Moving Forward

Last week, we decided to spend the evening in fellowship.  We were too tired to play a game, so we browsed Netflix and learned that you should never watch "The Whitest Kids You Know" TV show.

This week, we were again blessed by Julie's cooking and 'Bauer/Powers' hosting.  In the conclusion of the T4T material, we discussed the Great Commission at the end of the book of Matthew and how we could adjust our weekend cleanup activity to have a greater focus on outreach.  Common ideas were to hand people tracts as a way to start a conversation and to use a questionnaire to get to know people before asking them about God.  Let's try doing something different this Saturday to talk to people about God.  Maybe it's just opening our mouths!

The lesson in T4T involved reading Luke 1:5-25 using the 4-question approach from 2 Timothy 3:16.
1. What does God want to teach us?
2. How does God rebuke us in this passage?
3. How does God want to correct us in this passage?
4. How does God train us in righteousness in this passage?

The reading was about a man Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth, who were in a situation similar to Abraham and Sarah.  Elizabeth was barren and ostracized for it, but the couple was obedient to God and always acted righteously though their prayer for a son was left unanswered.  When an angel appears to Zechariah he doubts that God can give them a child, because of how old they are.  He is punished for his doubt, being made unable to speak for the 9 months of Elizabeth's pregnancy.

In general, our response to this story was that God rebukes us for our disbelief, wants us to have faith in Him and His promises, and shuts us up so that we can hear His Word.  We had a lot of great discussion over how God tolerates us questioning Him.  One clear conclusion was that we no longer have to fear God if we question Him, because Jesus has paid the perfect & final price for all of our sins.  However, Jesus's sacrifice should be a motivation to glorify God not an excuse to disobey Him.

We all thought that one passage of scripture per week (what T4T prescribes) would be too little for us.  So we decided that moving forward, we will all commit to reading 6 chapters a week of the same book and then read and discuss the seventh chapter on Tuesday evenings.  We didn't have much time to decide, but for now we have settled on reading through Matthew.  This means we should be ready to read and discuss chapter 7 next week (It is not a bad thing to ask what you missed if you didn't do all the reading. This will hold us accountable for actually remembering what we've read!).  Please pray about what book God wants us to read through next.