Applications? For today's CM Group meetings, you should be starting to consider the applications of your text to the church, individually, and in relation to our class. Obviously, this is to be bulit from your exposition of the text; if you as a group feel there is still work to be done in that realm of your study, then certainly do it. As they say, "don't put the cart before the horse."
Project? We'll talk seriously about this on Monday, stay tuned
Bloggers, you know the drill, so get it done (remember, you have 24 hours). If you have any questions, you can contact me by email: bhigley@bbc.edu.
Blessings
Bill H
16 comments:
1st Thessalonians 2:1-16
It’s been another wonderful time as our group met today. Two of our members were not present, so that made it a tad bit difficult to get everyone’s thoughts on our passage.
After some technical difficulties with the Internet, we started off by brainstorming on what we wanted to do for our group project. We knew we wanted to do something related to the idea of encouragement, both in and to the church as seen in our passage, but we weren’t quite sure how we were going to follow through with that. We decided to assign a few people to brainstorm on paper their ideas of how are project could possible look. Possibly through video or power point project? We’re still not quite sure yet. But don’t worry! We are working on it ;)
Following our discussion on our project, Steven led us in what he had prepared for our group concerning our passage. We discussed verses 3-7 today. Steven said that as Christians we are called to be real with our faith, when talking to non-believers or even other believers. This is shown in our passage several times, because Paul talks about the greatness of the Thessalonians faithfulness to the church and to God.
Today we read our passage out loud and then discussed questions that we had regarding our passage. In verse 4 it talks about all of us sharing one hope. We went over what we thought that one hope was and some answers were one hope in that one day we will all be with Christ and another answer was that we have hope in not being bound by sin. Christ is our only hope and he IS sufficient.
In vv. 14-15 we noticed that it was close to a passage in James ch. 1. None of us desire to be unstable and the church needs to be a shelter from the wind and waves.
Forgiveness came up at the end of our discussion. We need to forgive one another in love. Even though it is extremely hard we have to make ourselves vulnerable, humble and patient
John 1 and 17
today was a good day to meet with the group just to fellowship with each other and have fun. our meeting today was full of laughs. although we did have a good time, i promise we accomplished a lot too. for the past couple meetings we have been doing more of an exegetical study, however, today we tried to do more of a theological and bible study. we made some connections between john ch. 1 and 17 and how they are related to each other. once we established the fact that ch.1 establishes the diety and the one praying in ch. 17, we then discussed the relationship between the father and Jesus that is eveident in both chapters.
we then made applications to our own lives based on these passages. Just as Christ submitted to the father in ch. 17 in prayer, we, too, are commanded to follow His example and submit to the father. another truth that we discovered in ch. 17 is the fact that God was praying for us 1000s of years ago. that is a pretty cool idea.
for the last couple minutes of our meeting again pondered some on how we plan to present our presentation. although we are still not fully certain how we are going to do this, we were able to brainstorm many ideas, some in which would probably not be appreciated. (let's just say... "I" would not personally want to see nate king and paul mcIntire perform an interprative dance) :)
for our next meeting we plan to study and apply these passages in more detail.
one thing that kept coming up in our meeting was how much more comfortable our group is with each other. looking back to our first meeting and comparing it to our present meetings, we have all come along way. we have learned to except each other, although very different from each other, and learn to have a great time!
1 Corinthians 12-14
Today we were without our fearless captain, Laura, who is out discipling (aka schooling) other christians in the NCCAA girls soccer championship in Florida.
Professor Crago agreed to meet with our group today and answer questions that we had about our passage. Our group had previously prepared questions (mostly regarding tongues and spiritual gifts) and were able to get them answered in detail. He discussed how much controversy and difference there is in interpretation of the passage, and how it affects differing doctrines. We learned a lot today and had a very good discussion time. We also realized how much deeper our passage is than we originally thought that fateful day when we picked our passages.
Romans 12-15
We had a unique group meeting today. Our facilitator began with suggesting that our group vote on what we want to do today. The options were to discuss our passage or to play games. I am under the impression that this had to do with some suggestion of Dwight Peterson to the facilitators to 'do whatever we want in our groups' today...
