Awake. Engage...…
Leader Material
Contents
Material Introduction...... 2
Preparation Sermon 1: Identity Sermon
Lesson 1 Material
Preparation Sermon 2: IntensitySermon...... 13
Lesson 2 Material...... 19
Preparation Sermon 3: Imitate Sermon...... 23
Lesson 3 Material...... 29
Preparation Sermon 4: Interrupted Sermon...... 33
Lesson 4 Material...... 38
Preparation Sermon 5: Imtimacy Sermon...... 43
Lesson 5 Material...... 49
Preparation Sermon 6: Influence Sermon...... 55
Lesson 6 Material...... 60
1
Introduction
This material is based on three sources: 1) Vince Antonucci’s book “I Became A Christian, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” 2) Sermons preached by Vince at Forefront Church and 3) Small group questions created by Forefront Church to go along with the sermonseries based on the Lousy T-Shirt book.
We’d like to say a huge THANK YOU for giving us access to their materials!
How To Use This Material:
Each lesson begins with a manuscript of the sermon preached at Forefront Church based on the Lousy –T-Shirt book. This sermon is just for the leader preparing to teach. Hopefully, it will help give you some background material and be an encouragement to your spiritual walk.
The second portion of each lesson is the material that you will be teaching. In that portion of the material there are several things to notice:
1. There is a “Have-To-Have” list of material you may need or want for each of the lessons.
2. There is a “Big Idea” statement. This is the main idea behind the whole lesson. Hopefully this will help you keep a focus on the main thrust of each lesson.
3. The light print is for the leader/teacher only. It is to give you some ideas and guidance for teaching the lesson.
4. The bold or dark print is the material and questions that are in the student book.
Things needed for every lesson:
Bible
pen or pencil
student book.
2
Preparation Sermon 1: Identity
Leader Preparation(A sermon preached by Vince Antonucci on our topic):
How many of you have seen ... your own life? I mean really seen it? Have you looked in the mirror lately? I mean really looked in the mirror? Is your life difficult and maybe kind of wacky? Maybe your life just doesn't seem to match up with what God promises you in the Bible. It could be a lot of different things. Perhaps you have this habit, this self-destructive behavior that you're stuck in, and you don't know why, but you can't stop. Or maybe it's a relational thing. You and your spouse, or you and your kid, or you and your parent fight over what seems like everything. You fight over things that don't matter, things that don't make sense, and you don't know why, and you can't stop. Or it could be more of an emotional thing—maybe you're struggling with unexplainable depression or anger. Or perhaps it's a love issue. You've been coming to church for a while now, and you're here because you want to experience God's love and you want to love him, but... it's like there's something blocking that. Or maybe you can't develop intimacy with another person. And all these difficulties and all this wackiness ... it's getting to be too much. Maybe you're headed for a meltdown.
Today we're starting a new series called "I Became a Christian and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt" based on a book that a lot of us have been reading. Now, it's kind of an odd name—perhaps a bit provocative. But here's the idea: I've found that a lot of people become Christians but somehow miss out on the Christian life. Jesus said in John 10:10, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." He's saying he came to bring you full life. I like the way one of the early Christians, a guy named Irenaeus, put it: "The glory of God is man fully alive." Jesus came so that we could live life fully alive. But many of us aren't. Our lives just don't match up with what the Bible promises. We're kind of like the kid wearing the shirt that says, "My Parents Went to Florida and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt." It's like there's this journey, this adventure we're supposed to be on, but somehow we're missing it. The life we're supposed to have, the journey we're supposed to be on is to live life with Jesus (that through spending time with him, he might be kind of poured into us and change us) and living the Jesus life (that in spending time with others, Jesus might be kind of poured out of us, and we can help change the world). But some of us are missing that. So in this series we're going to explore why. Is our thinking wrong? Is it something we're doing or not doing? What is it? Today we're going to begin by talking about the issue of our identity.
How many of you have seen the movie Ice Age: The Meltdown? The answer is probably the same as the answer to the question "How many of you have kids between the ages of three and thirteen?"The movie is the second installment in the Ice Age series. Once again there's a cataclysmic event about to happen—this time it's a meltdown. The world is changing. The ice is melting. The characters in the movie, all animals, believe it could even signify the end of the world—or at least the end of life as they know it.
