The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
Part three: Practices for unhurrying your life
Simplicity (2|5)
Pages 185-193
TOGETHER read the book (END READING AT: …it would suck the joy right out of life) then the following scripture slowly and attentively.
INDIVIDUALLY take notes in your journal on what stands out.
Acts 20:35 (NIV) In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”
Matthew 6:24 (NIV) “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
Luke 12:15 (NIV) “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”
GROUP DISCUSSION:
Jesus and the writers of the New Testament put the number of our material needs at a whopping two things: food and clothing. 1 Timothy 6:8 (NIV) But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. But the propaganda machine is working like a charm. Most of us believe the lie: more money and more stuff equals more happiness.
Share just one or two things that stood out to you while reading the book and/or scripture. (try to keep it brief)
TOGETHER pray for one another.
INDIVIDUALLY answer the questions in your journal - process your notes and pray.
Once you reach what most Westerners classify as a middle-class life, money and stuff can’t deliver what they promise - happiness. Poverty is really hard and middle-class life is a real gift, but after that, it’s the law of diminishing returns. (The law of diminishing returns is an economic principle stating that as investment in a particular area increases, the rate of profit from that investment, after a certain point, cannot continue to increase if other variables remain constant.) But wherever you fall in the socioeconomic stratum, the most important things in life aren’t things at all; they are relationships with family, friends, and, above all, God.
What is your response to that statement?
What are the “things” you value most in life?
What can’t you live without?
What CAN you live without but desperately do not want to?
Psalm 39:6 (NIV) “Surely everyone goes around like a mere phantom; in vain they rush about, heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be.”
Jesus’ teachings aren’t just right in some arbitrary moral sense - they are good. That’s what morality is - the good and true way to live.
Pause and pray - that the Holy Spirit would open our eyes to the lies we believe and open our hearts to believe the truth that Jesus taught.
EXTRA READING:
Death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook 1954) has asked, “Isn’t it odd that Christendom - that huge body of mankind that claims spiritual descent from a Jewish carpenter of Nazareth - claims to pray to and adore a being who was a prisoner of Roman power, an inmate of the empire’s death row? That the one it considers the personification of the Creator of the Universe was tortured, humiliated, beaten, and crucified on a barren scrap of land on the imperial periphery, at Golgotha, the place of the skull? That the majority of its adherents strenuously support the state’s execution of thousands of imprisoned citizens? That the overwhelming majority of its judges, prosecutors, and lawyers - those who condemn, prosecute, and sell out the condemned - claim to be followers of the fettered, spat-on, naked God?”