 |
| The Tangible Kingdom Primer |
The Intuitive Life:
our choices, motives, decisions
now led by the Holy Spirit.
A Spirit-empowered lifestyle guided
by a capacity to sense and respond
to God's direction.
As Emmaus City Church finishes Spring 2025 with a focus on prayer, holiness, courage, and faith (i.e. good risk and trust), we're closing a 2-month journey that helped shape us for our first decade as a congregation of missional communities (MCs) in Worcester, Massachusetts.
The Tangible Kingdom Primer: An Eight-Week Guide to Incarnational Community helped our first City Group (MC) lean into apprenticeship with Jesus together. And the memories, lessons, and formative experiences have continued to shape people among Emmaus City in fruitful ways to this day. You can read more here:
Apprenticeship in Jesus' Way
Apprenticeship in Jesus' Way
While one brief post can never replace what day-by-day meditations, practices, steps of faith, and reflections provide, this adapted excerpt from Week 8 (Tuesday, May 6 — Monday, May 12, 2025) of The TK Primer is provided as a review of content to come back to and to provide food for thought for when City Groups connect for our Sabbath gathering on the 5th day (Saturday, May 10 in this case).
The Intuitive Life
Day 1: Exploration
Intuition is the ability to sense or know without conscious reasoning. Learning to live intuitively is really about learning to live life in faith led and guided by the Holy Spirit. Life rarely happens in steps, programs, or logical sequences. In fact, most of the time, it just happens.
Developing an intuitive,
incarnational lifestyle is a process
and depends on our willingness
to listen and respond to God's direction.
For it to emerge, we must learn to trust God and lean on faith, being certain that His Holy Spirit is faithfully working in and through us.
Key Exploration Considerations
What are the key lightbulbs that have lit up in your heart and head during the eight weeks of this study?
What areas of transformation have you begun to experience?
What areas of transformation have you begun to experience?
Day 2: Meditation
Read
James 4:13-17Key Meditation Questions
& Considerations
Think of a title that describes the season of life you're in right now and write it below. Does that title mostly represent a drama, a comedy, or an action adventure to you at this point? How so?
What are some of the unique opportunities (and some limitations) of this season?
Day 3: Change
Often the things we feel weakest in,
or most afraid of,
are the very things the Spirit is waiting
to do in and through us!
Read
John 14:15-20What do you learn about the work of the Holy Spirit from each of these verses?
Key Change Conversation
How can we become a better "listener" of the Holy Spirit?
Day 4: Action
It's so easy to get caught in patterns of saying "yes" to everything. Then, when God wants to use us, we either don't hear Him or we're too busy or exhausted to respond.
Cleaning out the clutter in our lives is especially difficult when good things are taking up our time. The intuitive life — knowing what to keep and what to get rid of — requires that we listen carefully to God as He guides us in creating more space in the margins of our lives.
What is the Holy Spirit
asking you to say "NO" to
in order to be more available
and engaged in incarnational,
missional living?
What is the Holy Spirit
asking you to say "YES" to
in order to further live out your life
as part of God's family of
missionary servants?
Day 5: Community
Throw a party.
Invite some sojourners.
Day 6: Calibration
Jesus said,
"Peace be with you!
As the Father has sent me,
I am sending you."
And with that He breathed on them
and said,
"Receive the Holy Spirit."
+ John 20:21-22
Relax.
Realize that you are modeling
and living out a missional expression
of Jesus' Church.
Learn to enjoy your freedom
without expecting everyone else
to follow.
The good news is that if
the story of your community is strong,
eventually a grassroots
missional movement can spread to others.
In the meantime,
realize that people will always be watching
and learning from your journey.
Day 7: ReCreate
Rest and consider:
God has always wanted a family
that would live in such a way
that they would show the world
what He is truly like.
As Christians, we are the fulfillment
of God's eternal plan.
We now have God's own Spirit
living inside of us —
the same power that raised Christ
from the dead.
Rest in that power!
Read
Blessing
May God explode your heart
with gratefulness for salvation,
with anger over injustice,
with love for the loveless,
with selfless hours of service,
with words that bring hope,
and homes that bring warmth.
May Christ be in the food you serve;
may He interrupt your schedule
with moments that
change the destiny of families;
may His purposes
become your purposes; and
may the things that break His heart
break yours.
May He supply to you
all that is needed
to live large in the Kingdom
that is now and yet to come, and
may we someday meet
along a heavenly riverbank and
meet each other's friends that
now know the King of Glory
because of you.
Intuitive Life Songs
Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back.
Kindle and seize us.
Be our fire and our sweetness.
Let us love. Let us run ...
Let us sing a new song,
Not with our lips but with our lives.
+ North African St. Augustine
May God's Kingdom come, His will be done.
Que le Royaume de Dieu vienne,
que sa volonté soit faite.
愿神的国降临，愿神的旨意成就。
Nguyện xin Nước Chúa đến, ý Ngài được nên.
Jesús nuestra Rey, venga Tu reino!
🙏💗🍞🍷👑🌅🌇
Rev. Mike "Sully" Sullivan