So with that, the vote was a landslide to partake in the elements of Uno and Rummycube. Odd comparisons were made between our passage and the rules of Uno such as 'not causing our brother to stumble' with 'more lenient standards of rules'. (haha?) We also found competition brings out different sides of people (for better or worse) and so we learned more about each other. It may be a stretch but I might even suggest that maybe we even learned something about Community in how we interacted with each other. We had to choose to glorify God and be loving even when Steve insisted on his ridiculous rules for Uno.
Ephesians 4
Our group finally finished Ephesians 4. Our last few verses to discuss were v. 25-32. Most our discussion was based on characteristics that should or should not be evident in someone who has put off the old self.
A believer is to speak truth; this makes sense since Jesus Christ is truth, therefore we should also reflect that truth. We are not to speak of anything unwholesome, or rotten. Although the Spirit will be brought sorrow when we talk unwholesomely, He will still dwell in us. Paul closes chapter 4 with some negatives and positives. We are to rid bitterness, rage, and anger, but we are to put on kindness and compassion since our forgiveness of others is to be like God's forgiveness of us.
GALATIANS
Everyone in our group was present and we had a great discussion of chapters 4-6, but mostly chapter 4. We all had done our research and made observations.
First we discussed 4:9 about how God knew us first. We compared it to the pattern of 1 John 4:10 – “not that we loved God but that He loved us…” God initiated the relationship with us; we didn’t “find” Him.
We had some lively conversation about 4:12, where Paul talks about becoming “like” the Galatians. We compared that to 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 where Paul says he became a slave to all to win as many as possible to Christ. We talked for a while about whether it was okay to change your appearance to appeal to teenagers, for example, or pretending to be interested in someone else’s hobby, just so they will listen to the gospel. We came to the conclusion that it’s only okay if you don’t change the gospel message and you don’t sin. For instance, it would be wrong to deceive a basketball player into thinking you love basketball, just so they will be willing to hear you talk about God. You can, though, change the way you present your message, depending on your hearer.
We discussed 4:21-31, about Hagar and Sarah, for a while, but since I didn’t feel like I understood it enough, I won’t attempt to blog it. :)
Finally, in 5:1, we talked about how foolish it was to go back to slavery after being free in Christ. Sometimes we may feel like we need to please God by being righteous to the extent that we’re trying to earn our salvation. One of our group members made the comment that sometimes we think that freedom in Christ is just the “icing on the cake” of salvation, but really that’s the whole point!
1 Timothy 3
This week our group got into a dicussion wheather or not it is biblical for there to be deaconesses. The Greek word that is used is not limited to men. We discussed what it means for women to submit and weather there were woman in the Bible that were leaders. We then started discussing Deborah in the Old testament and how God used her for a period of time to lead Israel.
We discussed that the meaning of deacon. We said that it is a servant in the church. There will always be woman who are serving in the church so in essence there will be woman who fit that definition.
We never concluded the dicussion weather or not woman should fill the roll of deacon discribed in our passage. Most of us believed that they should not be in that position.
We also talked about how much we enjoyed our group time and talked about how we wanted to continue it next semester.
Galatians
It was yet another good week of meeting as a group. Our passage being he whole book of Galatains we tried to figure out where we exactly wanted to go with what were studying. And we already decided to narrow it down more towards the last two chapters but there is still so much information in that. in chapter 5 starting at verse 16 we noticed how the passage starts out telling us to walk in the spirt and then ends in verse 25 again by telling us to walk in the spirit. So for next week we made plans to go through the entire book on our own and make a list of examples of walking in the spirit and walking in the flesh. In doing this we can tie more passages of scripture together throughout all the book to help u with our study.
Philippians 4
On friday our group got away outside to enjoy the beautiful breezy weather. We read chapter 4
which ends Philippians, with Paul giving his last reminding words of how the church should continue.
