New Life Bible Study discussion

This is a way to recap your takeaway from your pastor's sermon on Sunday and share your thoughts with others! :)

OHHH I love this!!! I'll add some sermon notes laterrrr :)))

YAY, thanks Denali! :))

Love this!

Thanks Lilly!!

I have some quick sermon notes that I'm almost done with- will post them here later!

Today the sermon was about John 5, when Jesus healed the lame man at the pool. The points were:

1. Cultivate fervent desire
Jesus asked the man, "Do you want to be healed?" Obviously, the man wanted to be healed, but the man might have lost hope, or lost a fervent desire to be healed. Don't lose hope!

2. Choose to act in faith
Faith is not an emotion, it's a choice, and a choice that you have to make over and over again.

3. Live in obedience to God
Be willing to leave the comfort of where you are right now, and go with God to where He wants you to be. It's called a "walk with God" for a reason. If we're willing to leave, God has a next place for us. If fear is keeping you captive, use Scripture to fight the fear.

4. Give all the glory to God
"All glory, honor, power is Yours, forever amen!"- Canons by Phil Wickham

OK, this is a sermon I heard a couple of weeks ago, but I came across my sermon notes and thought that I might as well post here before I recycle them.

Passage: Psalm 46
Topic: Trouble & how we deal with it

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Common responses to trouble:
1. Putting up walls with people
2. Safety proofing our lives
3. Reacting with aggression

I struggle the most with putting up walls with people. When I'm in trouble, I don't want to lash out and do something I'm going to regret, so I withdraw into myself and become distant.

How we should respond to trouble:

1. Recognize your refuge as a person instead of a place.

2. Find joy in the stream of God's presence.

Know what makes you nervous. If people's advice doesn't eventually lead to joy, it may not be godly.

3. Find peace through surrender.

Rebuke the chaos and learn how to just be still. Lay down your arms (meaning your words). Unless your motive to fight is peace and love, stop, take a step back, and see what God's doing in your life.

They talked about passionate prayer this week (we're in a series about the 7 pillars of spiritual growth). Prayer must be continuous, done in faith, and from the heart. One thing that stuck out to me was that when you say you'll pray for someone, don't save it for something to do later. Do it in the moment, with the person.

We’re going through a series that our Pastor’s dubbed “Controversial Conversations: the tough teachings of Jesus”. It’s been on the hard or difficult or hard to grasp teachings of Jesus. It’s been reallly good. Good in a challenging hard way. Definitely not easy sermons for them to put together.

That's awesome! I'd love to listen to something like that. That reminds me- as I'm reading the Gospels for the New Testament in 40 Days plan, I'm running into a lot of things Jesus says that confuses/surprises me (haha, I'm still in Luke). There's this one place where Jesus says to His disciples, "Are you still so dull?" or something like that. It's not a teaching, and the translation in other versions (that's the NIV) is less shocking ("Are you still without understanding?"), but it still shook me a bit.

Last week we talked about honor and the importance of honoring yourself, the people above us, and the people who we would normally think of as below us. To honor someone is to value and respect their person and their position. That's all I remember XD

We studied the first chapter of Jonah today. I think the points were sometimes we run because we think that we know best, God lets us run, but He chases after us. The thing that stuck out to me was a quote from John Quincy Adams: "Duty is mine, but results are God's." I'm going to go add that to my quotes 😂

Today's sermon was really good. It was about the first chapter of Ruth. My favorite thing he said was: "Sometimes He pulls you out of the fire, and sometimes He walks with you through the fire." Hadn't heard that before, that I remember.

(Which reminds me, there was a song in church today that I want to add to my playlist.)

To be honest, I've been a little disappointed with the sermons at my church recently. Maybe he's busy with life and his family, but I know that there's still so much more treasure in the Bible passage than what was mentioned. Guess I'll pray for him this week...haha.