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Totally Authentic - Week Five

April 01, 2025 0 0

 

A Genuine Person

 

The approval, esteem, recognition, and personhood, we strive for is something we can already find in Christ. How does it change our lives when we begin with the principle that there is already a place where we belong, where we are understood, where we are loved, where we matter? How does it inform how we think about freedom, redemption, God’s call, and living a meaningful life?

 

SEEDS TO SOW: A large part of this theme has been about appreciating our own genuineness, our authenticity as creations of God. But what about appreciating the genuineness of others? Even when we know people are putting up a front, projecting something they aren’t, how can we prayerfully remember the genuine person underneath? Worthy of love as one of God’s children.

 

Read Philippians 4: 8-9

Let the genuine resonate with the genuine!

In a news cycle full of the inauthentic and dubious, the insincere and the fraudulent, let’s not look away but instead look past allowing the inauthentic to diminish and shrink in the context of the just, the pure, the loving, the commendable and the excellent! 

As a group come up with a list of recent examples of just, pure, loving, commendable and excellent things!

 

Read 1 Kings 19: 19-21

Letting go, blessing others, setting off.

Here we see a threefold experience of being called by God to something new:

  1. Letting go of what we have and where we have been.
  2. Taking the opportunity to bless others where we have been.
  3. Setting off into the new experience. 

Do people sometimes skip stage 2, overeager to launch into the new thing? What are some examples of ways that people can bless others when they are leaving one place/project/community and heading into a new one?

 

Read Luke 9: 51-62

Let the dead bury their dead.

The Bible is full of richness and layers — we have just been considering the importance of taking the time to leave well and now here Jesus is telling us to just get on with it already!

So what’s going on… As we saw in the Elisha reading it can be important when called to something new by God to take time to bless others before setting off. But Jesus, probably with an eyebrow raised to that very passage (which likely would have been familiar to those questioning him), spurs on these would-be-followers to just get on with it, to seize the moment.

As Christian communities are there times when we are a long time burying things, a long time letting go, and Jesus is inviting us to just leave it behind and come to him…

Discuss these ideas as a group: the tension between the two passages we have just read and how perhaps for our churches there are things we just need to leave behind so that we can keep following Christ today.