Message: Facing the Unknown
Speaker: Greg Holder
James 4:13-15 (NIV)
Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”
Questions:
1. What is the unknown like for you? How do you respond to it?
2. James encourages us to face the future by saying, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that." How do you do with that? We were reminded not to make this a superstitious phrase. So how do we really live it out?
3. Faith and denial are distinctly different, and Psalm 121 shows us how to "lift up our eyes to the hills," and trust God. How does this relate to how you process things today? Consider the Eugene Peterson quote below. What do you make of it?
4. We considered "the topography of tears." And we saw in Psalm 56:8 that God has kept track of all of our sorrow and collected our tears. What does that mean to you?
5. Many of us feel powerless to help in this crisis, but Greg shared with us that, "Intercessory prayer catapults us onto the battlefield." Have you joined us in praying for healthcare professionals? If you text to the number 48099 with the message, "HEALTHCARE," you will receive updates and reminders to pray.
"If we forget that the newspapers are footnotes to Scripture and not the other way around, we will finally be afraid to get out of bed in the morning...We get our interpretation of politics and economics and morals from journalists when we should be getting only information; the meaning of the world is most accurately given to us by God's Word." -Eugene Peterson
Scripture
Psalm 46:1-2
John 16:33
Zephaniah 3:17
Isaiah 40:31
Philippians 4:6-7
Nahum 1:7
Psalm 18:2