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. What's up, Life Group leaders? This is Sam Smith, the discipleship director for Life Groups and Men's Ministry.
I'm here with the man, the myth, the legend, John Thomas. It's a lot of things. A lot of times, a lot of times. One more, the lead discipleship.
You guys are for Irvine. And we are gonna go through our series overview for the brand new series, how to lead a study of the book of Nehemiah. And we have a magazine for this one, and I was flipping through it before this meeting, and I'm like, wow. The amount of intentionality that our church goes through, to build something like this.
It's so beautiful. And I love that it's built almost entirely by volunteers. And a lot of artists within our church that put this together. Yeah, incredible.
Not only the articles that are in there, the different resources, a lot of the artwork that's in there too. We saw something cool this way, did we say I'm a staff meeting about how even a men's ministry, how you guys participated in this during man campus last week. Oh yeah. On page 125, I believe, is a painting done by a lot of the guys from Man Camp.
We did a joint effort painting led by Bill West. It wasn't like paint by numbers. It was like, no, we got it nice. It was really nice.
So this is a seven week series and it's gonna lead us all the way up to Christmas, I believe. So, yeah. I'm excited for it, man. I mean, I think the first thing to talk to that, like as a life group leader, like your enthusiasm to study guys' word, your enthusiasm, particularly for the series, it really sets the tone for your entire group.
So you wanna be the first one, you know, hey guys, I'm gonna be here this weekend. What service are you gonna be at? Let's sit together. Hey, series magazines, they're gonna be incredible.
Would you grab them? We're probably gonna run out. And then just do some pre-reading ahead of time. Familiarize yourself with the background of the DMI.
But your enthusiasm to study this book is gonna really help set the table for your group. And we're excited for it. I mean, over the last several months, Eric has been leading our pastoral team through the content, through the book of DMI, and the different, you know, the biblical leadership principles that are in there, which you're gonna see throughout this message. And for that, like our pastoral team has been so good, so much depth and rich teaching that has come out of that.
I mean, just yesterday, we talked about, this is one of the principles in the series, resolve and how resolve is a characteristic of a leader that is so important. If you don't have resolve, you can have everything else, but if you don't have resolve, everything else just kind of fades away. And so, yeah, I mean, I can't wait to study this. We'll do it together.
Yeah, and you know what? For the Life Group leader, this is a really applicable series. Like, this is gonna help them continue to lead their groups. And they're gonna get a lot of practical stuff that they can utilize.
But let's say there are members in their group that say, you know what, I'm not sure if this is really applicable for me, I'm not a leader in XYZ category. I know Eric's mentioned this a bit, but what encouragement would you give for leaders to give their members who say, you know what? I don't know if I'm a leader. Yeah, it's awesome.
I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I himself, he wasn't a priest, he wasn't a prophet. He was a lay leader. And I mean, just right after that, that's relatable, you know, for the vast majority of us, that is our life. And so leadership is way less to do with the position, with the title, even with that experience.
You know, you're a leader because God has placed you in a specific area. It's about the proximity, it's where God has placed you. And so, you know, leadership is often defined as influence. And so we all have influence, we all have influence because we all have relationships.
And our families and our workplace and our neighborhoods, you as a Life Group leader, I mean, right there. So every single one of us, whether you feel like you're a leader or not, whether you think you measure up to some other standard of definition of what leadership is, just by principle of being a follower of Jesus, that also then makes you a leader. Why? Because we are called to go and make others, right?
To disciple others. And so as we're following Jesus, we're helping others to follow Jesus. And so that plays itself out in all the different areas, areas of our life. And your marketplace, with your family, is your leader because you have influence.
That's good. And the book touches on this a bit, but what's the difference between us being a leader and maybe secular leadership? And it's the power of the Holy Spirit. The power of the Holy Spirit, totally alongside us, empowers us, gives us confidence to go about in our workplaces to make disciples of all the nations.
