Gather & Eat

Eat, talk, hangout, have fun.

Pray

Gather together in a comfortable setting (around a table, on the couch, the floor of a living room, etc.). Have somebody lead a prayer asking the Holy Spirit to lead and guide your time together. Don’t be afraid to leave some space in the quiet to just listen and rest.

Discuss

Everybody hopefully had a chance to listen to the message for this week. The message was from John Mark Comer on what it means to be with Jesus as part of apprenticeship to him.

Use these questions to help guide your discussion as a large group:

  1. What did you think of the teaching this week?

  2. What was the most challenging part of the message?

Learn

Every day there are 24 hours available to us. And every one us finds a way to fill them all - with things essential to life or remarkably less so.

It has become easier and easier to fill those hours as technology progresses - the internet travels with us in our pocket, and social media apps are constantly created and reinvented to occupy our time. In 2 Kings 4 there is a story of a woman with a miraculous jar of oil that constantly refills, so that it never runs out, and the woman and her son can be nourished perpetually. We have replaced this in modern society with an endlessly refreshing feed which somehow fails to refresh or feed us - but it certainly fills our time.

In modern life in Los Angeles there is no shortage of things to occupy your time. From groceries, laundry, work, traffic, miscellaneous errands, working multiple jobs just to make rent, dropping kids off at school, cooking, and trying to have any kind of social life…our days fill up. 

As a result, life is often hurried and hard.

The idea of somehow finding time to practice the way of Jesus can feel daunting if not impossible. How can there be enough time to do everything we need to do and also find the minutes and hours to spend time with Jesus, pray, fast, sabbath, read the Bible, serve the poor, invest in my community, worship, engage in silence and solitude, and whatever else might be on God’s to-do list for me today?

Yeah it all sounds exhausting when you put it like that.

Obviously this is not what God has for us. His yoke is easy and light, remember?

We must keep a few things in mind:

  1. Before God ever wants us to do things with Him, He simply wants to be with us. We start at this point. Abiding, and resting with the person and presence of Jesus. We don’t start at 100 miles per hour doing tasks for Jesus (that’s not even the finish line nevermind the start). There is an invitation from Jesus to just BE with Him. Start here.

  2. We order our lives around the rhythms of our relationship with God. For us to be followers of Jesus who live the way He has instructed us, it will most likely require a reordering of the structure of our lives around new rhythms. For all of us there is an inventory of our life that needs to take place where we must decide what is most important and we build the schedule (or rhythms) of our life around those things instead of others.

  3. Adding new things into an already full 24 hours is impossible - something has to get cut. It isn’t possible to just find more time to do more things. There is instead a need to ask ourselves “What am I going to stop doing in order to do this new thing that I want to do?”. This may be cutting out something that is an unhelpful and unproductive use of your time (I see you TikTok 👀) or it may even involve cutting something that is a good and enjoyable use of your time but not worth as much as following Jesus.

Share

Split into triads (groups of three, ideally of the same gender) to share at a deeper level. The goal of sharing in triads is to keep those groups consistent so that you can build trust and a deeper connection with whom you can be more vulnerable and share at a deeper level that you might not do with the whole group.

Check in with each other and get to know each other a little if you don’t already know everyone in your triad.

Then work through these questions, engaging your heart as much as your mind.

  • Do you feel like your life is full or even hurried? What takes up the majority of your time?

  • Do you find yourself feeling rested and spiritually, emotionally, and physically nourished most days?

  • What would it look like for you to spend 10+ minutes a day just being with Jesus (no Bible reading, no tasks, no agenda - just time in contemplative, resting prayer)? Would any rhythms in your life need to change to make this possible?

Pray

Staying in your triads, pray for each other. There may be practical needs or prayer requests, or there may be things to pray for regarding the topic of submitting our lives to the way of Jesus. When praying for someone you can ask them if you can appropriately place a hand on their shoulder, and it’s ok to keep your eyes open when you pray so that you stay aware of what is happening to them as you pray. Make sure to invite the Holy Spirit and leave space for Him to speak.

Practice (90 mins)

Here’s some things to practice this week to delve deeper into this topic.

Listen

Read

Can you find 10 minutes a day to be with Jesus?

Not Bible reading, not active prayer, not journaling. Just 10 minutes to say:

“Hi Jesus, all of my day belongs to you, so please take these 10 minutes to do whatever you want to do, and to say whatever you want to say to me”

Psalm 23

Spend some time meditating on this text and reflecting on how being with God is a call to rest and to be refreshed - not to be overworked and burdened.

Stretch Goal

If you want to go deep on this topic try reading “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry” by John Mark Comer. What would happen if you built your life around being less busy and in doing so your life became more richly full in Christ?

Rest with Jesus