Wisdom from Paul on Walking with God Week 5: Interlude - Pause for Guided Reflection Link here if you would like to print to fill out! --- Before you begin This week we stop adding and start absorbing. For three weeks we have laid the first pillar, the gospel framework that grounds and guards our effort. Today you spend one hour letting it sink in. You need a Bible, a pen, paper, and a quiet place. Work alone, or alone first and then with your table. Write your answers down. Thinking a thought is not the same as putting it on paper where you have to look at it. You will not finish every question. That is fine. When one lands, stay there and let the rest go. Time Movement Text 5 min - Settle and remember 15 min - God's abundant blessing - Ephesians 1:3-14 15 min - Christ seated at God's right hand - Colossians 3:1-4 15 min - God's providential guarantee - Romans 8:28-29 10 min - Gather it up --- Settle and remember (5 minutes) Sit quietly for one full minute. Ask God to show you what is true about him and about you. Then, first without looking at your notes and then using them as needed, write down: 1. Our four pillars. Which one have we been building, and why does it come first? 2. The three themes inside that first pillar. 3. What have you learned in this class that you most hope you don't forget? Now return to the question we asked on day one: what kind of person do you think God wants you to become? Answer it in a sentence or two, as specifically as you can. Keep that sentence in front of you for the rest of the hour. --- Movement 1: God's abundant blessing (15 minutes) Read Ephesians 1:3-14 slowly, out loud if you can. In Greek it is one long sentence of praise. Let it run over you before you analyze it. Remember. All of God has been working through all of time to save all of you. You are a constant recipient of abundant divine goodness. Receive. Choose one or two. 1. List the blessings Paul names in this passage. Put a mark by the one you find hardest to believe is true of you. Why that one? 2. What in your past or present leads you to doubt or question God's goodness to you? Name it plainly. God is not threatened by your honesty. 3. Move from "I agree" to "I will re-see myself in this light." Write five sentences that begin "I am..." using only what this passage says. Read them back out loud. Go deeper: anger and the victim story. We said in class that knowing ourselves as people who constantly receive God's goodness undercuts things like anger or a victim mentality. Test that claim on your own life. 4. Where are you angry right now, or quietly resentful? Toward whom, and about what? 5. Beneath most anger is a sense of being owed. What do you believe you were owed and did not get? 6. Is there a story you tell about your life in which you are mainly the person things were done to? Who hears that story most often? 7. Set that story next to Ephesians 1. What does the passage say you have been given that no person and no circumstance can take? How does the debt you are holding look beside it? 8. How might this re-narrate your past? How might it reframe one situation you are in this week? A word of care. Some of you have been truly wronged, and nothing here asks you to pretend otherwise. Being sinned against is real. The question is narrower: is the wrong done to you the truest and largest thing about you, or is Ephesians 1? Respond. Paul learned to pray from the Psalms. Turn your list from question 1 into a prayer of thanks, one line per blessing, or pray Psalm 145. --- Movement 2: Christ seated at God's right hand (15 minutes) Read Colossians 3:1-4 twice. The second time, stop on every "with Christ" and every "above." Remember. Mindset precedes behavioral change. Paul's first practical instruction is to fix our attention on Christ where he now is: seated. Seated because his work is finished, and seated on the throne because he rules. Receive: the finished work. "I want to be better" is a good but dangerous moment. It is dangerous because we can turn the wanting into a way of earning or doing on our own. 1. In your past, in what ways have you tried to prove your worth or earn your place before God? 2. Everyone seeks to be justified, to hear the verdict "you are in the right, you are enough." Where do you go looking for that verdict? Circle any that fit, and add your own: being right, being needed, being productive, being a good parent, being more disciplined than others, being liked, being seen as spiritual. 3. Think of the last time you got defensive, or replayed an argument in your head, or needed someone to know you were not at fault. What verdict were you fighting for? From whom? 4. What happens in you when that court rules against you: when you fail, are criticized, or are overlooked? 5. Paul says your life is hidden with Christ in God. The verdict is already in, and it was not won by you. If you believed that on Monday morning, what would you stop doing? What would you be free to do? Receive: the throne. Every action makes an argument about what matters most. 6. Look at last week's calendar, spending, and screen time as evidence. If a stranger had only that evidence, who or what would they say sits atop your hierarchy of values? 7. In what ways does your actual life not align with Christ's lordship? Name one area, not ten. Respond. 8. How close to mind do you want to keep Christ seated at God's right hand? Why? 9. How close to mind will you keep him there? How, exactly? Pick one concrete trigger for this week: a time of day, a doorway, a phone alarm, a verse on the dashboard. --- Movement 3: God's providential guarantee (15 minutes) Read Romans 8:28-29. Do not stop at verse 28. Verse 29 tells you what "good" means. Remember. Only God rules the world. His sovereignty does not mean that he scripts every event or that "everything happens for a reason." It means his ultimate purposes will be accomplished no matter what, and so anything can be redeemed. The good he guarantees is specific: that we be conformed to the image of his Son. Receive. 1. Where did God simply not enter your thinking this week (Psalm 10:4)? A decision, a worry, a conflict you handled as if he were not in the room? 2. Name the hardest thing in your life right now. Write it down in one line. 3. Be honest about the "good" you have been asking God for in it. Is it the good of verse 29, or a different one: relief, vindication, things going back to how they were? 4. Suppose God never explains this hard thing but does use it to make you more like Jesus. What specifically might He be forming in you through it: patience, humility, compassion, courage? 5. Is there something in your past you have filed as wasted or beyond repair? What would it mean to believe that even that can be redeemed? 6. Which is harder for you to trust in practice: God's power, his love, or his wisdom? What does that tell you? Go deeper: the long view. Read 2 Corinthians 4:16-18. 7. Paul calls his troubles light and momentary. He was not minimizing them (see 2 Corinthians 11:23-28). What was he comparing them to? 8. What is one worry you are carrying that shrinks when you set it against eternity? What is one thing you are neglecting that grows? Respond. Take the line you wrote for question 2 and pray it back to God in this form: "Father, I do not know why. I ask you to use it to make me like your Son." --- Gather it up (10 minutes) Read back over what you wrote. Look for the place where you felt the most resistance or the most relief. That is probably where God is at work. 1. Of the three truths, which do you most need right now: that you are abundantly blessed, that Christ is seated, or that God will use everything to make you like his Son? Why that one? 2. Go back to the sentence you wrote at the start about who God wants you to become. How badly do you want that change? How hard are you intentionally working toward it? 3. Now the framework's question: are you working toward it from blessing, a settled verdict, and a guaranteed outcome, or working for them? 4. Finish this sentence: "Because God has ___, this week I will ___." 5. Who will you tell? Name one person and tell them before next Sunday. If you are with your table, share your answer to question 1 or 4, then pray for the person on your left. Bring with you on October 18: your one sentence from question 4. We will start there before turning to our second pillar, the hopeful vision. --- Closing prayer Father, you have blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing. Christ is seated at your right hand, his work finished and his rule secure. You are at work in all things to make us like him. Teach us to live from what you have done. Amen.
