Welcome to the Mariners Church Life Group Leader podcast. This weekly conversation is designed to equip and resource you to build a healthy life group community that studies God's word, practices spiritual rhythms, and changes the world together. Welcome back to the Life Group Leader podcast. My name is Jared and as always, so grateful to be joined with Jeremy.
Jeremy, how was your Thanksgiving? Oh, it was great. I had time with both sides of my family and actually got to celebrate this year with a refugee family from Iraq. So that was a lot of fun.
Husband and wife and their two children. So it was a lot of fun watching them play, celebrate their first Thanksgiving here in America, but there was no English on that side of the family. So a lot of Google translate through our cell phones, but it was a lot of fun. It was a special one.
We won't forget. Wow, that is incredible. What an added complication to try to have to do the whole Google translate thing, but it really does force you to choose your words wisely to slow down in conversation. That's right.
It helps you avoid all the awkward, like, controversial subjects, right? So you got to choose your words so carefully. So you can keep it pretty simple. That's beautiful.
Well, everybody's like, oh yeah, I guess I should share about mine as well. Well, you know, a big news in the Kirkwood family is we purchased a home and we're so blessed. We're so grateful that that whole thing, after many years of saving and trying, we ended up getting a house. And so praise God.
Yeah, we ended up making it a working weekend. I had my extended family and my kids, all with paint rollers in hand. And we did a little serve project in my house. And so we had a good time doing that.
But of course, Thanksgiving was great. Nothing to complain about over here. Like our leaders, we hope that your time was good, with family and with friends, however you celebrate a Thanksgiving. And it's an important weekend that I believe postures and positions our hearts so that we can be fully ready to enjoy the meaning of Christmas.
And that begins, not on Christmas day. That actually begins right now. Because through our gratitude, we say the words, thank you. We are ushered into the presence of God.
And it is in that place that our hearts are transformed and really allows us to hear the beautiful message of Christmas. And so as we get into this weekend's content, we're starting our brand new Christmas series called Angels We Have Heard. And we're going to be looking at the Christmas story from the perspective of the angels in the story. And so as usual, before Jeremy and I get into the week one content, we are excited to have Eric join us again.
And he's going to take us through the overarching view of the content. And I'm excited for you to hear this, because not only do we talk about the Christmas content, I ask him a couple of questions about what he's excited about the teaching calendar for next year. And so before we get too far, let's have Eric join us in this conversation so you can hear from him. Eric, welcome to the Leader Podcast.
By the way, I've got to say Merry Christmas. This is our Christmas episode. How good is that? It's amazing.
So fun to celebrate this season with you. As we get going into this episode, one of the fun things about it is we have some brand new life groups that have just come out of Rooted. And we're so excited for you. Life group leaders, congratulations.
We are so thrilled to walk alongside you as you are leading these groups. Hey, if you are a new life group leader, it says a lot about you. You were recommended by people in the group who is a leader. You had a rooted leader who saw shepherding in you.
Me and you could shepper people well. They saw care and you compassion and you for other people. They didn't necessarily think you're perfect. So don't put too much pressure on yourself or like you're an expert.
That's not what they saw. They saw that you love people, that you love the scripture, that you want to shepper people well. And so I am proud of you for being placed into this position, into this role. And I think it's amazing what you get to do.
You get to think about the early disciples of Jesus. You had 12 people. You know, Judas walked away. So you had 11.
He was replaced by a guy named Matthias. So you had 12 with me in there. And they changed the world. 12 people changed the world.
So Jesus basically chose to enter into our culture and then invest himself in a life group. So Jesus had a life group that he poured himself in two for three and a half years, dies on the cross force, walks out of the tomb, ascends back into heaven, and then hands it over to the life group, hands it over to the life group. And we're here because that one life group took it seriously, went for it, was empowered by the spirit, served people, loved people, kept growing in their relationship with Jesus. And so the world has changed through a life group, you're a new life group leader.
