19 Feb Discussion Guide Zoë Week 2
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 Zoë, in which we study Jesus’s incredible claim that he came to bring us abundant life, even in the midst of our spiking cultural anxiety and fragmentation. We will explore how the life Jesus lived is the best way to tap into that promise as we seek to establish specific rhythms and practices to cultivate a life marked by a gospel-centered abundance of strength, health, and vitality.
Today’s Topic
Work/Rest
Discussion Questions
When you were a child, what job did you dream of having one day?
Luke 6:6-11
On another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Get up and stand in front of everyone.” So he got up and stood there. Then Jesus said to them, “I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?” He looked around at them all, and then said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He did so, and his hand was completely restored. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus.
In Jesus’s time, a shriveled right hand would have indicated this man could no longer produce any kind of valuable work, and therefore he would have been looked down upon as culturally insignificant and devoid of value.
How does our modern culture connect productivity and work to value and significance?
Why is it significant that Jesus healed a man who could not work on a day reserved for rest?
How does this passage support an understanding of rest as a way to heal the human tendency to either overwork or view work in an unhealthy way?
Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary
A sign hangs on the wall in a New Monastic Christian community house: “Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.” I was, and remain, a Christian who longs for revolution, for things to be made new and whole in beautiful and big ways. But what I am slowly seeing is that you can’t get to the revolution without learning to do the dishes. The kind of spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary. I often want to skip the boring, daily stuff to get to the thrill of an edgy faith. But it’s in the dailiness of the Christian faith—the making the bed, the doing the dishes, the praying for our enemies, the reading the Bible, the quiet, the small—that God’s transformation takes root and grows.
What daily tasks must you do in order to survive and thrive physically and spiritually?
How does work help us know God in deeper ways?
How does our small, ordinary work make space for God to do big, redemptive work God in the world?
Resting Well
St. Augustine, Confessions
Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we men, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you – we also carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
How does resting remind us of God’s worthiness and power?
How does rest humble us?
How can rest become an invitation to witness God’s goodness as he does salvific work as Jesus did in Luke 6?
Closing Thought
Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor
The gospel frees us from the relentless pressure of having to prove ourselves and secure our identity through work, for we are already proven and secure.
Take some time to pray for one another and thank God for the work he has given each of us to do and the rest he offers us in him.