So the book says that that's an unfair advantage, and I thought that was pretty neat. But what do you think it means about that? I love that. As a Jesus follower, who are also leaders that we have an unfair advantage.
What do you think of? A lot of what comes to mind is a lot of leaders in a secular way of leadership. For them, it's about grit. For them, it's about just working as hard as possible on their own strength to convince people to go ahead with a project, to influence others, to go with their vision of or thinking.
But the power of the Holy Spirit, when we rest on that power, that's a different kind of leadership. And it's not something that we can do by works. It's something that we actually give into bicerender. And so much of the leadership style of the world, it's top down, it's positional, it's striving, it's proved it.
It's claw and kick and compete and everything else. Yeah, of course, we have the incredible benefit of we're not trying to earn, we're going from a place of receiving. But that receiving doesn't make us lack today's goal. Receiving means, now I'm going to outwork that.
If I believe the magnitude of grace and forgiveness in my life, that's not going to actually cause me to just that's going to motivate me to serve in the same way that Jesus has served me. But I'm not going to find my ultimate value and worth in it. That's the key difference, right? I'm not defined by my success or my failures.
I'm defined ultimately by his success. And so there is this incredible, you know, if it's the right word, but it's almost like a safety net, like we should be the most risk forward for thinking. We should be the most out in front to try new things and lead things because our identity is not wrapped in it. And yes, it's what the world is top down.
It's bottom up, right? It's servant leadership. It's that whole axiom of, you know, if service is beneath you, leadership is beyond you. And so we don't leave so that we can build something.
We serve in the neck, gives us this position, this platform, where then we can point to Jesus, who is the ultimate servant leader. But we're going to learn all this stuff through this book. And I think Nehemiah actually displays that perfectly by wanting to rebuild the temple, not for his own glory, but for God's glory. And he's been called to it.
He has a burden for wanting to see this temple rebuilt and his nation rebuilt for God's glory. But once we build the city wall, because it's really, really important. And the others that came before him, to read the book of Ezra, I mean, some older iterations about Ezra and Nehemiah together, because it is a really, really fine story. So you see the continuation of that story of the people of Israel who are being brought back after a period of captivity to the Babylonian Empire for what, 90 years?
Is that what it was, Sam? It was 80 years. Close enough. Yes, I mean, that's pretty good.
Yeah, so bring brought back. And now it's a rebuilding. That's a really good way. Yeah, and I thought pages 16 and 17 are a pretty good timeline that you can actually walk through with your life routes.
And kind of just set the tone of where does the story of Nehemiah fit in terms of the overarching story of scripture? It is one story made up of multiple stories. And I feel like pages 16 and 17 do a great job of showing where we at in scripture in terms of Jesus' redemptive work. And it might be a great thing to walk through with your group on week one, just the kind of timeline of the nation of Israel.
Yeah, for sure. That's right. Yeah. So let's dig into what's featured in this magazine.
We've got artwork. We've got podcast highlights, poetry. We've got seven weeks. And in each of those seven weeks, we've also got rooted rhythm reminders.
So I know week one is on vision, being burdened shapes, being shaped by burden and belief. And what I think is really cool is that at the end of each week, we'll take week one, for example, page 24 and 25, or those pages, we have kind of a leadership framework. And it talks about how burden without belief leads to being a hopeless leader. But having belief without burden leads to being a leader without purpose.
But having burden and belief, that creates a visionary leader. And that's what Nehemiah had. So just pretty neat that we have these leadership frameworks at the end of each week. Which is applicable in every area of your life, right?
Exactly. Whether it says leader on your email signature, whether you're at the very top of your organization, or somewhere, so good and so applicable. So we're going to have a lot of these frameworks all throughout the series. But again, Eric walks through with our pastoral team.