This is a major important thing that you get to be a part of. Thank you for saying yes. Thank you for doing this. And we're so grateful that as life groups, one of the things that we do similar to this group that Jesus had is we practice those seven spiritual rhythms that come out of Acts chapter two, those things that you did enruded, like being in God's word, praying, talking about areas of center struggle, generosity and so on.
As we do that in life groups, we don't become a support group. While we care for one another, we are outward facing. And we care about the world around us. We care about our family and our neighbors and the city that we live in and global issues.
Like we care about those things. And that's how we as a group of life groups that call ourselves Mariners Church, we get to be a part of change in the world as well. So thank you, I appreciate you being a part of this conversation and always encouraging our life group leaders. We're talking about the Christmas series.
So we've got a great series coming up called Angels. We have heard, walk us through just the overview of the series and I can't wait to talk about where we're heading towards Christmas in the series. I love Christmas. I love teaching Christmas.
There's some pastors who I've heard say, oh man, I get so tired of teaching Christmas. It's the same story. I love teaching the same story. There's so many fun and creative and insightful ways to teach the same story, even presented to us in the scripture.
But really, the message of God entering our world for us is the message we need over and over again. I am excited about the angle we're taking this year. There is a lot of fascination with Angels. I mean, you have movies and books and all people speculate all the time.
Do I have a guardian angel? Sure. Team of guardian angels. And we'll talk a little bit about that in the series.
But what you see is that Angels are really surrounding the Christmas story in a big way. The announcement to Mary is through an angel. The announcement to Joseph is through an angel. The announcement to the shepherds through an angel.
And so Angels are very prominent in the Christmas story. So we're going to hear the message that the Angels shared. So Angels we have heard. And the message that was shared to Joseph, to Mary, to the shepherds is the same message that we need to hear.
It's yet you have Mary. She hears that, hey, don't be afraid. A lot of the messages are about don't be afraid. Which really is cool coming out of the series, my anxious thoughts, because we have dealt deeply with our fears, our anxieties.
And now the message that we're going to hear coming out of the series is to not be afraid. And then there's reasons given. So to Mary, hey, don't be afraid. You are favored.
You are favored. You're carrying the Messiah. And we're going to see that we're favored too. Those of us who are Christians, we carry the Messiah.
Christ has moved into our lives. So we don't have to be afraid. We are favored. Then we're going to see when it comes to the shepherds.
Hey, don't be afraid. I have great news. The angel has great news. I'm sorry, good news of great joy.
And so you don't need to be afraid. Week one, you're favored. You don't need to be afraid. Week two, we have great news.
There is great news. And we'll talk about what the great news of Christmas is. And then Joseph, a message to the angel. And he gets a Christmas week, which is the 23rd and 24th at all of our congregations.
We'll have different service times those two days. But we're going to see one really fascinating passage in 1 Peter 1, verses 10 through 12. It's really fascinating. I mean, it's just an amazing text.
It says that the scripture says Peter writes that angels long to look into these things. And these things referring to verse 10 about our salvation. So Peter is essentially saying angels wish they understood salvation. And you're like, wait a second.
Angels were there with the shepherds. Angels were there with Mary, with Joseph. They had a front row seat. The salvation, enter in our world.
What are they missing? What are they longing for? Drum roll, you'll find out on Christmas. But here's the hint.
There's something you know that angels don't know. And they want to know what they know it mentally, but they haven't experienced it. They have never experienced being forgiven. They've had nothing to be forgiven for.
They've never experienced the joy of being restored as we have. And so angels, they look at us with a sense of, wow, I wonder what it's like to worship after being forgiven. I wonder what it's like to be in all after having grace change you. So that would be the week of Christmas.
So the whole month of December, we're going to interact with the gospel through the lens of angels. That's awesome. Yeah. And then of course, as we do every year, our Christmas series is getting us right towards those Christmas services.
