Demonstrating The Gospel: Part 1
An Invitation
by Bethany Allen & Gavin Bennett
Begin with prayer (5 minutes)
Gather together as a Community in a comfortable setting. Have somebody lead a prayer asking the Holy Spirit to lead and guide your time together.
Read this overview (5 minutes)
More than half of American Christians believe that the Holy Spirit is a force, not a person. We generally understand the Father and we get the Son, but for many of us the Spirit is more abstract. On top of that, regardless of maturity, commitment, gifting or education, most, if not all of us are a bit underwhelmed with the experience of the very promise Jesus got so excited about.
But this staggeringly contrasts what we read in the pages of Scripture. From creation, to the Old Testament, to Jesus and the early Church, we find the Holy Spirit central to life in the Kingdom. Moment after moment we see the Spirit present, active, and essential. In fact, in the Gospels Jesus tells the disciples that the Holy Spirit is an incredible improvement to direct, face-to-face, conversation with God in the flesh. That God’s indwelling presence trumps God in human form.
Which brings us to the church. Put simply, the Church led by the Holy Spirit looks like a continuation of everything Jesus started. And even though the expression is imperfect and flawed (because the Spirit was given to ordinary people), the work of Jesus still carries on.
At the end of the day, the Holy Spirit is a person to know, not a force to capture. You cannot know a person by simply learning about them. You have to experience them. And so the invitation today is to welcome, experience, and get to know the Holy Spirit.
Work through these discussion questions together as a Community (20 minutes)
Regardless of whether or not you grew up in the church, we all come to the conversation about the Holy Spirit with different perspectives, experiences, and understandings. Some of us had really beautiful encounters with the Spirit in the church, while others didn’t really ever hear about the Holy Spirit or had more negative experiences within their church community. This means that some of us will bring a deep hunger for the things of the Spirit to this conversation and others of us will bring hesitations and maybe even some fear. And some of us will bring a mixture of both.
With all of this in mind, spend some time discussing the following questions together:
In one or two sentences, how would you describe what you were taught or understood about the Holy Spirit? What misconceptions did you have about the Holy Spirit?
What are some of the obstacles/fears you have when you think about inviting more of the Holy Spirit into your life?
What hopes stir in you as you consider a life with more of the Holy Spirit?
Discuss the coming week’s Practice (5 minutes)
As we start out this Practice, we want to take some time this week to look at our daily rhythms and schedule. The invitation is to look for opportunities to engage and follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit. It could look something like this:
Each morning, before you look at your phone, you take 2 minutes to breathe in deeply and say, “Come, Holy Spirit,” and then pause to receive from him — a feeling of peace, a prophetic word, a passage of Scripture, or simply the gift of quiet.
It could also look like posturing yourself in scheduled moments throughout your day to notice where the Spirit is moving, working, and speaking in and around you.
You could end your day by celebrating the ways in which you saw the Spirit work and inviting him to reveal to you the ways he was working that you didn’t notice.
Whatever it ends up being, take time to be with the Holy Spirit and begin to invite him into more of your life.