Before the Session
Facilitator: In advance of the session
- Have the Bible Background Video ready to view.
- Review today’s scripture text 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 (From the Media Session Page)
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 (From the Current Session Page)
Read Psalm 147:12-20, then watch the Bible Background Video.
Ask questions like these:
- What creative activity do you hear in this psalm?
- Nikki says that God “redeems us creatively.” What do you think that means?
- When you think about the ways we pray for God to work in our world, are these the things we expect to happen?
- In what ways do we look for God to strengthen, grant peace, send, give, hurl, or declare?
- In what ways does God’s redemption work like the people who make new things out of the material that others have discarded?
Closure (from the Youth Session page)
Hold a brainstorm session with the group, looking at some ways that God might be working in your community and how to get involved in them. Try to think outside the box and away from the obvious ways God is working that everyone already knows about by asking questions like:
- What kinds of things in this community do you think may make God sad and why?
- What is going on that bothers you, but no one else seems to want to do anything about it?
- What ministries or other helping activities are going on, but struggling because no one seems to be involved?
- What kinds of things might need doing, but are too scary or repulsive for anyone to want to get involved with them?
- Who do you think are the most forgotten people in our area and why?
Have a discussion with your group about ways your group can join in where God is already at work, then work to make a plan to serve your community in this way.
Close this session in prayer.