Before the Session
- Have the Bible Background Video ready to view.
- Read through all of Psalm 147 and the session activities to help better facilitate the discussion.
- Encourage your group to listen to the Faithelement podcast ahead of the next session (Share the link via email or social media).
Context
Play the YouTube 2015 in Review Video and ask:
- With the understanding that this is YouTube’s look at the last year, which involves a lot of popular culture that might be unfamiliar, what, if anything, in this video stood out to you and why?
- What things do you remember most from last year and why?
- What kinds of things make you feel like your life is passing by you like a blur?”
- How is it possible to focus on specific events when life is so complicated these days?
- What steps can we take to have proper focus this year?
- What are ways, based on how God has blessed us, we can remain with proper focus?”
Content
Read Psalm 147:12-20, then watch the Bible Background Video.
Ask questions like these:
- What do you typically think when you read or sing the words “Praise the Lord”?
- What does it really mean, in your view, to praise the Lord and why should we do it?
- How do you think the writer of this Psalm felt about it and why?
- Why do think the Psalm ends with images of “word”, “commands”, and “law” before proclaiming “Praise the Lord?”
- In what ways might we miss the point of God’s guidance in all the excitement/discouragement of our life?
Closure
Show the Mindy Kaling Superbowl Commercial and ask:
- When have you felt as if you were invisible, and how did you react to that?
- What people in your community tend to be the most “invisible” and why?
- What might God show us if we really looked at our neighborhood “invisible?”
- To what degree do you think that praying and praising the Lord feels the call to help the unfortunate or see the world more as God sees it and why?
- As we celebrate the “Epiphany” of God’s revealing Jesus to us, how might we help others have an epiphany by reveling those people and causes that they cannot or will not see?
Close in prayer…
Writer: Jon Self