Kingdom of Love Series Intro
Overview
This year’s theme is “Love God, love your neighbor.” We began the year by laying the foundation of love, first through God’s covenants, then examining how Jesus saw and loved each individual he interacted with (Seen). With both series focused on receiving God’s love, we then spent the Summer studying how we respond to that love (Obey Love). In this fall series we’ll expand the concept of love beyond a relational aspect with God and towards the reality of God’s ways, design, and promised future, showing us how followers of Christ really live. We’ll do so by once again returning to the book of John with our new series, Kingdom of Love.
To help form an outline of our series we can start with the structure of John’s Gospel, which falls into 5 big sections:
Sections in John
- Introduction – John 1
- The Book of Signs – John 2-12:50
- The Farewell Discourse – John 13-17:26
- The Passion and Resurrection – John 18-20:31
- Epilogue – John 21
Now check out how the 14 weeks of our series fall into those categories:
1. Introduction
Week 1 – August 18 – John 1:19-34
2. The Book of Signs – events during Jesus’ ministry
Week 2 – August 25 – John 2:1-12
Week 3 – September 1 – John 2:13-25
Week 4 – September 8 – John 4:31-45
Week 5 – September 15 – John 5:18-29
Week 6 – September 22 – John 6:1-15
Week 7 – September 29 – John 6:16-21
Week 8 – October 6 – John 6:35-59
Week 9 – October 13 – John 7:1-51
Week 10 – October 20 – John 10:1-21
3. The Farewell Discourse – Jesus’ last teaching with the disciples
Week 11 – October 27 – John 16:1-15
Week 12 – November 3 – John 16:16-24
Week 13 – November 10 – John 16:25-33
Week 14 – November 17 – John 17:1-26
4. The Passion and Resurrection – John 18-20:31
5. Epilogue – John 21
So we’ll start off the series by looking at John the Baptist’s testimony of Jesus, but as you can see we’ll be spending the bulk of our time talking about events during Jesus’ ministry. These have been selected specifically to help us understand the nature of the Kingdom Jesus was ushering into the world. In the last four weeks we’ll look at selections from Jesus’ final teaching time with the disciples. This Farewell Discourse is a longish section covering the night before the crucifixion where Jesus washed the disciples feet (13:1-20), promised to send the Holy Spirit (14:16), and prayed the High Priestly Prayer (17:1-26), shortly before being betrayed by Judas (18:3). During these last four weeks we’ll learn about the disposition of what we could call “Kingdom life,” and how this Kingdom life is defined by the work of the Spirit among us.
Resources