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. Hello and welcome to Life Group Leader Podcast. I am your host, Kirby Wood, the group's pastor here at Mariners Irvine, and I am so glad to be discussing and walking you guys through the leader guide today.
So I do not have a host of me today. It's a holiday weekend, but I am still well prepared to help equip you for your discussion with your group this week. And next week we'll have on one of our group's pastors and talk through week three that Jared will be teaching. But this weekend we had bang preach on how the Holy Spirit frees and it transforms us.
And I absolutely love this message this weekend and feel like it's gonna be such a great conversation for our groups because the Holy Spirit really does use our groups and these discussions to help work in us this sanctification journey. So at first before we get into it, I want to say a hello and welcome to any new Life Group leaders. We are so proud of you. Congratulations on graduating from Rooted and welcome to this new journey as a Life Group and a Life Group leader.
So we hope you know that you are not alone. This podcast is one of the ways we have a couple discussions here with Jared or our men's pastor or women's, marriage or singles pastor. We talk here and have a great time about how you can best prepare for the week's discussion and what you can expect. So know that we're always here to support you, all of our different pastors, affinity pastors as well as myself and of course your coach.
If you have a coach or if you're already a leader, you know how incredibly helpful and resourceful your coach can be. So training is coming up for all our new Life Group leaders on July 17th. I hope to see you guys there and all of you, the coaches will be there as well to help step you along the journey. If you're an existing Life Group leader and you want a little refresher, you are welcome to come join us, just shoot me an email and I can send you over our registration or the little RSVP would be great.
We'd love to prepare to have you there and make sure that your coach could hopefully be in attendance. If not and you're an existing Life Group leader, you know, there's always available trainings online and people to talk to but your coach sitting down, getting coffee with your coach is sometimes the best way that you can kind of have a little refresh, have a vision moment, plan through the summer or plan for fall because we have a lot coming up in fall to jump into. So this summer, as you've probably seen, we are studying the Holy Spirit. I love the podcast from last week.
New leaders, if you want to jump back to last week's podcast, I talk through, of course, the leader guide, but Eric and Jared were able to share on what we hope all of our people here at Mariners get out of this incredible series as we study the Holy Spirit in two parts. First, we're studying the spirit in us and then we're gonna help study the Holy Spirit in our lives as we move to the next section here in a few weeks. I think there's six weeks and then four weeks as I remember correctly. But yeah, so here we're at week two, freeing and transforming us.
I love this concept. This was one of my favorite things when I was a new believer was to take that next step from saying I believe and really learning, okay, now what purpose do I have in my life beyond just waiting for eternity? What is God gonna do in my life? And of course, expectantly and excitedly wait for eternity, but also we have some ways that we can tap into God's incredible power and gracious work in our lives.
And so I'm excited for you guys to discuss in your groups how God and really truly the Holy Spirit is actively working in your lives right now. So we start, never feel afraid to kind of start with just reading the overview, life group leaders and especially new ones. The overview will kind of help you set the tone of, okay, what are we talking about today? What can I expect at a discussion?
Okay, great. So this was the overall content I'm reading here. You know, we're talking about justification. I know that we're gonna talk about sanctification, which might be a new concept to some of your people in your group or it might be an age old concept.
If you've been leading a group for a long time, you might think, wow, the Holy Spirit is, you know, I know about the Holy Spirit. This is great. But also how do we know that God is working in our lives as we pay attention to how He's actively working in our lives? So that's the word of Holy Spirit.
And we love that. As you read through the overview, you'll see the next natural step is lean in. So you'll start your group, you know, maybe actually do some checking, you might eat some food, and then you sit down and you're like, okay guys, let's start our time. Maybe you might pray first or, you know, people might share a little bit about where they're at or like how they're weak when.
And then you're gonna say, okay guys, let's start the discussion today. And I'm gonna start with a real simple one, a fun little lean in question that really can tie into our discussion today. But let's all share what's a skill you learned or wish you had learned as a kid. And I love all the kid ones.
