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. Welcome leaders to the Life Group Leader Podcast. I'm glad that you're joining us today.
This is a great time to join together, to celebrate what God is doing, to equip you as Life Group leaders. We're coming off just an incredible season. We're always humbled and amazed about what God is doing in and through His church, in and through you and your leadership. We're coming off of the back of Easter, which my goodness, without Easter, without the resurrection, that we might as well pack up and go home.
We don't have anything without it. That's it. We're coming with our great voices, ladies and gentlemen. Who is speaking?
Who's that man from the corner? It's our singer, pastor, Eric, guy, girl, what's going on? Man, you invite me on. Like, once every series kind of kick it off, right?
So it works out great that way. I love being able to speak to our Life Group leaders. Life Group leaders are really thankful for you. Without you, we have, we do not have the ability to shepherd people as a church without you.
So our Life Group's are how we shepherd many, many people. And you being a Life Group leader, when you are shepherding people in His name, caring for people, being sure people are connected to Jesus, connected to the vine, I'm so thankful for you. Yeah. So if you're a new Life Group leader, it might be that you're coming off of leading a Life Group leader.
We're glad you joined us. We've got new video groups that are starting up here real soon too. So this is our rhythm of weekly, we're putting you along the discussion questions and we do bring Eric in when we start a new series, which we're doing. I need a miracle.
I do. I need a miracle. All I need is a miracle. There's a song about that somewhere.
I wonder if we should play that. We might should. We played a HU at the beginning of the Jude series. Yeah.
98% of people loved it. They loved it. 2% were like, what is happening? Why are we playing a Beatles song?
And I'm tang with me, hang with me. We're gonna be teaching through Jude. That's right. That's right.
I'm gonna be talking about the heart behind the series. I mean, coming off of the greatest miracle of all celebrating the resurrection of Jesus and now looking at several of his miracles throughout the gospel. What are we excited for? What are we looking into?
Really, when we prayed about the whole teaching calendar for 2023, you can see the diet of teaching we've had so far. We started with on the table and then moved into holding on, which is a study of a good Jude. So really, you know, eight weeks on the table, five weeks in Jude, so 13 weeks, I mean, a quarter of a year was, I mean, really some intellectually challenging. You could say we always want to teach for head, heart and hands.
So we want people's hearts to be moved by the grace of Jesus. But we want to be intellectually honest and take people to the scripture that's head. We also want to be practical. Like what do we do now?
What do I do with what I've heard that's hands? So I think it's a teacher often, head, heart, hands. But you could say that on the table and holding on the study in Jude, there was some heady stuff in those. I need a miracle as we mapped out the whole teaching calendar calendar for 2023.
It's a series that that really is very much heart. The heart of what Jesus has accomplished for us, the heart of our Heavenly Father for us. The heart of people that we often do have this sense of, man, I need a miracle. I need Jesus to come through for me.
Now in the series on the table, we talked, we had a whole week on suffering that not always does he do a miracle, but sometimes he does. And so in this teaching series, we're going to see some of the miracles that Jesus performed and then what they mean for us. But it does come off of Easter, which is the miracle of miracles. And because of Easter, every other thing's possible.
I mean, without Easter, there's nothing possible. But because of Easter, if Jesus can walk out of the tomb, then he can intervene on our behalf in other ways as well. So there's really, we'll see this in week one of the series of the teaching. There's really two different viewpoints that people have about miracles.
There's naturalists or supernaturalists. So naturalists believe that miracles are not possible and supernaturalists believe that no, miracles are possible that the supernatural happens. And so you have to just start with the Christian faith is a supernatural faith. And we are not Christians without the supernatural.
Think about it. God created the heavens and the earth. Jesus enters our world through the womb of a virgin. On the cross, Jesus takes away our sin and our shame.
And that's a miracle. He walks out of the tomb on the third day. He moves within his people. So, so he gives us his spirit.
We're going to rise again and live forever with him. I mean, none of this is natural. It's all supernatural. So so much of our faith is grounded in supernatural reality.
