Current Issues Bible Study... · Web viewGod created us to have meaningful and fulfilling...

Course by Community Christian Church (www.communitychristian.org), a member of the NewThing Network (www.newthing.org)

Keys to Biblical Relationships

TABLE OF CONTENTSClick on the study title you’d like to see:

Study 1: CULTIVATE COMMUNITY Leader’s Guide — Participant’s Guide

Study 2: BE FULL OF GRACELeader’s Guide — Participant’s Guide

Study 3: OFFER HOSPITALITY TO EVERYONELeader’s Guide — Participant’s Guide

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LEADER’S GUIDE FOR STUDY 1Cultivate Community

True fulfillment lies not in individualism but in sharing life with others.

God created us to have meaningful and fulfilling relationships. Being part of the community called “church” is not about being more religious; it’s about being fully relational and helping others find the love they’re longing for.

Lesson #1

Scripture:Genesis 2:18; Acts 2:42–47

LEADER’S GUIDECultivate Community

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PART 1Identify the Current Issue

Note to leader: At the beginning of the class, provide each person with the Participant’s Guide included at the end of this study.

Mark Driscoll writes in The Radical Reformission:

- Playing cards as a social activity is down 25%.

- The number of full-service restaurants is down 25%, and bars/luncheonettes/coffee bars are down 50%, but fast-food outlets have increased by 100%, as more people eat alone and in cars.

- Family dinners are down 33%. Having friends over for dinner is down 45%.

- The amount of time spent caring for a pet is up 15%. The amount of time spent on personal grooming is up 7%.

- From 1980 to 1993, participation in America’s #1 participant sport, bowling, was up 10%, but the number of bowling leagues decreased 40%, as more people bowled alone.

Isn’t it odd that we are apparently becoming a nation of attractive people who sit at home alone at night with our pets, watching TV shows about relationships and taking medication for the depression brought on by our loneliness? Meanwhile, our neighbors, whom we do not know, are spending their evenings in much the same way.The decline in our nation’s social capital inevitably reduces all of life to a transaction-based culture in which the only way you can get anyone to help you is to pay them. So if you are lonely and need someone to speak to, you pay a counselor. If you can’t pick up dry cleaning, you hire a personal assistant. If you want to work out with someone, you hire a personal trainer. And if your car breaks down, you often have to call a cab, rather than a neighbor, to pick you up.

Community is not just a nice thing, or an optional thing. We all are designed to be relational creatures, to live life in community with others. God made us that way. Before there was any sin in the world or anything had ever gone wrong, there was just one thing that God said was “not good”: that the man was alone. That part of Genesis is usually understood to be about marriage and sexual companionship, but that’s only part of it: it’s about us being relational to our core with an inherent need for community. A big part of being made in the image of God is that God is relational within himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and human beings are only fully human when life is lived in community that reflects the relational nature of God.

It can be challenging to fully realize our need for relationship in the midst of the constant tug toward individualism and “cocooning,” where relationships are just

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about me and a few close family members. Both the joys and the pain we have all had in our relationships remind us of how God made us relational creatures. God’s goal in creation and redemption was to create a community where people are fully connected to him and each other. The church is not meant to be a religious organization, an institution, or a “country club” for the saved— it is meant to be God’s offer of community to a world that is “longing for home,” the home that was damaged and lost when sin entered the world.

Discussion Starter

[Q] Describe the time in your life when you most experienced living in real community (e.g., a high school team, a college dorm floor, a specific neighborhood). What did you love about it? What was the biggest factor that contributed to making it feel like community?

PART 2Discover the Eternal Principles Teaching point one: God designed us to live in community.

Genesis 2:18 says, “The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.’”

Despite the fact that today’s technology in travel and communication allows us to be constantly connected, many people seem lonelier than ever. Even though “connections” are easier to come by, real friends and family that genuinely care about us are hard to find. Also, many people move far from their families, live far from their jobs (thus more alone time commuting), and are busier, so they have less time to make friends even if they really wanted to.

