Week One

God’s Place, Our Passion

SEEDS TO SOW: WHAT ARE YOU PASSIONATE ABOUT? *

Read Psalm 84

God’s Place, Our Passion... in the light of the Psalms.

Even the sparrow and swallow can make a home — find a nest — in God’s dwelling place (verse 3). A nest is a place of security and comfort but it’s not necessarily fixed permanently in one place. Birds often remake their nests from season to season, perhaps returning to the same location but rebuilding anew. You could say nests don’t hide birds away from the world, but rather help them to find a place in it — a perch to launch from out into the wider world and then to return to rest.

Discuss what we can learn from the metaphor of nest building.

How could building a nest with God each year be helpful metaphor for thinking about our relationship with God? What does it meant to nest with God? And do you think God nests in us?

Read Matthew 3:16 - 4:11

Jesus’s place.

Here we see that Jesus’s place was first and foremost in God’s love and only secondly in the wilderness. He was grounded in God’s love, the words of 3:17 were in Jesus’s head as he set out to face the temptations. Discuss how knowing we are loved allows us to face difficult times.

Why do you think the angels in verse 11 only show up after the devil leaves? Why weren’t they around earlier when the devil first arrived? And do angels still minister to us in our lives or do we live in an angel ‘no fly zone’?

Read Psalm 32

My place.

As we see in verse 7, God offers us a hiding place, a sanctuary where we can tuck ourselves in. But, like the bird nests above, these are not hibernations from the world, they are perches that allow us to find a place to be in the world to renew ourselves. We are sheltered in God’s love but that doesn’t detach us from the world around us. In what ways can this empower us to go out into the world, knowing that we can hide away with God?

Young children as they learn to process the world around them often need to ‘recharge’ by spending time with their primary caregivers to give them confidence to then go out again and explore. And in fact the same applies to adults! Knowing that we have a loving home base, a den, a hideaway, can refuel us for the adventure. How do take time to recharge with God? What role do friends and family have in this? How do these encounters recharge your passion?

* SEEDS TO SOW: These are open-ended and optional prompts and are designed for people wanting to develop their own resources in response to the themes. Perhaps if you are using this material as a group you could use these prompts to inspire a time of prayer, or drawing, or creative writing? They are a short and sweet, simply a starting off place for you and your imagination. Tailor and develop as suits your group.