We'll obviously do things throughout the Christmas week. But man, we're heading into a great 2022 calendar. And so just for our life group leaders, I'm just so excited for where you, Eric, are taking us in that teaching calendar over the next year. We don't need to spend time talking out of here because we're going to get through it each and every series.
But give us a teaser. Is there one series next year that right now you're just excited about as you're thinking about what's coming in 2022? Oh, dang, man. I'm Jack.
I'm every single one of them. I know you are. The one I'm making you choose of your favorite children. Which are you excited about?
The one I'm always most excited about is the next one. So I'm almost done, as you can tell, I rolled off my tongue with Christmas. So I'm excited about Christmas. But since I'm almost done preparing the Christmas sermons, I'm real excited about what we're going to go into right after Christmas.
So Christmas is you hear every year, advent. So advent means arrival. So we are celebrating the arrival of Christ, the arrival of the Messiah. That's Christmas advent.
And then coming out of Christmas, we're going to talk about the second advent, which means the second arrival or the second coming of Jesus. Yes, we are going to do a series coming out of Christmas on the end time. Come on. What the Bible says about the end.
And it's not going to be a bunch of charts, but it's going to be more high level. The ending is a better beginning. We're going to see the end of your life. We're going to do a whole sermon on the end in hell.
A whole sermon on heaven. A whole sermon on how the book of Revelation wraps up. So that will be several weeks together, five, six weeks together looking at the second advent of Jesus. So good.
So for our life groups, it's a beautiful thing when you can start to think you can be mindful and plan ahead going, OK, here's what we're thinking about. As a group, the conversations that we're going to have, we're going to plan our prayer experiences around that, serve experiences, and so on. And so we're excited for the new year. But let's go back to Christmas as we look at these next several weeks, angels we have heard.
For our life groups, are there anything that our leaders can do to prepare ahead of time, anything that they could be aware of in any of those four weeks? One fun thing that comes to my mind is just on this upcoming weekend for December 4th. We have our annual Christmas tree lining at the Irvine congregation. And it's going to be a great time for us to have a little party with all of our friends and the easy invite for people to come on out for that.
Any other things come to mind within this series? Yeah, I think that Saturday night is going to be a blast. And I do hope people utilize the Christmas series to invite friends and family. And so at Life Group Leaders, I encourage you to even in your discussion with your life group to throw that question out, hey, who are you praying for?
Who are you inviting this Christmas? That just will be an amazing question to ask. By even asking it, you will get people to start thinking, oh, who should I pray for? Who should I be inviting to join me this Christmas?
And Life Group Leaders, I want to say this series, if you were tracking with the discussion questions with your Life Group, the only thing I'd encourage you on this series is to enjoy and be filled with some wonder in all over the Christmas story. You have carried a tough load as a Life Group leader the last two teaching series. And this is what I mean. First Peter's a heavy book.
And so if you walk through First Peter with your group, you had some heavy conversations as we dealt with the trials and the struggles of life in the fallen world. I mean, first Peter's about suffering, right? So you led people through that. You gave them hope.
But I mean, gosh, the conversations were deep. And then we just have been in a series on anxiousness, and depression, and worry. And so I know that every time you go into a group and you know that's me and talked about, you probably are thinking, am I prepared to answer all of the questions? And you never have to be.
I don't know is a great answer to say. But regardless, the last two series have been a bit heavy. This one's going to be its description. So there's always heaviness because it's the word of God.
But it's Christmas. It's joy. It's all. It's wonder of this great story.
So I'd say enjoy being able to look at the Christmas story together. Because we are looking at it from the lens of the angels, the only thing I would encourage group leaders to be cautious of is an over fascination with angels. The Apostle Paul Warren and Colossians too, about those who worship angels. In other words, they're so attractive and such a compelling subject that if we're not careful, we can be overly fascinated with them.
So that'd be the only, I don't think it's a major caution. But spend more time talking about the message of the angels than the angels themselves. Yeah, we're just looking through the perspective and the story of the angels to find Jesus. That's right.