Community is not easy. It can be messy, because it involves people, and people are imperfect and have messy lives. Having to deal with others who are not like us, who have annoying habits or views or pasts that make us uncomfortable, can make us want to bail out of community. But like our own families, these are just challenges we need to work through to keep together and strong.

Living in community and having the kind of relationships God designed us for can be fulfilling on many levels—they provide belonging in place of loneliness, allow others to care for us through life’s challenges, help us avoid self-centeredness and give of ourselves, and provide a lot of fun. Christ-centered biblical community can also provide accountability in areas where we struggle, involve us in communal prayer, and help us understand God’s Word.

[Q] Consider the quote above that says more people today are bowling alone. What does this say about the current state of community in our world? Why do you think this is happening?

[Q] What makes living in community hard? When have you experienced this?




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[Q] What makes living in community fulfilling? When have you experienced this?

[Q] Think about your favorite TV shows (Friends, Seinfeld, Mash, Survivor, etc.). How did your favorite show portray living in community? What aspects of this community do you admire? What aspects are unrealistic?

[Q] How would you define church? Would you consider yourself as being “in church” when you’re in a small group discussing the Bible? Or hanging out with friends talking about God and real life? Why or why not?

Teaching point two: The community of believers attracts others to Christ.

Read Acts 2:42–47, which describes the early church just after Jesus had risen to heaven.

When it comes to religion, people are becoming less and less impressed by academic arguments, logic, and slick marketing, and instead respond more to people who genuinely care about them. Since loneliness is so prevalent, people’s need for belonging is at an all-time high, so welcoming them into our community is one of the most powerful things we can do. Once people experience God’s love, grace, and compassion lived out in a real way, they almost can’t help but want to follow him.

[Q] Acts 2 is quite a description of church and community. Have you ever seen anything similar to this lived out? Do you think this type of church community is possible today? Why or why not?

[Q] It has been suggested that people are often converted to community first, then to Christianity. Do you agree with this? Have you seen it in action? What are the advantages and disadvantages to this approach to evangelism?

[Q] Some parts of the Bible are meant to be prescriptive (prescribing how we should live, even in today’s culture), while others are descriptive (merely describing how something was at the time it was written, not necessarily commanding the same approach today). What do you think the Acts 2 passage is—a prescription for how we should do church, or merely a description of how it was done back then?

Leaders Note: We shouldn’t get caught up in the literal details as much as the core principles and values of this passage.

[Q] It would appear that the Acts 2 church was more focused on internal church health than on external church growth and evangelism. Yet God added to them daily those who were being saved. Why do you think this is?

Leader’s Note: Perhaps the focus on transforming the believers in the church and living out Christ and his mission naturally resulted in believers




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loving and serving people in the world, which in turn naturally attracted them to want to follow God.

PART 3Apply Your Findings

“There is no life that is not in community, and no community not lived in praise of God” (T. S. Eliot, “The Rock”).

The New Testament talks often about church in terms of people, a body of believers—never in terms of buildings. Many people today are stretching their current notions of church to reflect this, as evidenced by the recent renewal of the house church movement. When we sit around and talk about life with friends and explore what God has to do with it, we just might be having church. Living in community with the family of God is the essence of the Christian message.

Action Point: Reflect on the people in your life. How can you share more of your life with a community of believers? List specific ways.



PARTICIPANT’S GUIDE FOR STUDY 1Cultivate Community

True fulfillment lies not in individualism but in sharing life withothers.

God created us to have meaningful and fulfilling relationships. Being part of the community called “church” is not about being more religious; it’s about being fully relational and helping others find the love they’re longing for.

Lesson #1 Scripture: Genesis 2:18; Acts 2:42–47

PARTICIPANT’S GUIDECultivate Community

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Community is not just a nice thing, or an optional thing. We all are designed to be relational creatures, to live life in community with others. God made us that way.

PART 2Discover the Eternal Principles Teaching point one: God designed us to live in community.

Teaching point two: The community of believers attracts others to Christ.


“There is no life that is not in community, and no community not lived in praise of God” (T. S. Eliot, “The Rock”).