Paul emphasis God's peace and contentment in this chapter. Our group realized that being content in who you are and what God has given you leads to joy, with joy leading to peace. God has given us everything we will ever need. Whether we are single, don't make much money, struggle with disease or sickness, constantly against trials, we are to be content in our state. When we are content we find ourselves in Christ, and we are reminded of the cross. Philippians 4:13 says "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Through Christ our lives can be content and we can find joy and peace through Him. We can experience true peace in Christ we give ourselves over to Christ. Peace is not something we can make for ourselves, but given to us from God.
Mr. Zerbini our facilitator pointed out that 4:8 is a filter verse to 1:27. Phil. 1:27 says to let our conduct be worthy of the gospel. Phil. 4:8 helps us understand how to live this verse, telling us the things we should think on "whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable. We ended our study seeing that content leads to humility. We become humbled by who we are in Christ knowing that our lives is nothing without Him, and the fact that we have him, she should be content and humbled.
Taking this last chapter and looking over the first few chapter our group had to put our heads together, for our project. We are still trying to figure out the main theme because not even the commentaries that we read told us that there is just one theme. Is it joy? unity? humility? Others above yourself? We are thinking about taking all these themes and using it for our presentation. We then thought of cool ways for our group to present Philippians, someting out of the norm that is exciting and also a learning experience for everyone to see how Philippians truly works. I'm not going to write our ideas, you'll just have to wait and see!!
3 of the 4 members of our group were present, as our faciltator was away at a cross country meet. Those of us who were there looked further into the correlation between James 3:1-12 and 2:14-26.
We discussed how even though the tongue is one of our smallest members, it can cause much damage when used in an ungodly manner. The tongue when used incorrectly is the reason for many church splits today and does not show Christ through us.
Romans 12-15
Our group first went over everything that we talked about so far this semester on our passage. We then talked a lot about the personal applications that we each individually had for the passage. We talked about how each one of us could follow through with what the passage said and actually plan to put it in action. We also once again talked about the individualistic mindset the church in America has and how we can personally help to change our churches from being me focused to community focused and loving. We also talked about what we thought the project was going to be on and our team leader reminded us to keep in mind everything that we learned thus far.
Group time this week pretty much picked up where we left off...AJ and Lauren were able to share their studies on Love and Gifts.
As we discussed this we began our Application. The Corinthians had a distorted view of both Love and Unity. This affected the proper use of Spiritual gifts so when adressing their questions on gifts, Paul gets to the 'heart' of the matter which is unity in Love.
Once we re-evaluate our motives we can properly use our gifts for edification of the church.
Each of us shared about our various ministries and we discussed the implications correct motive of Love has on youth ministry, nursing home visitation and Awana.
I know this is late and I apologize now, I had some difficulty with my BBC email and such. Ok here goes. So, it was just Gavin and I on Friday, Tim and Rachel were both absent for different and valid reasons. I know, what could be more important than time with the Church's Min. group. Anyways, since our group has been discussing application since before it was technically assigned, Gavin decided to use the time to discuss antyhing that is happening in our lives. I will admit I exhausted the entire time with a trial that I am going through, but Gavin was such an encouragement to me that day and I really appreciate his prayers and advice. He is a great facilitator and I am glad to have him in my life. He was definitely edifying his brother in Christ that day, and praise God for it!
John 1 and 17
Today was a sad day... no, not really. But seriously it was a little upsetting just to know that today was our last official in class meeting. We have had a lot of fun within our group and have enjoyed getting to know each other.
Today we began to put a powerpoint together to use for our presentation. We also discussed other options that we can incoorporate into our presentation. So far, on our powerpoint, we have the background info. on each chapter and some definitions of important words used in the chapters. We plan on meeting again on our own, outside of class to finish the powerpoint and putting a presentation together. This will take some sacrifice of time in order for all of us to get together. Good thing we like each other!!! (although you wouldn't also guess it, due to the way we joke ("___ looks like puke")) but... it's all in good fun!
Our group time basically consisted of discussing ideas for how we want to present our information of Ephesians 4. We have some pretty good ideas, but I'm not going to share them publically:)We also discussed some of the important points that we want to make sure our audience picks up by the end of our presentation. According to Ephesians 4:16, it is vitally important for each member to do their part for the unity of the body.
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