If I believe God has changed my heart, but I am still saying words I shouldn’t, what can I do about it?
Even more difficult: how can I parent my kids to change their words, when I know myself (from scripture and my experience) ...it’s ultimately impossible?
This is the central focus of this Family Discipleship Kit. (And this is the purpose of discipleship in general!) It turns out that the “work” of becoming more like Jesus is less about controlling behaviors, and more about controlling our thoughts.
We set our minds on things above, and the words and actions follow. We become transformed when we renew our minds with the truth. We make ourselves new through changing our attitude.
Our memory verse for this Family Discipleship Kit is 2 Corinthians 10:3-5: “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
The weapons we fight our sinful thoughts with are powerful weapons. They have the power to demolish strongholds – to take strong, insidious, wicked lies that our minds believe and destroy them, so that every thought we have can be made obedient to Jesus.
Family Discipleship Kit will guide your family through utilizing these weapons of:
My aim in writing this Family Discipleship Kit is to provide tools for families to help disciple each other as they seek to identify sin in their lives, and change their thoughts so that fruits of the spirit can replace the fruits of the flesh. May God give us the grace to take our thoughts and make them obedient to him!
(This file is a 44-page PDF document.)
If you would like a full-color, double-sided print out of this study mailed to you, please fill out the form below:
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During this unique season of social-distancing and staying at home, there are, ironically, a lot of temptations to be distracted! We can be so obessed with the latest news that we find ourselves losing attention for the most important things.
Yes, we may have 21 days of staying at home in our future - but we also have 20 days until Easter! Let's take advantage of this mandated "rest" and focus our attention on Jesus, as we prepare our hearts for Resurrection Sunday.
To that end, we have organized two Bible reading plans that guide readers through the gospel of John.
There are two versions: For adults, we challenge you to read one chapter of John each day for the next 21 days (John has 21 chapters). For children and families, we have pulled out some shorter reading passages that cover the main events of the book.
Both reading plans will allow you to finish the book of John in the next 3 weeks.
God does not waste our time. He did not orchestrate this season of our lives for nothing. All things work together for His glory and our good. We challenge you to "not waste your quarantine." Use this time to focus on Jesus!
Fall 2019's Family Discipleship Kit was based around Pastor Steve’s Sermon Series, “Receive Grace, Extend Grace”. Pastor Steve preached eight sermons over twelve weeks that looked at ways that we receive gifts from God like Grace, Mercy, Truth, and Freedom – and how we can extend those gifts out to others.
Our congregation’s own Julie Buter has written an accompanying Bible Study for adults along these themes and our Family Discipleship Kit looks at these concepts from the perspective of a family with children. The goal of both studies is to prepare the hearts and minds of our congregation for the preaching of the Word – to wrestle personally with the concepts before we hear teaching on it.
This Family Discipleship Kit challenges families specifically to ask, “How can we extend these gifts to the family members with which we share a home?” and “How can a family work together to extend these gifts to others in our congregation, or even outside the church?”
Summer 2019’s Family Discipleship Kit guides families through a brief survey of the life of the apostle Peter. Peter was one of Jesus’s most famous disciples and was witness to many of the key events in Jesus’s ministry. In studying Peter, we see a lot of weaknesses we can identify with: speaking out of turn, misunderstanding Jesus’s teaching, failing to trust, and giving in to fear and doubts.
And yet towards the end of Peter’s life, we see him as a powerful preacher and bold witness of the gospel. How does this transformation happen? What brings forth this dramatic change in Peter’s life? Can it happen to us?
These are the questions we challenge you, as a family, to tackle through this discipleship kit.
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