And these are so, so good. You're going to be so encouraged by that. We definitely encourage lifer group leaders to just challenge your members to say, hey, even if you're not a leader in, let's say, a business organization, or if you're not a business owner, in the supply, in each of your lives, really try to draw out and encourage and empower your members to step into leadership. Maybe you challenge them for more.
Even within the church, I know that in the fall season, we've got the Seek the Good campaign. So a lot of these weeks touch on serving your community. God's sending his people out. God sending Nehemiah out of exile back to Jerusalem to rebuild his temple.
And doing it alongside his brothers and sisters. So that would be a really good encouragement for you leaders to step into a group serve in the Seek the Good season. I don't know if you had any notes on that work. And that's it.
We're not talking about leadership, but again, the services beyond your leadership is below you, the leadership is beyond you, right? So I love that we get to play that out during our secret campaign, too. So yeah, that's right now. That's good.
Yeah, week one, we'll just highlight all these real quick. Week one, or week number one talks about vision, being shaped by burden and belief. Week two is conviction, displaying clarity and courage. Servant hood is for week three, inspiring high, stooping low.
I think about thinking big and acting small, serving God, but also serving his people. Perseverance is for week four, fighting through challenges, inside and out. Week five is credibility, growing in character and commitment. And a few other things I think, chemistry.
Week six is transformation, transforming belief behaviors, beliefs and behaviors. And then week seven result, living with restlessness and also finding rest. And those are just amazing elements of being a great leader. Yeah, you're going to see this all throughout the great book of the Amaya.
And this isn't a story that curated you only tell the successes, do you right? I mean, we're going to learn that this story has some pretty crazy twist and turns. And that it actually ends in a pretty crazy cliffhanger. It's like really, after all that, this is where we got to.
Yeah, really, as you see all throughout the story, scripture and through the story of our lives, that we can't keep the promises that we make. Yeah, we serve God who's a promise, keeping God, and be faithful to his people and we're unfaithful. But man, if you've ever led something, a team, a project, someone, and you'll understand this, you may have all of these things. You might feel like great belief and a great burden and have the vision and everything else, but it doesn't always go according to plan.
You don't always see the outcome of everything that you hope. Now, we see a lot of that in the book of the Amaya. We see that the walls are rebuilt in 52 days. Like he said out to achieve what he principally had set out to achieve.
But it's not just building and leading projects. It's also building and leading people. Wow. And there's a lot of challenges in that because we are all real broken.
And so if you're expecting to hear a book where it's just like, man, up and to the right, everything is incredible in the Amaya's life. And wow, I wish I had people like that around. You're going to find that God's word is not only timeless. It's relatable, right?
Yeah, so it's a story of honesty there, too. You're going to see the twists and turns be encouraged by the incredible victories, but then also, I think, encouraged by the difficulties. Because those are, that's the real everyday rubble life for us, right? So man, that reminds me.
I know we talked a bit about rooted rhythm reminders at the end of each week. I'm not going to tell you my stronghold right now, say, what you want to give. OK, I thought that was going to be a perfect segue. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, that reminds me of the rhythm of sharing your story. Because like you said, it's so relatable. Our personal stories are not up into the right. We have twists and turns.
And God doesn't lead us in a straight line. But you know what? He does lead us. And his work is so powerful and redemptive in our lives.
And yeah, what comes to mind is sharing your story that we're going to have weeks where we're going to share just like me and my we've encountered opposition, that we've had to overcome and persevere about we don't do it by our own strength. That's really good news. It's great news. And that's the gospel.
JT, I'm stoked for the series. Let's do it. That's great. Leaders, if you need anything, remember to email our light groups inbox at lightgroupsatmarinerschurch.org.
We're just calling Sam directly at 714-8-749. Actually, it does start with 8. Yeah, it doesn't really. So that was very perfect.
8-6-7-5-3-09. So that's the more 8-6-7-5-3-09. That's really catchy. That's almost good.
Yeah, that sounds good. Leaders, we're here for you. We're praying for you, as always. Stay connected.
And yeah, God bless you.