This film features some of the same characters as in the first movie, but the character I found the most interesting is a new one. It's a female wooly mammoth named Ellie, voiced by Queen Latifah. Ellie is a wooly mammoth ... who believes she's an opossum. She lives with two other opossums, whom she thinks are her brothers. She totally thinks she's an opossum—a ten-ton opossum! This makes her life difficult and kind of wacky. We're first introduced to her as she's hanging from a tree by her tail; the branch breaks and she hits the ground with a thud. She's way too heavy to hang from a branch, but that is what opossums do. She makes the excuse, "Some of us have a hard time holding on to branches. It's not like we're bats. We don't have wings." Another wooly mammoth (named Manny, with the voice of Ray Romano) explains to her that she's not an opossum, she's a mammoth, but she replies, "Don't be ridiculous. I'm not a mammoth. I'm an opossum." And Ellie doesn't just hang from trees. She worries about a buzzard carrying her off, because that's what happens to opossums, so she only travels at night. She plays dead when a hawk flies overhead because she thinks it might grab her and take heraway. She tries to squeeze through a small hole between two fallen trees as the other opossums do, but for some reason she can’t fit. The other mammoth tries to prove to her that she’s not what she thinks she is. He points out that their footprints match and their shadows match. But she won’t hear of it.
Well, because the meltdown is approaching, Ellie is forced to go on a journey, and it happens to lead her to encounter her past. And as she explores her past, she realizes what happened. It turns out that at a very young age she lost her family. Another family, a family of opossums, took her in and made her one of their own. They treated her like an opossum, so she began to believe she was an opossum. The rest of her life she just selectively chose information that reinforced her belief. But through visiting her past, she finally realizes she’s been living a lie. She says, “Deep down, I knew I was different.”
And so Ellie accepts her true identity as a mammoth. Now, it’s not that easy for her. Although she is a mammoth, she doesn’t really know how to live as a mammoth. She makes statements like, “Sorry, I don’t know my own strength yet.” She asks questions like, “Do we just throw our weight around?” And some remnants of her old identity are not so quick to disappear. She still wants to travel at night, as opossums do, and believes she can see better at night because opossums can. It’s not easy for her to make the transition to her new identity, but slowly it happens. Increasingly she’s able to not only accept but actually live out her new identity.
And maybe the coolest thing that happens is that she’s able to love and be loved. See, when the mammoth played by Ray Romano met her, he was very interested in making—you know—a mammoth connection, but she wasn’t interested in him because, well, he’s a mammoth and she’s an opossum. It would never work. But once she learns that she’s a mammoth, suddenly the possibility of love is there. Even that’s a little difficult at first, but eventually it happens. She says, “I am a mammoth. I should probably be with a mammoth, don’t you think?” And that’s the end of the movie.
So, let me ask again: How many of you have seen .. your own life? I mean really seen it? Have you looked in the mirror lately? I mean really looked in the mirror? Is your life difficult and maybe kind of wacky? Do you feel like your life just doesn’t match up with what God promises you in the Bible? Let me ask one more question: Do you think it’s possible that your problems stem from having a false identity? I know it sounds weird. But is it possible that you think that you’re one thing when really you’re something else, and it’s this identity problem that’s causing all your other problems? Maybe you’ve been trying to fix your problems but the fixes you’re trying don’t seem to work.
Maybe it’s like this: Say you accidentally downloaded a virus onto your computer several years ago, and your computer’s been running slow ever since. You’ve addressed that by constantly buying upgrades for your computer, getting a new mouse, increasing the memory—getting all this new stuff for your computer but never dealing with the virus that’s ravaging the basic operating system. Maybe all the stuff you’ve been trying to do to “fix” yourself, to solve your problems—it’s all helpful, but it’s not going to do the trick if it’s just layered on top of a faulty system. That faulty system is what I’m calling our identity. Our view of self. How we define ourselves and who we are. Do you think it’s possible that your problems stem from having a false identity? I think it’s not just possible but probable.
If it’s true that we can have a false identity (like Ellie the mammoth did), how does that happen? How do we get a false identity? Well, we like to think that we’re self-made and that “I’ve set the course for my life,” but the truth is that you are an amalgamation, a composite, of the messages you’ve received. What you believe about yourself is, in large measure, based on what you’ve been told about yourself. In life we receive a ton of information, and we’re kind of like sponges: we take it all in.
Now, not every message we receive becomes a part of our identity. I think the two factors that determine whether we take information in and let it shape us and become part of our identity are early and often. Information or messages we receive early and/or often tend to seep in and shape our identities.
