27 Aug Discussion Guide Stories: Everybody’s Got One: The Shunammite’s Homecoming
Before We Get Started
For our discussion today, we will be using the sermon series discussion guides. If you would like to follow along you can access this discussion guide on the website at mosaicchurchaustin.com and then select “community group resources” in the menu options.
Prayer
Because the primary goal of our time together is to establish relationships and learn how to walk with one another in all that God has called us to be and do, we’d like to begin by praying for one another. So, does anyone have anything you’d like us to pray for or anything to share regarding how you’ve seen God moving in your life that we can celebrate together?
This Week’s Topic
Today, we continue our series titled Stories: Everybody’s Got One, in which we examine how to make sense of our own world without God’s story. Who are we? Where do we fit? How can we see ourselves in it and connect to it in a way that actually changes our lives for the better? Join us for a four-week look at four incredible stories of people who found their lives swept up in a story much larger than their own lives.
Today’s Topic
The Shunammite’s Homecoming
Discussion Questions
Where do you feel most at home in the world?
Living in Our Temporary Home
2 Kings 8:1-6
Now Elisha had said to the woman whose son he had restored to life, “Go away with your family and stay for a while wherever you can, because the Lord has decreed a famine in the land that will last seven years.” The woman proceeded to do as the man of God said. She and her family went away and stayed in the land of the Philistines seven years.
At the end of the seven years she came back from the land of the Philistines and went to appeal to the king for her house and land. The king was talking to Gehazi, the servant of the man of God, and had said, “Tell me about all the great things Elisha has done.” Just as Gehazi was telling the king how Elisha had restored the dead to life, the woman whose son Elisha had brought back to life came to appeal to the king for her house and land.
Gehazi said, “This is the woman, my lord the king, and this is her son whom Elisha restored to life.”
The king asked the woman about it, and she told him.
Then he assigned an official to her case and said to him, “Give back everything that belonged to her, including all the income from her land from the day she left the country until now.”
Why was the Shunammite woman willing to obey Elisha and temporarily make her home in an uncomfortable, inhospitable place?
What do you imagine those seven years were like for her?
In the end, was it worthwhile for her to make a foreign land her temporary home?
How is God honored by our willingness to embrace this broken world as our temporary home?
Longing for Our True Home
Madeleine L’Engle
We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.
Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home
The word longing comes from the same root as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space and also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us. The longing for home is so universal a form of longing that there is even a special word for it, which is of course homesickness.
Have you ever been homesick? What helped you through that time?
What burdens of your temporary home here on earth cause you to long for eternity most?
Have you ever caught small glimpses of the home you long for, where everything is as it should be?
Believing Our Heart’s True Story
Shauna Niequist, I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet
I know now that I’m strong enough, brave enough, whole enough to hold it all – how it was and how it ended. What I got wrong, what I made right, who I was, who I wasn’t, who I’ve yet to become. What I miss, what was lost, what’s still unfolding. I’m not perfect or shiny or bulletproof. The story of my life is not a fairy tale. It’s not a horror story. It’s just a story like most stories – dark and light and beautiful and terrible and still being written.
Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved
One of the greatest acts of faith is to believe that the few years we live on this earth are like a little seed planted in a very rich soil. For this seed to bear fruit, it must die. We often see or feel only the dying, but the harvest will be abundant even when we ourselves are not the harvesters.
John of the Cross
Live in the world as if only God and your soul were in it; then your heart will never be made captive by any earthly thing.
How do Gehazi, King Jehoram, and the Shunammite woman all represent people who believed their true story?(*see note below)
How does the gospel prove the truest story about us is that we are loved?
What false stories can often drown out the story of our belovedness?
How can we help the people in our lives hear the true story of God’s heart, that they are precious to him and he longs to lead them home to himself?
NOTE: King Jehoram was the son of Ahab and Jezebel, who worshipped Baal and opposed Elisha’s predecessor, Elijah, for decades. Gehazi lied and stole from people Elisha helped. His betrayals eventually resulted in him contracting leprosy and being banished from the ministry.
Closing Thought
Brian Edgar, The God Who Plays
The present era is, indeed, a time that mixes joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, tragedy and triumph as we await the final revelation of Christ in his glory, but this certainty of a future hope has implications for our understanding of the present time, for the kingdom is in the present as well as the future and the glory of God is revealed all around us at this very moment. As much as this world is a preparation for the next it is also a present demonstration of that life of play, dance, music, joy, and rejoicing.
In the final moments of your time together, take turns sharing ways you have made this temporary home feel a little more like our eternal home in heaven.