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:

  • What impacted you from the teaching this week?

  • What was the most challenging part?

Learn

Before Jesus was a Rabbi we know His father Joseph was a carpenter (or stonemason) and that for a lot of Jesus’s life he wasn’t known as a rabbi but a carpenter.

So let’s picture Jesus as a carpenter. What if we were apprenticing under Jesus in carpentry? What would we do?

It’s safe to assume we would go into the carpentry shop, and we would follow the carpenter around, and we would learn the physical skills, techniques, philosophies, and tools of carpentry. And at first we’d be really bad at them (and that’s ok!). We’d watch him make things and pay great attention. And we’d ask questions, and we’d scurry around after him helping where we could, absorbing everything about carpentry, because he is a master craftsmen and we are novices, and one day we want to be able to do what he does.

Jesus the carpenter would also have a way of doing things. Part of our apprenticeship to him wouldn’t be just to learn how to do things, but to learn how to do things his way. Over time we’d go from being eager but pretty useless helpers to competent carpenters and maybe one day even masters ourselves. And we would be recognizable to others as having trained under that particular carpenter because we would do things the way he taught us to do them.

This is how it is with Jesus and us right now. Jesus the Rabbi, the son of God, has a way of doing things and we are supposed to do the things he does the way he says to do them. With not just his technique, or methodology, but his character as well. We are called to do the Jesus stuff, and to do it with the character that Jesus did it.

There is perhaps a temptation in modern western Christianity to hang around the carpentry shop, sitting on the workbench, swinging our feet, not paying attention. We can find ourselves hanging around in the shop like it’s a social club and we don’t actually do “the stuff”. We call ourselves carpenters but we’ve never picked up the wood chisels or a handsaw in our lives. Or we sit in the shop telling the master carpenter that we don’t think his way is actually the best way anymore and that maybe he should consider our new ideas. Or we do the things the carpenter taught us but not in the way that he taught us - we are very happy to wield a hammer but we don’t do it with any of the grace, sensitivity, or nuance that Jesus taught us.

Spiritual formation means we do what Jesus did. He has a way. We are followers of the way of Jesus, doing the things he did, with the same loving sensitivity he did them.

So now we have an opportunity, as part of this community, to choose to reorient our lives around the person of Jesus, and choose to submit our lives to not just his teaching, but his lifestyle.

The ultimate goal in spiritual formation is that your life would resemble the life of Jesus.

Share

Split into triads (groups of three, ideally of the same gender) to share at a deeper level.

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 have practices in your life (prayer, sabbath, fasting, silence and solitude, reading scripture, deep Christian community, radical hospitality, sharing the gospel, serving the poor, grateful generosity) that you already do? Are any of these absent from your life? If so, why do you think that is?

  • Which of the practices of Jesus do you anticipate would be the hardest to integrate into your life?

  • What are you hoping to see happen in your life if you do adopt all the practices of Jesus?

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)

Next week we will turn our attention from a thousand foot view of formation and get very practical. We will begin by learning how to engage with and observe the spiritual practice of sabbath. This will be a four week journey that will finish the second half of this course. The goal is that we would start with this oft neglected but essential practice of Jesus that will begin to set our lives apart - and the fun part is it’s all focused around resting and delighting, not work or striving.

Listen

Stretch Goal

Robert Mulholland is one of the masters when it comes to spiritual formation and discipleship. If you want to go deep on this topic, you can’t get much better than his seminal work “An Invitation to a Journey”.