The New Testament talks often about church in terms of people, a body of believers—never in terms of buildings. Many people today are stretching their current notions of church to reflect this, as evidenced by the recent renewal of the house church movement. When we sit around and talk about life with friends, and explore what God has to do with it, we just might be having church. Living in community with the family of God is the essence of the Christian message.



LEADER’S GUIDE FOR STUDY 2Be Full of Grace

God calls us to offer forgiveness and mercy to the people in our lives.

Our closest relationships (family and close friends) need to become “grace-based” for us to experience the fulfillment God means us to have.

Lesson #2

Scripture:Ephesians 4:32; Luke 6:27–36

LEADER’S GUIDEBe Full of Grace

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One Christian author says that all relationships are either curse-based or grace-based. In curse-based relationships, people push and manipulate each other to get what they want. Shame, blame, and guilt are used on one another, and in the end performance is what matters and love is conditioned upon that performance. Relationships like that are built from faulty blueprints, with faulty materials, and with tools that don’t work.

God wants to help us do away with curse-, performance-, and condition-based relationships and make our relationships grace-based. Grace empowers us to see people through the eyes of God for the value they have regardless of how they act. Grace enables us to forgive when we are hurt and disappointed. Grace calls us to be loyal and to keep our commitments to others out of love both for them and for God. And grace doesn’t allow people to take advantage of us out of misguided/mistaken notions of what love is. The most important skill in relationships is not communication, but forgiveness.

Discussion Starter

[Q] Describe a time when someone showed you grace and forgiveness, even though you didn’t deserve it. Why do you think that person extended you grace and forgiveness? How did it impact you?

PART 2Discover the Eternal Principles Teaching point one: Grace is essential for enduring, Christ-honoring relationships.

Ephesians 4:32 says, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

Grace-based relationships don’t come easily to anyone, though some people have personality types or spiritual gifts (like compassion, mercy, or serving) that do make grace and forgiveness come more naturally. Ultimately, as sinful humans we cannot accomplish these types of relationships on our own, but we can through God’s transforming power.

Since we all mess up, and everyone we’ll ever have a relationship with will mess up, forgiveness will always be required. It is essential to relationships. Forgiving others comes from a deep sense of our own need for forgiveness. God’s




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forgiveness of our sins gives us the power to forgive in the toughest of circumstances.

One big step toward offering grace to others is accepting that community will be messy. Many people go into relationships (marriage, friendships, small group, church) assuming people will live up to their expectations, and then they want to bail when things get tough. Having a foundation of forgiveness, grace, acceptance, and love can help us push through the messiness.

[Q] How easily do grace-based relationships come to you? In what relationship do you feel you’ve done well at this?

[Q] Why is forgiveness essential for enduring relationships?

[Q] Community is messy, because it involves people, and people’s lives are messy. What types of relational messiness do you tend to avoid? By avoiding relational messiness, what do you miss out on?

Teaching point two: Grace requires loving our enemies.Read Luke 6:27–36. Russ Ford, a death row chaplain, said, “Jesus didn't teach us to love our enemies for their good. It is for our own good—to keep from becoming the enemy” (CHRISTIAN READER, Vol. 34). So if you are avoiding people because you don’t want to make the effort to love them, you could be harming your own soul.

[Q] Why is it so hard to live like this?

Leader’s note: It’s hard to live this out because we are ultimately selfish people who would rather focus on our own needs than on others’. It also takes a lot of trust and faith that God and our community will provide for our needs if we are going to sacrifice for others’ needs.

[Q] What is a healthy way to live this out, without being taken advantage of or walked all over?

Leader’s note: Jesus does not want us to be taken advantage of (co-dependency, abuse, etc.). But he does call us to be extreme in serving others. We ultimately need God’s wisdom (through his Word and the wise counsel of Christian friends and leaders) to determine how to live this out in specific situations.

[Q] Where could you live this out in your life?


As God’s acceptance of us, with all our faults and foibles, soaks into our hearts, we long to show such grace to others. The community of the church is a flawed




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family, but we are a family nonetheless. We need to be committed to each other so that we don’t abandon our brothers and sisters when they most need us.