We'll define a miracle in the teaching series that it's God's intervention upon natural loss. So there's natural laws that he's set, but because he's God and exists outside of his creation, he can supernaturally intervene. And that's a normative operation of what we see Jesus doing, how he out works the kingdom in the gospel, right? We often talk about proclamation and demonstration where he's doing both, he's showing, he's telling.
And sometimes you hear the signs and wonders. Yes. And the wonders because they're the cause to make us wonder about what's behind the sign. The sign is beautiful.
Yes. Just in and of itself, but there's more behind working that. All right. So I think it's really important that you mentioned that term science.
Yeah. So in John's gospel, right? There's four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In John's gospel, he refers to the miracles as signs or he mentioned seven signs.
And then in the very last chapter of John's gospel, he says, Jesus performed many other signs, which I guess we wouldn't have enough books in the whole world to record all the signs. But the word sign is important because it wasn't simply Jesus was performing a miracle to show people. It's not a party trick. Yeah.
And it's Jesus showing who he is, a sign, meaning there's something beneath the miracle that he's showing about himself. So I mean, just I'm going to try to be really practical for a life reporter. So he heals blind people. Well, what's that show that he can heal us from our spiritual blindness, right?
He turns water into wine, which will be week two of the series. What does that show? Well, on a surface level, it shows that he can provide, but it also shows because he took these ceremonial cleansing buckets, which would have been or jars, which would have been purification of that all. It would be about the law and he turns them into wine, which shows that he has come to usher in a new kingdom filled with grace.
So there he raises Lazarus from the dead. What's that show? He can raise us from the dead and give us everlasting life. So these signs that John in his gospel talks about, to your point, they aren't simply a surface level sign.
They're showing us something deeper that he does for his people. That's good. Amazing. So great.
That's right. And we can have expectation to hope to believe that he still does that today. Some wonder when we talk about miracles. Well, he did that.
Does he still do that? Does he still want to do that for me today? Like the bloopers, you might be wondering that things that you're carrying your your, your everything within your group, physical elements, relationships that are broken. Does God still care?
Does he still move? Does he still want to act? He does. And I think that what you want to do is a life people leader to hold an intention is you'll have people in your group who will, perhaps by God's grace, see a miracle and then you'll have people who don't.
Yeah. So how do you as a leader, how do you shepherd people when you have someone in your group who is miraculously healed of cancer, you'll have someone in your group who is not? And so how do you, how do you handle that? This is, this is what I think we learned from the teaching of miracles throughout scripture.
The healing of the cancer is a miracle, but it's not the greatest miracle. The greatest miracle is that I'm forgiven of my sins, that Jesus walked out of tune and I'm going to have everlasting life with him. The miracle of curing of cancer points to the greater miracle and the miracle of cancer being healed only happens because he's able to work the greater miracle, but we want to be sure we're always celebrating the greater, the greater miracle and not the lesser miracle. So because miracles are intervening on natural laws and not breaking forever natural laws, even those who are healed eventually still die in this life.
So think about Lazarus, right? Jesus raised him from the dead, but then he died. You know, the girl that Jesus raised from the dead, she later died. Because the natural law in this world of death is still there.
Jesus intervened on it, but the natural law is still there, so the person dies again. But in the new heaven and the new earth, that law is no more. The natural laws are completely gone because we now live in a kingdom not that is subjected to the pain of a broken world, but we live in an everlasting kingdom. So the reason I'm sharing that is I think it'd be good to know some language.
David Hume was a philosopher in the 1700s, not a Christian. He would call himself a naturalist, but some Christians have actually taken his language about miracles. And so I'll give you a little bit behind the scenes thinking. David Hume said, miracles are breaking natural laws.
Two, natural laws are not broken, and therefore there are no miracles. So that's what Hume said, like, not natural laws are never broken, so there's no miracles. Christians have sometimes taken the first part of what he said. Miracles are breaking natural laws, but there are miracles because God breaks natural laws.
C.S. Lewis though, I think has a better definition for miracles. He doesn't use the term breaking natural laws because the natural laws really aren't broken. Just like Lazarus still died because the natural law of death is still there.
He intervenes on natural laws. So he intervenes, raises ladders from the dead, but the natural law is still there because Lazarus later dies. It would be like that, I'll use the illustration in the message. I think we can learn.