We have a lot of good lean in questions that are about childhood. And I think it's a really easy way to just start a conversation and get people talking and also learn things about one another. And you'll hear us share a lot about that. You're on the podcast of these lean in questions.
All they might sound trivial and I might feel like you might want to just skip over it. It really can be the start of a rich discussion, getting people to talk that might normally not talk or helping people who talk a lot, I eat myself, hone in and not just talk about all kinds of things but really talk about the specific things that will help kind of build a little foundation for a deep rich conversation. So if you stay focused and you stay on track, follow us and it'll really lead to a rich conversation. So as you as people share, you might have things people staring like jump rope or singing or other things that are like, oh man, I really wish I would have stayed with Swimming.
I feel like I really could have been a really great swimmer but I only gave it a little bit of a shot. I know for me, I was literally thinking like course upgrading. I started horse by grinding, I loved it, but it was so, you had so much discipline and as a kid I really struggled but man, that would be so cool if I could just pop up on a horse whenever I wanted and whatnot. I haven't been horse by grinding a long time but it definitely seems like a fun time.
Then of course, we always move to look down second. That's where we know we're turning the conversation to say, okay, if we're gonna start anywhere, we're gonna start with God's word. And we know that God's word is one of the ways that the Holy Spirit can speak to us and that we can really see that God's word, yes, is this beautiful historical, inspired word but also it is living and it is active. And as we read Second Corinthians, I think it's also helpful that you might open up Bibles, if everybody's got their Bible and read it out loud, just pick someone and your group maybe who hasn't shared or someone who's being a little tangential and you wanna hone them in, you can take that moment to say, hey, why don't you read Second Corinthians for us and that kind of re-center is the conversation which is really good.
And then we like to always ask a what question here and you want a question here that will really help people point out different things but then it's not just like, what do you see but we wanna have a pointed question. So the question that we have here is, what do you learn about growth from this passage? And so that's what we hope to point out is okay, what is, what in the scripture does God say about growth? Like, is it beneficial?
Is it helpful? What were the words, point out things? Those kinds of things will really start to help people unpack and see, okay, I can look into God's word for myself and I can point out what ways that he's speaking to me and also things that we can learn from the passage. So that's a great way to kind of start the discussion.
And of course then we can start to turn, we made a little switch for this guide. I think I mentioned it last week, we used to have look in, come before, look out, but right, we switched these two as I had a conversation with Kenton or Pastor Emeritus and we kind of just learned that this would be a good step for this. But when we look out first, it allows us to start off the conversation without having to get too heavy and allows us to set a great foundation for the conversation by looking at where God is already moving and where also world and culture might be negatively impacting people in our lives or systems in that we see or culture habits or what have you. So as you look at look out, the first question is where have you seen people hold onto dead things?
And the second question there is, where have you seen people experience new life? I think this is really great. I love the juxtaposition here. We have, where have you seen people hold onto dead things?
And then the opposite flip of where have you seen people experience new life? I think it's important that you start with the first one and not jump right to the second because you want to try to capture all of the negatives before you jump to the positive. If you ask these questions at the same time, I think people will very quickly jump to positive because negative is kind of hard and maybe a little awkward. Or as you hear negative, it'll be really tempting, I think, for your group just to say some really dark and hard things, like addiction, which is actually a really good example of a pattern or a cycle of sin that people can't let go of.
But I think you might want to challenge people. What have you seen in people's like every day? Maybe that might be consumerism or just worry or things that just really don't fill us, but we still, their friends or people at work or people, their neighbors or even in their family. What are some of those dead things that people just really hold onto that they don't want to let go of?
Clearly, they're not filling them up. That's really what we're hoping to get out of that conversation. And then also it's like, okay, so where have you seen people? It might be these same people that are holding onto dead things or other people in your life that you love and you want to be like, like where have you seen those people experience new life?
And hopefully you're going to get a lot of great questions about or a lot of great answers around church, people experiencing new life, whether they stepped into community. And if you're a new router group, hopefully this answer is going to come really quick and easy to your group members on lips. But also I hope that people reflect on maybe some of the influential people in their lives, their parents or a mentor or, yeah, or like when really people have really broken some of these cycles of patterns of sin in their lives, they're hopefully going to point to maybe experiential things in the church or experiential things just in their faith or in other people's faith. So that's where we want to kind of start to see that juxtaposition and then where we really see people experience new life.