Action point: Who is one person you need to offer grace to? What could that look like? What steps can you take toward this goal?



PARTICIPANT’S GUIDE FOR STUDY 2Be Full of Grace

God calls us to offer forgiveness and mercy to the people in ourlives.

Our closest relationships (family and close friends) need to become “grace-based” for us to experience the fulfillment God means us to have.

Lesson #2 Scripture: Ephesians 4:32; Luke 6:27–36

PARTICIPANT’S GUIDEBe Full of Grace

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One Christian author says that all relationships are either curse-based or grace-based. In curse-based relationships, people push and manipulate each other to get what they want. Shame, blame, and guilt are used on one another, and in the end performance is what matters and love is conditioned upon that performance. Relationships like that are built from faulty blueprints, with faulty materials, and with tools that don’t work.

God wants to help us do away with curse-, performance-, and condition-based relationships and make our relationships grace-based. Grace empowers us to see people through the eyes of God for the value they have regardless of how they act. Grace enables us to forgive when we are hurt and disappointed. Grace calls us to be loyal and to keep our commitments to others out of love both for them and for God. And grace doesn’t allow people to take advantage of us out of misguided/mistaken notions of what love is. The most important skill in relationships is not communication, but forgiveness.

PART 2Discover the Eternal Principles Teaching point one: Grace is essential for enduring, Christ-honoring relationships.

Teaching point two: Grace requires loving our enemies.


As God’s acceptance of us, with all our faults and foibles, soaks into our hearts, we long to show such grace to others. The community of the church is a flawed family, but we are a family nonetheless. We need to be committed to each other so that we don’t abandon our brothers and sisters when they most need us.



LEADER’S GUIDE FOR STUDY 3Offer Hospitality to Everyone

We serve Christ directly when we open our hearts to strangers.

God wants us to relate to the people who are not close to us (most neighbors and strangers) based on who they really are and not just as objects we have to deal with.

Lesson #3

Scripture:Romans 12:13; 1 Peter 4:9; Matthew 25:34–40

LEADER’S GUIDEOffer Hospitality to Everyone

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“In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture, and country, from their neighbors, friends, and family, from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found. It is possible and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.” —Henri Nouwen in Reaching Out

How do we interact with those we don’t know well or consider friends: the people who wait on us in restaurants and at Starbucks, the administrative assistant of the manager we are trying to sell our product to, the coworkers who we don’t know well?

Our natural tendency is to relate to these people as objects instead of persons. As objects, they only exist as part of the scenery of our lives, as those who perform functions that help us achieve our objectives.

Author Joseph Myers talks about four kinds of relational space in which we interact with people: public, social, personal, and intimate (from The Search to Belong). God calls us to help people we don’t know move from the public space of our relational lives toward deeper levels of relationship and community.

Discussion Starter

[Q] Share about a time when you were a “stranger” or “the new person,” but you ended up feeling welcomed (e.g., working at a new company, moving into a new neighborhood). What did people do that made you feel welcomed? How did that impact you?

PART 2Discover the Eternal Principles Teaching point one: When we offer hospitality, we open our lives to the transformational work of Christ.

Read Romans 12:13 and 1 Peter 4:9.

Hospitality is important in authentic biblical community. In the Old Testament, it was the highest priority to offer food and shelter to strangers, partially because God at times appeared in the form of traveling strangers. The word hospitality might evoke images of soft, sweet kindness, tea parties, and bland conversations, but that is only because we have lost God’s vision for loving strangers.




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Hospitality literally means “loving strangers” in the original language of the New Testament. Hospitality is not just an important virtue; it is offering a space where both I and those who I am not close to can grow closer and share our lives as God intended. As Henri Nouwen writes, “Hospitality means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy (or an object).” Of course, everyone we meet is not meant to become our closest friend, but God’s call to us is to be people who are constantly reaching out to the strangers in our lives, to serve them and befriend them and to treat them as people dearly loved by God instead of as objects in our path.

[Q] What do you think is the biggest barrier to showing hospitality to people we don’t know that well?