It's like the natural law of gravity. So I'll probably be holding some type of ball on stage, drop the ball. The gravity is pulling the ball to the ground, but I can intervene and catch the ball. It doesn't mean that gravity is broken.
It means that gravity was intervened upon. So a miracle is the supernatural, Jesus intervening upon natural law. So the natural law of our bodies, the centigrating over time, he can intervene and bring healing, but the natural law is still there. One day we will die in this world.
It was the lesser miracle. So what I do is a life repeater celebrate when the lesser miracle happens, but the greater miracle is that he's forgiven our sins and that we are with him forever. That's beautiful. I mean, we have a longing for that.
We have a longing for that. That's right. That's right. And which is why during the series uniquely, I think three out of the five weeks we're going to offer extended prayer after all of our services.
We are invite people. And this is what's going to happen. We are going to see some miracles happen. Why do I know that?
Because we see miracles happen regularly in our elder prayer room and all of our congregations. We see people, we see doctors confounded by what happened. And so we're going to see some miracles take place, but not everyone's going to receive a miracle, but everyone who's believing Jesus has received the ultimate miracle. And part of my background, I want this to sound too much more.
I had more time podcast, but just one talking about these things. When you maybe grew up in an overrealized eschatol, or like a hyper-careerismatic, so you love our care plus for me when that didn't happen, it was, okay, well, there's a sin problem, there's a faith problem. It's something that's on me that I couldn't conjure up enough of what I needed to get this in here. I think that this will be helpful for a real leader to evaluate the two extremes.
So like if you had a spectrum and we're so thankful for every tribe within the King of God and every type of church. And we have people we speak respectfully because we have people who come from earners from all different backgrounds. But you know, if you had like a spectrum on one side would be what you just described, which was your upbringing, which is the miraculous, it's expected to happen all the time. And then on the other side is there, there's no more miracles happening, right?
They don't happen at all. And there's really downside of both sides. So what you just described is true where if you grew up in a context where the miracles are almost promised, if it doesn't happen, you feel like you did something wrong, that there's something missing in you, something lacking in you. The downside of all the way over to the other extreme where there's never talked about a miracle happening is almost a naturalist viewpoint of he never intervenes.
He never steps in and catches the dropping ball, you know, he never moves on behalf of his people. So where do we want to shepherd people? We want to shepherd people this way. He can.
He's the God of yesterday, today and forever. He can move on behalf of his people. He doesn't always intervene. We don't fully understand why he does and why he doesn't.
But for those who have believed in him, we have already the better miracle because of Easter, we have the better miracles. And both of those extremes have problems experientially and also typically that's going to walk us through each week during the sermon series. But I do believe that this is going to be a really impactful series for us to walk through with our group, to have this expectation of if God can do anything, but also the substantialness of the charity of our faith of even when I don't see what I want to see in the immediacy, I will still trust because the greatest miracles are going to cheat through Jesus on cross. So we're excited for this.
As you mentioned, extended prayer is going to be happening three out of five weeks. We've got a rooted launch in here. We've got Mother's tag. We've got outreach weekend.
We're using the great stuff out there. Most of the weekends in here. Yeah. This isn't really fun series.
Yeah. Yes. Yes. Each week, life, your leaders tune into it, right?
Because we're going to walk through the specific passage and go through the questions in there. But any final thoughts? If your new life, your pleater, I hear almost weekly somebody will stop me and say, hey, thanks for that life, your pleater podcast. It's really helpful for me as I prepare.
So if your new life, your pleater, I do encourage you, you know, why you're on a ride or why your exercise and why you're commuting, you know, to spend a couple of moments, it will just help you be able to think through your group time knowing how to give you some handles on how to talk about what we're talking about. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. We want to equip you guys, because as you said, you're doing it.
We could do it without you. I'm absolutely, but I mean I gots doing great things, it's not independent of what you're doing on the ground weekend and we can't with those that you care for. So we're excited for the serious thanks Eric, Bert, leave us through it again. I appreciate you man.
Alright man, group leaders look forward to connecting with you weekend and we can out on this great resource for you.