And then as we do that, then when we've been able to look at others and talk about a discussion of what we've seen in other people's lives, we can now look into ourselves and actually start to challenge, allow the Holy Spirit to challenge us where we are still holding onto things and where we can hopefully step into new life. So I love this first question here. What are the areas of your life you struggle to believe that God will perfect in you? Wow, what a great question because rather than just hitting it and just like, what do you have to, what dead things are you holding onto?
Which could seem like an obvious question. You know, there's always something holding us back. And so that's what helps people really lean in to this conversation, LOL. But really look into themselves as like, what areas are you like to struggle to believe that God will perfect this in you?
And that's really going to be like, okay, well, I've been struggling with this one sin my whole life and hopefully people will be able to identify that pretty readily. If you just went through rooted, strong holds might come up pretty easily. But also just like small things, I just been, maybe it's a big thing for someone, but it could be just little habits throughout the day. Like I just really struggled to not worry or I really struggled to not, yeah, I just can't imagine not struggling in this area or what have you.
So that's really what we hope to provoke is where are we, where are we unbelieving in this? And then I love this question because it's really pulls to one of our rhythms here. What habits can you build in now to cultivate growth in that area? And there's a lot of different habits.
And obviously we're gonna, if you can kind of see ahead here, we're gonna talk about daily devotion. But there's a lot of habits that you can build. And that can be one of the greatest habits you can say is coming to group every single week. And I hope that you guys encourage that this is one of those habits that can help people prioritize and allow them to continue in their sanctification journey and feel supported as they really hope to believe more in God's sanctifying power.
A lot of other answers to questions that hopefully people will call out is attending church, attending support groups when needed, and of course, studying God's word and being in prayer. And one of the things I think that makes rooted really successful for people is when they do their daily reads, those five days a week. And we hope that that that's one habit even through summer as life gets busy and things go on, encouraging people in daily devotion will help solidify and enrich their experience as they want to hopefully experience more of the Holy Spirit in their lives. So I love this little note we wrote up for you guys.
We do believe that scripture is the very word of God and we believe that the rhythm of reading and meditating and applying God's word to our lives is really important and is honestly vital to our spiritual health. And so in this discussion at the end of your group, I just, I wanna encourage you guys to maybe set some goals. And everybody's just gonna look different. Five days a week was rooted, but maybe in the summer, it's gonna look different.
Okay, well I'm gonna spend, you know, hopefully you're gonna goal to be in the word, you know, every day, but maybe some people's schedules look different and so just allow people the freedom to explore what is the right challenge for them in this time but allow everybody to kind of share. Okay, so what does daily devotion look like for you? What's a reasonable goal for you as you? And some people, you know, may have a really rich and studious or rhythmic daily devotion.
So you might even ask them, so what's the new challenge for you as you consider the importance of daily devotion? So that might look for someone who's always active in God's word, maybe spending more time in prayer or someone who prays very intentionally every single morning, maybe spending a little bit more time in God's word. Or I know for myself, the challenge of going into the summer is to spend more time listening. Where I can talk a lot, I can read a lot, I can dissect a lot.
I wanna spend more time in silence listening to what God has for me. And so there's a challenge in there for all of us as we really try to tap in, like I've said, to God's active instinctive dying power. So my hope for you guys this week is you have a great and rich discussion. We will be back on the podcast next week talking about Jared's message, which is, I can't remember in this moment, but oh, this we're about to be comforts and encourages.
So next week we're looking into how the Holy Spirit can really step alongside us in our journeys and encourage us and comfort us. I look forward to hearing from Jared on that and we'll be discussing that with one of our pastors. You don't just have to listen to my voice the whole time, but excited for you guys to have a great group discussion this week and we again will see you guys at July 17th, our new leader training and a refresher for anybody who wants to join. God bless and we are praying for you.