Here’s what I mean by the early information factor: If you receive messages about yourself early in life from what seems to be a credible source—from your parents, brothers and sisters, friends, teachers, coaches—it has a good chance of molding what you think about yourself. This is why you can sit with a woman who has two Ph.D.’s and she’ll tell you that she’s not very smart; it’s because she was told that as a little girl by her mom. Or maybe you know a salesman who’s pretty bad at what he does, but he still has great self-esteem and thinks very highly of himself, and you can’t figure out why. It’s because his parents convinced him growing up that he was valuable regardless of his achievements. Or you might know a very successful businessman who thinks he’s a failure because he vividly remembers hearing that from his father when he was seven years old. Obviously the danger here is that early information is not necessarily correct information, but if it comes early from what seems to be a credible source, it can become deeply embedded in our identity.
Then there’s the often factor. Okay, I want to do something fun with you—don’t cheat if you’ve done this before. We’re all going to repeat the same word, out loud, ten times. Okay? We’re all going to say the word joke ten times. Everyone ready? Out loud: “Joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke.” The white of an egg is a ...? No, it’s not a yoke! It’s an egg white, not a yoke. We’ll try another one. We’re gonna say silk ten times. Ready? “Silk, silk, silk, silk, silk, silk, silk, silk, silk, silk.” And cows drink .No, cows don’t drink milk! This is Marketing 101. What marketing people know is that if you hear a message often enough, it will start to impact you, you’ll start to believe it, and you’ll remember it. Like “Two all beef patties ..” Right. It’s been years since those commercials, but if you’re old enough that you heard them, you still remember them, because you heard them often.
And most powerful of all is the message that you receive very early and very often. That can be a toxic cocktail if it’s the wrong message. Perhaps you heard a message early and often, and you grew to believe it, to internalize it, to make it part of your identity. Maybe it was your dad saying, “You’ll never amount to much.” Or your mom told you, “You’re impossible.” Or she communicated, through her example, “You need a man to make you happy.” Or a kid told you on the playground that you’re weird. Or you received the message “You have to be in the spotlight to impress people.” Or “You’re not very pretty.” Or “You can be anything you want to be”—which sounds nice, but it’s a lie. You can’t be anything you want to be; you can only be what God created you to be. And maybe you’ve spent your life, based on that lie, trying to be something you’re not supposed to be. And it’s killing you.
See, our identity is based (in large part) on the messages we’ve received in life, especially things we’ve been told about ourselves very early and/or very often. And what happens is that when we receive that information early in life and start forming our identity based on it, it becomes the lens through which we process future information. So throughout the rest of our lives we selectively find information that reinforces what we already believe about ourselves.
It’s kind of like this: Let’s say you and I drove to a party, and right before we walked into the house, I turned to you and said, “By the way, you do know that everyone at this party thinks you’re a complete idiot, right? Okay, let’s go in.” What happens? If the host forgets to take your coat, you know why. It’s because she thinks you’re an idiot. If someone looks at you from across the room or if someone makes a joke about you, it’s all reinforcing the lie I told you. And so information you would have processed in an entirely different way if I hadn’t told you the lie, you selectively use to reinforce the lie I gave you. See, that’s what a lot of our lives are like. We receive some bad information early in life, it shapes who we think we are, and our lives become this party we’re walking through—and we’re supposed to be enjoying it, but all we do is selectively find things to reinforce that toxic lie we were made to believe.
So what do we do about all this? Well, I think it’s time for us, like Ellie, to go on a journey to our past. You need to explore your past and realize what happened. What messages did you receive? What lies were you told? What did you begin to believe? And since then, have you just been selectively finding information to reinforce your belief? The goal is to have no unexamined assumptions about yourself. Take all the things you believe about yourself out, one by one, and examine them, and compare them to the truth God tells you about yourself in his Word. This may be difficult. It may require the help of your small group, of a trusted friend, or of a professional counselor. But it’s necessary. And as you begin to expose the lies you’ve been living, you’ll see your false identity for what it is, and you’ll say, “You know what? Deep down I knew I was different from what I was told.”
My prayer is that if you make that journey through your past and expose the lies of your false identity, the journey will lead you to your true identity. But what is your true identity? Well, the Bible says that you were created in the image of God. You were created in God’s image—and that’s your true identity. Now, the reality is that a lot has happened to mar God’s image in you and me. Some of it is stuff that was done to us; some of it is stuff we’ve done. And so God’s image has been marred in us, but it’s still our true identity.