Welcome to the Mariners Church Life Group Leader Podcast. This weekly conversation is designed to equip and resource youth to build a healthy life group community that studies God's word, practices spiritual rhythms, and changes the world together. Hey, Life Group Leader is welcome to the Life Group Leader Podcast. My name is Dallas, and I am joined by...
This is Kim, the group's pastor. It's so good to be with you. We are loving the series. I think when I saw the series for the first time a year ago, a series on prayer, I was going to be so great, I can't wait, and then jumping into it, it's different than I thought it would be in the best way.
It's heavier, it's intense, it's beautiful. I have found myself praying differently the last couple weeks just being in the series. Agreed. It's refreshing, it's motivating, and the cars that we're getting each week build on top of each other.
I love that, how finding a place to go away, and then also having the ideas how to P-R-A-Y pray that way, pray to your father. It's just beautiful. Whether you've prayed for 50 years, or this is your first time ever praying out loud or running to the father, I just love it. Yeah.
It's beautiful, loving to see the response of our church on the weekend. For those of you, you, life group leaders, you were the ones picking it up on the other side too. I know, even just in my own group, after last week's talk about the father and how our earthly father isn't a reflection of our heavenly father, but a perfection, that really stirred something as a group. It was a beautiful time, and I'm thankful for all of our life group leaders.
You are the ones handling those conversations in group time. I'm so thankful. Agreed. I can't help but pray for our groups that they're going to do a prayer experience.
This just lends itself to that. Even a personal prayer experience, we're building that within ourselves and to take that opportunity for your group to go somewhere, even to the beach or even to a park. It doesn't have to be far, but what a sweet time to have a prayer experience and to have all of this resonating within your mind and your heart at the same time. Just we didn't even plan this, but to plan it off your group.
You could all pick a place to get away to pray. You'd pick a place and a time to go to a prayer experience, and then you just walk through the how to pray. Prays, ask, you. It goes away for an hour doing that.
Give them a verse. Give them any of these amazing passages from Jesus. Right there, you have a prayer experience. Build out.
There it is. That's all you need to do. Very easily. Even this last Sunday, the card had scripture printed on it for all of those characteristics of God.
That in itself, an hour may seem daunting, but it is going to fly by. Just being able to have that time to journal it or to just sit on each step for a minute and then come together afterwards and share what you've got, share what you've heard, share what you learned from the Lord, and get some food together. It's always good to get food together after. Be reminded that this was one of the things that brought your group together and reading.
If you think back to Rudid, you think back how your group came together, it wasn't just part of it was just sitting and talking and debriefing. Homework time asking great questions, but a big part of that was serving together and was the prayer experience and praying together. That was a big reason. Because I think you and I are so close to Rudid groups right now, and we always hear them graduating and like, what would you love about it talking to leaders?
Prayer experience. Yes, always. And I think part of it is the element of surprise because I think they walk into that kind of with trepidation. They're not sure what to expect and I certainly don't belong here.
I don't know what to do. And they come back like, oh my goodness, that was so great. And it could have that same surprise feeling. You don't have to come in a perfect place ready for that.
God is faithful and he shows up every time. So leaders, I think this is a challenge for you. We are getting into the back half of the year. Christmas is creeping around the corner, poking the head through the door like, hello, I'm right here.
Jingle, jingle, jingle. You actually said the word, Christmas, wow. It's right around the corner, which means that's a whole season of the day. A season of busyness, of chaos for some.
What does it look like to really get your group together, do a prayer experience and to prepare for this season? So leaders, I want to challenge you. Get a prayer experience on the books. If you have a prayer champion, a plus student, connect with your prayer champion and say, hey, you have three weeks.
Let's put something on the calendar and let's do a prayer experience. So good. You know, and even in your time together this week, doing prayer a different way. Yeah.
Taking out of the box and spend more time intentionally praying but also intentionally listening. Yeah. Where you just yield and low God to speak into your heart. So maybe you spent the last 30 minutes of your group time in some type of prayer, many experience together.
Maybe you'll hear people pray that have not prayed out loud before. Beautiful. It's your good. But things this week, let's transition to this week's topic.
We are in week four of our how to pray like Jesus and we are a walking house, walking houses of prayer, Mark 1112 to 25. Make sure you read that whole section. It's like three sections. It's like a sandwich of passages.
So we have a couple of questions for your group to interact with. And I think that first question as we lean in together and get everybody to share, what is a task that requires a lot of your focus or attention? Why is that? Why is this question so important for the group?
Because we're not always good at multitasking and what is it that requires our attention. We know what that is. I mean, there's certain things you can do all day long with mirroring about the things at the same time. But there's some that are worthy of your focus.
