LEADER PREPARATION
Lesson Summary:

Note: These lessons are designed to be 30 minutes long. If your club time is shorter than this, we encourage you to be prayerful about parts of this lesson to put more or less emphasis on. If limited on time, we urge you to prioritize Tool Time and summarize Dig In, as Tool Time is what prepares you for sharing the Gospel. As always, let the Holy Spirit guide your leadership.

Just as Jesus was crucified and resurrected, He offers His followers the chance to experience new life by dying to our former lives. This new life will be amazing, but it is not easy. We must give up our own desires to lean into the will God has for each of our lives.

Main Point
As followers of a crucified Jesus, we are called to a life of discipleship with Christ.

Team Roles

Host: This Student Leader will lead the Start Up section of the lesson, helping create a fun environment, making everyone feel welcome and included.
Speaker: This student leader will guide the group in growing deeper in their faith by reading and reflecting on passages of scripture. They will then connect the content to the group’s daily lives by asking practical questions and leading the conversation.
Other Roles: Promo, Welcome, and Follow Up. 

Scripture References

• Luke 9:23-26
• Romans 6:6-8

Materials Needed

• Two Bottles of Water (One Per Student)
• Two Rolls of Toilet Paper
• Two Plastic Cups
• Invite Cards
• Testimony Guides

(7 minutes)
Welcome everyone and be sure to get the names of any new friends.

Icebreaker Game: Breaking Point
Supplies Needed: Bottles of Water, Two Rolls of Toilet Paper, Two Plastic Cups

Ask the group for four volunteers; then divide them into two teams. Instruct one member from each team to roll out their toilet paper across a long table. Give the other students a cup and a bottle of water; then ask them to sit on the far end of the toilet roll.

Explain that the student with the remainder of the roll will be reeling it back up, but only after their partner has placed a cup at their end of the roll and filled it up with water. The goal of the game is for the student with the roll to reel in their cup with as much water as possible WITHOUT tearing the paper. If the paper tears, their team must remove as much water as they see fit and then restart the game. The team who reels in the most water is the winner.

Feel free to have as many teams to participate as time and materials allow.

(5 minutes)
Ask: Your techniques were great! What was the reason some of you lost water? If you held on, what do you think was your secret to holding onto the water? (Take a few moments for students to share.)

Say: As followers of Jesus, sometimes the sin in our lives is like the water in these cups. We try to balance our life with Jesus while still keeping as much of our past ways as possible. Jesus challenges us to dump out our cups and to turn away from anything that is not from Him.

Jesus calls us to follow Him along a path of discipleship that will take us to unexpected and even difficult places. Jesus is leading us on the way of everlasting life, but it is a way that often involves sacrifice and hardship as we say no to the sins and momentary pleasures that would derail us toward the wrong path.

This way might seem hard to walk at first, but Jesus promises: His yoke is easy and His burden is light. Matured followers of Jesus know that there is more joy and satisfaction to be found walking with Him through hardship than there is in walking without Him through times of comfort and selfish pleasure.

Just as you follow the instructions of a guide on a strenuous hike or your coach in a hard workout, you can rely on Jesus’ guidance as He trains you in this new life of discipleship. Soon His ways will become natural to you, and the temptation to sin will lessen. The closer you are to God’s voice, the more familiar and satisfying it will be to follow Him.

Read Scripture: And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-2)

Ask: As Jesus hung on a cross, what do you think the “joy set before Him” was? (Take a few moments for students to share.)

Say: The joy set before Him was the fulfillment of Jesus’ purpose. The joy was you. He came so that you could be reconciled to God. He came to the earth and lived a perfect life, died, and rose from the dead to rescue you and bring you back into a relationship with God.

As followers of Jesus, our race of discipleship will take us through hard paths, difficult choices, and even the death of some of our desires. But anything we may lose does not compare to the satisfaction which is ours when we live in relationship with God.

In light of this prize, Jesus reminds us that the cost of discipleship is nothing compared to the joy we discover in His company along the way. Often, we will look back on our most challenging times as also our most precious because of what we discovered about God’s fierce love for us and the joy of His presence.

Read Scripture: Then he said to them all: Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self? Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. (Luke 9:23-26)

Ask: What do you think Jesus meant in this verse about denying yourself and taking up your cross and following Him? What examples do you have from your own life? (Take a few moments for students to share.)

Say: Jesus modeled a radical way of life for us. In His self-giving love, He lays out a way to live that goes against the norm. In Jesus, we discover that the way to a life filled with purpose, joy, peace, and love requires dying to the old ways of life which were leading us to death.

Read Scripture: For we know that our old self was crucified with Him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin – because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him. (Romans 6:6-8)

Say: In order to experience this new life Jesus promises, we must put to death everything that is not of Him. Just as Jesus’ death led to resurrection and victory over evil, our dying to ourselves leads to eternal life. The radical truth is that denying ourselves leads to a life of freedom and the joy of living God’s purposes each day.