The conversation about Jesus. Yeah, we're not worshipping angels at Christmas. But we are hearing the message that they shared. Yeah, that's beautiful.
Well, I am so grateful as we think about where our groups have been. There have been some heavy conversations. But there have been some beautiful stories of what God has done throughout our life groups throughout the fall. And we can't wait to hear it more.
One encouragement I'd have for us as life group leaders, I think would be the story of Christmas is the incarnation. It is that it is God being with us. Life group leaders, perhaps there's even someone in your group, an individual, or a couple that God may be inviting you to have an incarnational moment with. Is there one person in your group that you could spend just a little extra time with to go grab a cup of coffee and just check in on them or drop a meal off at their house if it's a difficult time, right?
To pray for them in a really specific kind of way. Because this is the incarnational ministry that we do because of the incarnation of Jesus, right? That's good. And Christmas for many, and it's worth noting because we're coming off this series on anxiety, is a ton that is so sad because they are seeing the culture try to act happy and they don't feel happy on the inside.
So we can still point people to the wonder of Christmas, but yet be sensitive to the reality that for many, the fascination of Christmas is not the current reality of their heart. And that's that really is why we need the second Advent. Because the first Advent didn't fix everything. That's right.
It fixed our relationship with the Father. We now are reconciled to Him, but we need the second Advent to fix all the brokenness in the world. That's right. That's right.
Well, Eric, any final thoughts for our Life Group leaders on this episode? Merry Christmas. Enjoy. That's good.
Leaders, we're so grateful for you. Jeremy and I will take a couple of minutes here, and we will walk you through the week one discussion guide. Thank you. Well, isn't it so fun to hear from Eric as he has shared with us not only about the Christmas content, but also where we're heading into next year?
So much to look forward to. And Life Group leaders, we are grateful for you because the content that we teach on the weekends and then what you discuss inside of your Life Group time, that's really the beautiful hope that we have for you is that we can build bridges between the weekend content and Life Group conversation so that we can talk about how all of this content informs our life. A phrase that we talk about in Deep Dive often is the differences between orthodoxy and orthopraxie. We have to have right thinking so that we can have a right practice in our life that we might be able to live out the beautiful scriptures that we're learning about at our weekends and our various Bible studies and things like that.
And so, Jeremy, why don't you take us into the week one content so we can get a further and better understanding of week one where we are going to hear about the message. Don't be afraid. You have found favor with God. Yeah, that's great.
And I love that you mentioned right thinking leading to right action because we're going to see in this very first message how Mary models for us asking questions even when she doesn't quite understand. God welcomes our questions. He wants us to come to him with what we, the things that we don't quite understand. We don't always get the answer that we maybe want or expect that he welcomes our questions and then we're going to see model model for us how Mary responds in faith to the answer that she received.
So, this first passage that we're going to look at is the story in Luke one. People are probably familiar with this, but the angel coming to Mary. We see the angel Gabriel, he's named in this particular passage and he comes to Mary to tell her that she has found favor with God. She responds like, how is this thing that you're talking about going to be possible?
How can I give birth to the son of God? I've never been with the man. I'm engaged but not yet married. And he says nothing will be impossible with God.
And her response is ultimately then may it be according to what you say. And she puts herself as a servant of the Lord and says, I want to live my life for the glory of God. And she submits to this wonderful message and it kicks off our whole journey towards Christmas. I think for our life group leaders, reading each of these stories ahead of time is going to be a helpful way to prepare.
One bit of advice I guess as we will constantly remind our life group leaders is that your job is not to have to be the Bible answer people that we answer every single question that people have. I love that even Eric mentioned that that our job is not to get stuck on angels. Like this is not a study about getting into all of the unknowns and the nuances about angels, but really this is about Jesus. And so I just want to remind leaders that you don't have to have all the answers in this.
