Faith to walk on water

I am so excited to prepare this lesson for our Connect Groups at Southern Calvert Baptist Church because, we are officially meeting in person again on site at the church!!! Last week was our first official, in person meeting of our Connect Groups since March. For the past five and a half months, we have been meeting via video chat. Praise God for technology and the ability to continue to study the Word together but, there is nothing like an in person, face to face Bible study.

From fear and doubt to praise and service

Last week, we took a look at our great salvation in Jesus Christ. This week, we are digging into the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1. Our lesson will cover the birth of John the Baptist. In this lesson, we will begin with fear and doubt that, through faith, leads to praise and service of the Lord. I do not know about you, but, to me, this is very, very good news. I know what it means to be afraid. I know what it means to doubt and be uncertain. I can relate to those feelings and emotions and I would be willing to bet that you can relate to them as well. Zacharias  was a servant of the Lord who struggled with fear and doubt. That reassures me to read about because I can relate. If you ever struggle with fear and doubt, this lesson is for you, just as much as it is for me. Let’s dig down in Luke 1 and learn how we can go from fear and doubt to praise and service.

Jesus calms the storm

Over the past couple of weeks, we have been studying the life of Christ. We are walking through the life of Christ in a different manner. It is not a chronological look at His life. We began our walk with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. Then we moved to the ascension of Christ. Last week, our topic was the birth of Christ, specifically focusing on His family. This week, we are going to take a look at one of His miracles, when He calmed the storm for His disciples. This lesson is going to teach us about the divine power of Christ as well as about ourselves.

Do you ever struggle with fear? What do you do when you are afraid? Does fear ever control you or are you able to overcome it every time that it attacks you?

Overcoming Fear L4 part 3

So what do you do in specific situations when you have real, live enemies? This is the topic that we want to cover today.  In our previous two articles we covered the topic of fearing people’s opinions about you, specifically when you are called by God to a certain mission and why we tend to fear. We discovered that God has an answer for us at all times. In our Western world we generally do not face physical persecution for living out our faith and sharing the Gospel through the disciple making process. This is not the case in the rest of the world. Many Christians around the world are severely persecuted for their faith in Christ Jesus. I have some friends from Muslim backgrounds who have faced and endured some of the harshest physical as well as psychological persecution one can imagine just for the simple fact that they chose to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, rejecting their dead religion and choosing a personal relationship with God that transformed their lives. What do you do when enemies threaten you because you live out your faith? What do you do when you are threatened with terrible consequences if you continue making disciples?  The Word of God has our answers.

Overcoming Fear L4

This lesson deals with fearing people. Many times, many people are afraid to dedicate themselves fully to the Lord and serving Him because they fear what people might think or say about them. I am baffled by this response but I hear it often. God knows what we are like because He created us. He also knows why we act the way that we do because of the Fall of mankind into sin. In order to help us overcome our fear of people, God moved long ago through a righteous man to write down reasons why we should not fear the people around us, why we should not be afraid of what they will think and say about us. Before we get into this lesson though, I would like to have a quick review of what we have studied so far in overcoming our fears.

Overcoming Fear L2

The other night I taught lesson 2 from overcoming fear at our youth group and I would like to share some of the insights with you here. Before digging down deep in lesson 2, I would like to review the important truths that we learned in lesson 1. You can read the entire article here.