Nov 16, 2009
Faithwerks
FAITHWERKS
Join us during the next four weeks as we learn that Spiritual formation is all about hearing from God. We are going to learn how to teach others about our faith--our neighbors, our co-workers, and especially our family! We're going to learn about prayer, Scripture reading, and Service.
November 22: Integration
Big Idea: We need to hear from God every day and not just when we are in church.
There is a disconnect between church and home. We still see church as the primary spiritual developer of the family. Yet, God created the family as the place of spiritual development. The challenge is that so many kids are growing up without any kind of spiritual foundation at home. Its not part of lives. The role of the church is to help equip families. We need to admit we need help and we need to seek out the help we need.
The Solution to what works is leveraging the hours we have with our children to the fullest potential.
http://read.ly/e/gt
November 29: Prayer
Big Idea: Prayer is about hearing from God rather than telling Him what we want Him to do.
What if someone came up to you and said “Would you teach me to pray?” 85-90% of people would say “Don’t ask me, ask so and so (some official spiritual person)” or they would say “It’s a very personal thing, everybody needs to pray in their own way” which is another way of saying “Don’t ask me.”
Prayer starts with God, not you. Things were happening in Samuel’s life, and Eli was teaching him to respond to God. We tend to think that prayer is US starting the conversation with God, that we are the initiators. The story shows us that wasn’t the case for us, that God is speaking to us constantly. Now obviously, it’s not like Samuel, where God comes and stands by his bed (or maybe it is and we just can’t see him or hear Him? The story doesn’t say Samuel saw Him, only that he heard Him.) But God is speaking to us.
Apply this to both my own prayer life and the prayer life of my kids if I have kids. I need to learn and teach my children that prayer never truly starts with me. I’m responding to what God is saying to me in my life.
God is already speaking to each of us every day in a myriad of ways. Prayer doesn’t start with us, it’s responding to God. God starts the conversation, not us. Prayer is not so much “what am I supposed to say?” or just saying what I have to say and then being done praying, it is thinking about and reflecting on what God has been saying to me and responding to that in what I say back. That’s why Samuel is told to say to God “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.”
Prayer is more about listening than talking. Prayer is more about doing what God wants me to do instead of telling God what I want him to do.
Deember 6th: Scripture
Big Idea: We hear from God when we read and study the Bible with others in community.
Hearing God isn’t presumptuous to think about, it’s not for the elite, it’s necessary for life as we know it. Last week we talked about hearing from God in prayer and today we’re talking about hearing from God from the Bible. For starters, that’s what we gotta get: Scripture isn’t about just a discipline, or just learning spiritual data, or memorizing stuff or becoming a Bible scholar. Scripture is about hearing from God, and hearing from God is necessary for life.
December 13th: Service
Big Idea: Hearing from God means using our spiritual gifts to serve together and change the world.
Families will be encouraged to serve together and discover and develop their spiritual gifts together. We usually think about this as something we do for others, but there's also a huge element of how God develops us through service, how we are the ones who are on the receiving end even though we are the ones who are doing the serving. This is about knowing why we are here, and how God has wired each of us up in particular ways to make a difference for Him that fits together with the different ways He has designed others to make a difference. The Body of Christ working together is one of the best passages on this, and how we need to overcome our culture's individualistic bias against me playing my part in a larger community, whether that community is the church or the family.
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