It's okay to say that's a great question. I'm not entirely sure about that. But keep coming back to the leader guides that we've prepared. We're coming back to this conversation as opposed to any number of conversations that this may become.
Jeremy, any other kind of ways that our leaders could be well prepared as we had in the week one? Yeah, the very first question that we ask after reading the passage really deals with what you just said that we want to draw attention to the fact that in this case angels are more than just this abstract spiritual idea. They're somehow they are very mysterious. We don't know a whole lot about them, but we do want to draw attention to the fact that this is a messenger of God.
Angel literally means messenger. And so I love the way you and Eric drew attention to the fact that while we're coming at this, from the perspective of the messages that people receive from the angels, our emphasis is not on the angels. This is not a study in discussion on angels. Angels themselves are constantly pointing to the message that they have to share from God.
And so that's what we want to do in our groups. And this week in particular, we want people to see how all the great news that there is in this passage, both that the angel shares, both from the example we can learn from Mary. Ultimately, we want to help people see that Jesus is the promised King, that he is the one who has come and his kingdom will never end and that we're ultimately invited to be a part of that kingdom. And so we're invited into this Christmas story, this coming up with the King, and to live in that reality, even now 2,000 years later, until the Lord ultimately comes again.
So having a conversation that could take us off the rails about angels, their purpose, their existence, and my aunt twice removed once told me this great story. So that's an obvious pitfall that we could fall into. Are there others that we might want to be aware of? One thing that I think is important in this very first passage as we look at the life of Mary is that it's possible to try to come up with reasons why maybe God chose Mary.
And scripture offers no reason. And so other than she has found favor in the eyes of the Lord and that she humbly submits her life, we see in the way she responds to Gabriel, she asks a question, she doesn't understand how what God is saying through this angel is going to be possible, but she submits to that message. And so we don't want to elevate Mary to the kind of the emphasis of the story either. What makes her special is simply that she trusts God and she believes this message and God has chosen her according to his purposes to bring Christ into the world.
So again, the emphasis is on Jesus, not on Mary, not on the angel, but they're the characters we're interacting with here, which is a great reminder and an invitation for all of us to think about the incarnation of Jesus being a present reality in all of our lives today, that Jesus is fully with us. And if that is true, that ought to have an infinite possibility of how we can talk about where we need Jesus, where we are experiencing him today, that kind of conversation I think is really healthy for a life group. Anything else that you would encourage us to get deeper, any particular questions or areas of focus within our leader guide? One thing that with this week, it's quite possible that the group leaders aren't going to be meeting every week during this month.
Our calendars get full. And so one thing that I would encourage group leaders to do this week is to talk about what your plans are. If you haven't already, what are your plans for the month of December? Are you going to be meeting each week?
Are you going to do anything differently? If you'd like to do some sort of celebration, we point forward to that. We have some suggestions, some ideas in the final week of this series. If you'd like to do some sort of celebration, it doesn't have to be on that week.
But I'd really encourage group leaders to plan some sort of time, if possible, for people to get together and celebrate Christmas together as a life group and to worship together and just celebrate that fact. And even if it means doing things on a different night of the week or day of the week, take time to celebrate Christmas together with these people in your life group. So good, Jeremy. The last thing that I would encourage us to consider is who will we invite during this Christmas series?
Statistics show us that four out of five people that we invite will say yes and will come to Christmas. This is just a time where people are familiar with coming to church. And so I'd encourage you, don't wait until Christmas Eve services, invite them to next weekend. When you come to one of our congregations, there's a pack of invite cards.
Take one of those invite cards. You can fit them in your wallet, in your purse, keep them in your car. And when you feel the spirits leading, make a simple invite for somebody to come to church with you this weekend. It's a beautiful time at the church.
It's a beautiful message for them to hear to know that during a difficult time in their life or perhaps a great year in their life that God wants to be with them in the midst of celebration or in pain, that's the incarnation. God is with us. And so take the opportunity to do that. Leaders we're grateful for you as always, and we will see you for week two.