Before the Session
Facilitator: In advance of the session
- Review today’s scripture text and the session activities to help better facilitate the discussion.
- Have the Bible Background Video ready to view.
- Listen to the FaithElement podcast for this session
- Use the social media prompts on this session’s webpage to help youth begin engaging the session them ahead of their gathering.
- Make available materials to use in a brainstorming session (paper, pencils, whiteboard, etc.)
Intro
Play the selective attention test video and ask:
- How much do you think you are really aware of what is going on in the world around you and why?
- What is the most embarrassing thing that has escaped your attention lately?
- When have you tried to get someone else to notice something, only to have them miss it completely?
- What do you suspect to be the most important things going on these days that you’re just not able to pick up on and why?
Context
Play the “Brain Games” video and ask:
- Be honest: how many of the changes that were made in this video did you notice before they revealed them?
- Why is is so easy for people to distract us and make us think we’re seeing what they want us to think we see?
- What are some things that you think others are trying to make you see, whether they are real or not?
- In what ways can you see God at work in the world?
- How can you notice what God is doing, when there is so much going on all the time?
Content
Read Psalm 147:12-20, then watch the Bible Background Video.
Ask your group:
- What characteristics of God are displayed in this psalm?
- Why might people think that God has already created everything and there is no need to create more?
- In what ways do these verses show that God is always creating?
- Why do you think that the video says that God’s creative work and God’s redemptive work are one and the same?
- How have you personally seen God’s creative work lead to redemption?
Closure
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.
Writer: Don Breeden