Welcome to Sunday Fuel! This series of questions is designed to assist your personal reflection and fellowship with others about the sermon from this past Sunday.
- When it comes to feeling okay or good about yourself, where do you look to find your justification, your “stamp of approval”? (If you have trouble identifying this, consider some of the examples that Pastor Kim mentioned in the sermon, like body image or appearance, success, social media, romantic relationships, or even the ordinary event of someone cancelling an appointment with you.)
- Can you put into words what kind of justification you are looking to these things for? (e.g. worth, acceptance, affirmation, identity)
- Not only are we not justified by works (Gal. 2:16), there is no one but God who is qualified to justify us. Yet when we set our minds (meditate) on these things, we are giving these things (some of them good) a weight that we should find only in God alone. In the above situations, what are you meditating on instead of the gospel? What ripple effects does this have in your faith and trust in God? Confess these things to the Lord.
- Take steps to turn away from your temptation to see others as a god by meditating on Galatians 2:20:
- How can you guard yourself against this misdirected worship? In what company, situations, or times of the day do you find this a temptation? With Pastor Kim’s personal examples as a suggestion, what can you rehearse in advance to prepare yourself?
- How can meditating on the truth that you are a beloved child of the Father through your faith in Jesus help you in these circumstances?
- Consider this quote from Dane Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly: “Jesus does not love like us. We love until we are betrayed. Jesus continued to the cross despite betrayal. We love until we are forsaken. Jesus loved through forsakenness. We love up to a limit. Jesus loves to the end.” How can remembering the love of God help your soul rest from the fear of man?
- How might the life you now live in the flesh look different as you meditate on the better love of Christ who gave himself for you? How might this change how you live, interpret, and/or respond to others today?
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