Leader’s Note: Some ideas may be: selfishness (“I’m too busy”), lack of faith about having our own needs met (“I can’t afford it”), distrust of people.

[Q] It is possible to go too deep too quickly in a relationship with someone (i.e., pushing to a deeper level of friendship than either side is ready for). Have you ever experienced this? How do we build meaningful relationships while not pushing too hard?

[Q] In theory, since technology (e-mail, cell phones, travel) allows us to be more relationally connected than ever, our society should be less lonely and more connected than ever. Do you think this is true of society today? Why or why not?

Joseph Myers, in The Search to Belong, says we should not confuse “stranger” with “anonymous”; that many newcomers to our church want to remain anonymous at first but do not want to feel like strangers to the music, the communication style, or even the inside jokes. They come to church wanting to connect with God, to not feel like a stranger to him.

[Q] How can we help make our church a safe place for people to remain anonymous, but still feel welcome?

Leader’s Note: Some ideas: Remind ourselves how we felt when we were new and what specific things the people who welcomed us did to make us feel welcome; avoid inside jokes and cliques; seek to meet people where they’re at rather than expect them to catch up to where we’re at; seek to serve people, to give them space to explore, rather than rush them to buy into all of our beliefs as quickly as possible.

[Q] Look at how Jesus modeled community for us—he spent quality time with huge crowds, with strangers, with outcasts, with close followers, with intimate friends, and alone with God. What do you learn from this?

Leader’s Note: Jesus did not say yes to everyone. He often said no to certain groups of people so he could spend time with other people during his limited time on earth.




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Teaching point two: When we offer hospitality, we serve Christ himself.

Read Matthew 25:34–40.

Jesus views offering care and compassion as essential to living out life as his follower. Paul repeats this often in his letters as well. Some of us have our own criteria to evaluate whether others are living out the Christian life (whether they go to church, pray, don’t drink or swear, etc.), but God’s are radically different. This type of service to people has become the exception, saved for a few really “missional” Christians, not for the rest of us.

[Q] It is easy to think that showing hospitality and helping those in need are just nice things we should do as nice Christian people. But how do you think Jesus views such hospitality, based on his words here?

[Q] It can be easy to skip over these verses with excuses like “I don’t really know any homeless or starving people.” Do you think Jesus’ words were limited to just those situations? Can you think of anyone right now (in your family, neighborhood, church, city, country, the world) whom you could reach out to in the way Jesus talks about?

[Q] It obviously doesn’t take wealth, special talents/abilities, or extreme intelligence to respond in any of the ways Jesus mentions here. So what does it take? How can you develop that?

Leader’s Note: Jesus said, “Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.”


The challenge is to become people who regularly reach out to the strangers in our lives because they are dearly loved by the same God who loves us so much. As Christ followers, we are called to become “carriers of community” wherever we go, even if it is only for a few minutes of conversation or compassion.

Action point: What is one way you can be hospitable this week, whether it is helping those in need, opening your home to visitors, or engaging someone new in sincere conversation?



PARTICIPANT’S GUIDE FOR STUDY 3Offer Hospitality to Everyone

We serve Christ directly when we open our hearts to strangers.

God wants us to relate to the people who are not close to us (most neighbors and strangers) based on who they really are and not just as objects we have to deal with.

Lesson #3 Scripture: Romans 12:13; 1 Peter 4:9; Matthew 25:34–40

PARTICIPANT’S GUIDEOffer Hospitality to Everyone

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Author Joseph Myers talks about four kinds of relational space in which we interact with people: public, social, personal, and intimate (from The Search to Belong). God calls us to help people we don’t know move from the public space of our relational lives toward deeper levels of relationship and community.

PART 2Discover the Eternal Principles Teaching point one: When we offer hospitality, we open our lives to the transformational work of Christ.

Teaching point two: When we offer hospitality, we serve Christ himself.


The challenge is to become people who regularly reach out to the strangers in our lives because they are dearly loved by the same God who loves us so much. As Christ followers, we are called to become “carriers of community” wherever we go, even if it is only for a few minutes of conversation or compassion.



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