There's some that are hard for you and they demand your focus to be able to accomplish it. But being mindful of that, what that looks like, that's really intriguing and it's good to know about ourselves. What takes that from us? Yeah.
So if you're around, ask everybody, get everybody to talk. It's fun. It's like hearted. You get to see how people are wired because people are wired differently than you.
So you might hear something like, that's so easy for me. Yeah, you're probably going to hear that because we're all unique. So then we look down, read the passage, three different stories, the sandwich. And we have some questions just for you to engage with the passage.
So what similarities do you see between the victory and the temple courts? What are Jesus's actions in the passage? What does he say about the victory? Courts and prayer?
I would really encourage all of you guys all go to church. Don't miss this week. I have heard this passage taught before and I've never heard it the way Eric has taught it before. And it was so enlightening.
Light bulbs collect things. You know, I had no idea those were connected. You know, like show up somewhere. Like how do you know that person?
Everything gets connected. That's what this teaching is this weekend. That's very true. A whole new light on it.
Because to me, they were always separate stories. The way they were brought together changes the whole way and makes them applicable. Completely applicable to me right now. It was really great.
Yeah. Dig in deep to that scripture. And hopefully at least some of the people in your group can reflect back on the message and the notes they took from that. Yeah.
And relate if you weren't there because it was really great. Yeah. Maybe as a group you could all go to church together. Lowing in fruit there.
Try out our Saturday, our 530 PM service. It was always fun stuff afterwards. So as a group you guys could just debrief right there before you go into the end of your time and hang out. There's always dinner.
There's always fun. There's something for everyone. Such a good idea. So I encourage you all to do that.
Then we look out and I think it's important to always know looking out as a leader. We have to make sure this time stays looking out and we don't allow people to look in. That's always the temptation in this one. I go, let me tell you about my life.
And as a leader, how do we transition them to say, oh, we're not looking at our life yet. That's the next section. That's such a good point. Looking out.
We want to get everybody to look out, compare and contrast and culture. So any of those questions can stand out to you and we have two of them in there. I think it's really interesting what makes someone good at praying because there's a lot of assumptions with that. Yeah.
And I think the more that those words are spoken, that truth will be seen. What makes somebody good at praying? It isn't the most eloquent probably or the loudest or the one that has the most experience. What is it?
That's for us to explore together. Yeah. Some of those beautiful prayers that I've heard have actually been rooted. And it's the person who's like, I've never done this before.
And it's about as raw and honest as it gets. And I'm like, you are good at praying. And people might say, down to your words are so great. It's like, yeah, well, sometimes you're just like repeating.
Like, it's easy going right into it, which ties into our leading question. So, yeah, that's probably where I've heard some of those beautiful prayers. And I think you're God leaning in so close when those happen because it is so authentic and genuine right from the heart, right? But think of, as a parent, when my kids first started talking, I leaned in, like, I'm going to try to understand this.
What are you trying to say? And it's so beautiful. I listened so intently. Now I speak their language.
I understand their words and translate it for three-year-olds. That's the best. That's the best. And you don't want to miss it.
You don't want to be away from them because you don't want to miss what they say when they want to talk. So good. And even time in the prayer series, how much more does our Heavenly Father love that? If we love it here, how much more does our Heavenly Father rejoice in our verse?
Yes, it does. Yeah. So good. Yeah.
So that's the look in section. That's the part that when we go home from life group, that's the part that sticks with us. When we lay our head on the pillow, that look in question is the one that's going to be there that we wrestle with. And that's okay because that's what change comes in our heart.
So just make sure you leave time enough to let the concept of these ring true with our hearts. Like the one that says, is there clutter in your life that is stopping you from becoming a house of prayer? That's almost worthy of asking every day. Yeah.
And it's something that, as I've learned with facilitating groups, be okay with some silence right here. This is a silent one. Okay. You've had a few moments to think on it.
Who wants to answer first? Who wants to jump in? Continue to invite? That's not an answer to a question that I'm going to answer immediately.
I'm thinking on that. So being okay with silence. Yeah, for sure. Such a sweetness to this because we get to take it with us and praying is a personal thing.
Sometimes it's a private thing. Sometimes as we sit with some of the scriptures that we've talked about through this series, there's time for us personally to go away. So being able to sit in that silence is so awesome. What a gift.
The world is not silent, but to have a place that it's okay just to stop and think is so beautiful. That's good. Well, I hope your group time is as beautiful as a series has been, how special this series has been. I've had some really great conversations and we hope that you get to continue that.
Thank you for being on the front lines. You guys should hold on a lot of the way as life group leaders just even this last week. So with talking to your father and we're just so thankful for you the role that you play in our church. We could not minister and shepherd to all these people of Mariner's church, all these image barriers of Mariner's church without you.
So life group leaders would love you and we're so thankful for you. And then praying for you guys. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time.