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.
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Explore a curated online collection of recommended practices and resources to pursue presence, formation, and love in your life.
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Love
Teaching Text: 2 Corinthians 5:13-21
If we are “out of our mind,” as some say, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Themes
Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:
Pain in the absence of love
Reducing love
Suffering love
Presence
Watch or listen to the sermon. Then take a moment of silence and think about these questions:
“The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.” —NT Wright
Meditate on this statement for a moment.
Jesus embodied this. Thank him for this suffering love.
Formation
Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:
Whatever you pursue with your greatest attention, devotion, and affection; whatever can ask the most of you and you won’t refuse, that is going to shape you.
“Christ’s love compels us” and that is incredible. that is inspiring. that’s what we want right?
Paul is saying that in a fallen and broken world LOVE often meets resistance. Requires laying down our life, being pressed on all sides.
Our world reduces love by attempting to take out the suffering.
We are told if it gets hard or painful we look to get out, and we deserve that.
But in many cases - traveling through the suffering because of love and carried by love is what love looks like and how it grows and how it gets expressed.
A love that doesn’t account for suffering won’t make it far.
Look to Jesus to his disciples: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.” —John 15 v 12-17
How can you know the unexpected depth of love in a shallow world?
It won’t be by reducing love down to pleasure or lust or attraction or agreement.
It won’t be by simply enthroning selfishness in your heart and calling it empowerment.
It won’t be by quitting when things are challenging.
It won’t be by building a life on comfort and entertainment and exciting travel opportunities.
It won’t be by being drug around by your ego - posturing.
It is getting a vision of love that is compelled by Christ.
Love that involves dying to your selfishness because Christ has died for you.
It is laying down your life for others because God has loved you more than you can fathom.
It is being filled with the Spirit of God.
Love means dying to myself. It means putting the other first. Being informed by their needs. Entering their story. Listening. Caring. Giving. Not having the last word. Not hammering them with my rightness, Not pepper spraying them with my ego. Not giving them the brass knuckles of my wants and my story above all.
The way of love that we are sold is very shallow.
But to be a friend, a lover, a son or daughter, a spouse, a parent, a good neighbor requires a depth of love that can account for fear, failure, selfishness, forgiveness, pain, grief, delay, danger, inconvenience.
Christ’s love compels us
That we should no longer live for ourselves - the unexpected way to abundant life
This way of Jesus changes how we regard everyone - how we evaluate people
The new creation has begun - a new way of being human - filled with God’s Spirit
We live by this new citizenship - because our primary allegiance was Jesus.
We have a life message of reconciliation as if God were making his appeal through us.
God has a staggering commitment to relationships - expressed in love
This week, fill in the section on formation in the booklet you have received. Follow the steps of pausing and praying, and inviting God to lead you before doing so.
Love
Read these notes and discuss the questions below:
This week our neighbors at Mixteca threw a party for those among us new to America, new to the language, needing resources, many needing help, and needing love. On Sunday we made sandwiches.
There are places in our church suffering for lack of people to serve. Take a look at this page and choose somewhere that you and your group can serve together:
Pray for one another in the group.
