PDF version of this Discussion Guide is available here.
Read:
Chapter 3: Hint, the solution isn’t more time; and Chapter 4: The secret of the easy yoke.
Review, Reflect and Discuss
Feel free to comment and raise any questions that occur to you as you read. Don’t be limited to the questions listed after each summary, but they might help to prime your thinking.
Chapter 3 – JMC argues that the solution to hurry sickness is not more time but rather to ‘slow down and simplify around what really matters.’ Created in God’s image but from dust, we have both potential and limitation. We generally don’t like facing our limitations but JMC lists the various areas in which we are limited. The main one is time. So we have to make choices and say no to certain things. In other words, to ‘live deliberately’. We should, then, honestly recognise how we waste a lot of time and determine to live deliberately? We do this by learning to follow Jesus.
- Read again about the various ways in which we are limited. Can you be honest about your limitations? How helpful do you find it to honestly face these limitations?
- In what ways do you waste time?
- What would it look like for you to ‘live deliberately’?
Chapter 3 – the author sets out to examine what the way of Jesus might have to say about this epidemic of hurry. He explains what is meant by a ‘yoke’ in relation to Jesus as a rabbi (teacher) in his day. Jesus claimed that his yoke was ‘easy.’ To be an apprentice of Jesus, to take his yoke, is to organise our life around 3 goals: to be with Jesus, become like him, and do what he would do. Taking his easy yoke enables us to bear the weight of life and to find rest and healing for our souls. To experience the life of Jesus we have to adopt the lifestyle practices of Jesus – his way of life. Life is hard and Jesus does not offer us an escape from this reality but he offers a new way to bear the weight of it – not an easy life, but an easy yoke.
- What would it mean for you to organise your life around the 3 goals that JMS mentions?
- In what way is life hard, and in what way can bearing the yoke of Jesus be experienced as easy? Is this how you have experienced it?
Next
Read Chapter 5 about the rule of life and what he calls an Intermission about spiritual disciplines.
I like that JMC gets us to think about our limitations. I remember that at the end of junior school it seemed to be a tradition at that time in the leavers assembly for the year 6s to sing reach for the stars by S Club 7. Remember that One!? I often felt quite emotional and uncomfortable especially when I looked at how some of the kids were limited in ways that they couldn’t do much about, when they sang the lyrics
‘There ain’t nothing you can’t be
There’s a whole world at your feet’
We are always limited. That’s where God steps in and shows us just what we CAN do BECAUSE of our limitations rather than what we can’t do. It can be hard though to accept our limitations as we compare ourselves to others and might think ‘if only……’ I think that’s when the yoke that Jesus talks about then comes in and helps us to manage and be more accepting of our limitations. Then we can see the possibilities. There’s so much to learn about that!
God is teaching me to not focus on what I haven’t done or achieved in my day but look at what iI have and feel his joy in that.
I like the line , ‘Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets’. It reminds me of another saying – ‘If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got’.
His observation that Jesus offers us an alternative way of working, rather than rest from work, seems obvious when he says it but I don’t think it had occurred to me that that’s what he was saying.
I think we can be guilty of flinging out the scripture “I can do ALL THINGS through Christ who strengthens me, N. T. Wright turned that on its head for me this week, “I have strength for everything in Jesus.”