renovate, or salvage His design?
Jesus is the solution. God taking on flesh and entering into our world to live the life we could not live and die the death we should have died and then rising again to conquer our greatest enemy, death, the ultimate intimidator. The fact that “while we were His enemies, Christ died for us,” proves God’s unconditional love for us and that perfect love casts out the fear and insecurity that we’re not enough, and God isn’t for us, and reconstitutes us as the humanity God originally designed us to be.
Henry T. Blackaby
“Will God ever ask you to do something you are not able to do? The answer is yes–all the time! It must be that way, for God’s glory and kingdom. If we function according to our ability alone, we get the glory; if we function according to the power of the Spirit within us, God gets the glory. He wants to reveal Himself to a watching world.
The reality is that the Lord never calls the qualified; He qualifies the called.”
If you call yourself a Christian, where was your life when Jesus called you to follow Him?
What does that tell us about the kind of King Jesus is?
He is a King who loves unconditionally. A King who is merciful, gracious, slow to anger.
What does that tell us about the kind of followers He wants us to be?
What does it take to be kind of person? Where can we find the strength and motivation to follow Jesus like that?
It requires the security of unconditional love. The only way we can love others unconditionally is if we have a reservoir of unconditional love to pull from. We cannot do it in our own strength. At some point we will come to a place where we feel something has been taken from us (respect, time, money, love, etc.) and when that happens we will begin to hold something back. It is only when we realize we have everything we need in Jesus, who is the same yesterday, today and forever, that we can love unconditionally with boldness and confidence, expecting nothing in return, laying down our lives for those God has called us to.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
What are some reasons people, including those who call themselves Christians, might resist following Jesus the way He wants us to?
How did Jesus model for us the very thing He calls us to be and do?
How does the Gospel story help us overcome our fears and self-preservation?
Closing Thought
Matthew 4:18-20
While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.
How can we, as a group of followers, live out God’s story of redemption right here in our part of Austin?