In Real Life Books Salt, Light, and the Good Life Blessings and the Sermon on the Mount

Exploring tough questions facing youth today • Also available as an eResource

OPEN THE BIBLE • Help youth apply the Bible to real life and discuss their faith. This all-in-one curriculum guides youth and their leaders on a journey for meaning and identity. In Real Life encourages youth to ask the hard questions, and helps them encounter Scripture in search of answers. In a time of violence, injustice, materialism, and new pressures, this series offers a different point of view. Compatible with a whole family approach.

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What is the good life to which Jesus calls us?

Start with the Blessings from Jesus’ preaching—where his disciples started their preparation for a life of service in the Spirit. The teachings of the Sermon are radical—they drive to the root—both in their simplicity and in the difficulty of living them. Yet this is the bedrock of what it means to live as a disciple of Jesus. This unit will use the instructions in the same way they were used by the early Christians—as catechism, teaching the essentials to new believers. It explores the Sermon under four main sections: the Blessings, Salt and Light, Jesus and the Law, and Heavenly Teachings. (6 sessions, plus extender session)

Sessions:

1. The Blessings: Invitation/Conversion • Assure participants who may be feeling inadequate and/or awkward spiritually that these conditions—poverty of spirit, mourning, and meekness—are exactly the ones that make them receptive to a relationship with God.
2. The Blessings: Foundation/Preparation • Show participants who may be searching for a formula for faith how the desire they have is not just something to be fulfilled in the future, but is itself an experience of faith.
3. The Blessings: Commission/Ministry • Urge participants to integrate regular peacemaking and reconciliation into their lives as disciples.
4. Salt and Light • Help participants who wonder about their purpose in life see that their principal job is, through their “saltiness” and light, to let God’s light in them shine.
5. Jesus and the Law • Help participants who have a strong sense of justice avoid legalism by seeing that Jesus returned biblical laws to their roots: Love.
6. Heavenly Teachings: Do the Right Thing • Show youth, who constantly seek approval, that doing the right thing is not so much about how people see us but how God sees us.
7. More on the Good Life (Extender Session option) • Write your own homily. • Hillside prayer. • Practice mercy. • Poetic blessings.