12.5.21 HUDDLE – Explorer Edition

Zach Below   -   December 5, 2021

INTRO QUESTION

  1. What is your all-time favorite Christmas movie? As a group, conduct a debate and come up with an official group Top 3 Christmas movies of all-time.

 

 

WEEKLY INTRO

This week marks our latest expression of One Life Explorer Edition. As such, huddle will look a little different this week. The question we are exploring this week is, What would the world be like without Christmas?

 

  1. If there were no Christmas (meaning no Jesus), what do you think would be removed from the world? Another way to ask this question is, what ideas, institutions, charitable organizations were started because of Jesus’s influence on a follower’s life? See if you can list 10 things.

 

One line from the famous Christmas carol, O Holy Night, says, “Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother.” This song points to the argument that without Jesus, the world would be without one of the most fundamental concepts to who we are . . . individual rights. The key to this idea is that every single human being has rights and worth that go beyond the government and that right comes from somewhere else.

 

  1. The idea that every human being has inherent worth and rights was not a universal idea. Many argue that it would have never happened without Jesus. Respond to the following quote by atheist philosopher Luc Ferry. “The Greek worldview rested entirely on the conviction that there exists a natural hierarchy. . . . Some men are born to command, others to obey. But in direct contradiction, Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”

 

 

BIBLE ENGAGMENT—GALATIANS 3:26-28

“So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

 

  1. Consider this was written in the time when the Greek Worldview, mentioned in the previous quote, was by far the leading worldview, What stands out to you from this text? How does it speak against the worldview of the time?

 

  1. Respond to the following quote from atheist philosopher Jacques Derrida. “Today the cornerstone of international law is the sacred . . . the sacredness of man as your neighbor . . . made by God or by God-made man. . . . in that sense, the concept of crime against humanity is a Christian concept and I think there would be no such thing in the law today without the Christian heritage, the Abrahamic heritage, the biblical heritage.”

 

  1. If human rights don’t come from somewhere else (God /the idea of everyone being made in the image of God), where do they come from?

 

  1. Why can’t it be as simple as “the majority decided it over time?” (Leader note: this would indicate that a majority could later determine that people don’t have rights.)

 

 

FINAL QUESTION

  1. How do you intentionally keep Jesus as a part of Christmas?

 

 

CLOSE IN PRAYER