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Rob Bell Study of Faith and the Christian Life

As we go through the video series with Rod Bell, I would like you to keep a log of your thoughts about certain questions that come up within each of the episodes that we watch. As we continue on in the course I am going to get you so start developing your ideas of what the word "Faith" means to you in your walk with God.

__** Episode 9: Bullhorn **__

Can we really love God without loving others?
God loves everyone, so a Christian should, too. In fact, Jesus said that the most important thing in life is to love God with everything we've got and love others the same way. But it's not always easy to love everyone around us, is it? Sometimes we strongly disagree with other people's political views, religious beliefs, behaviors, or something else, and it makes it hard to love them when we feel like we're right and they're very wrong. But Jesus doesn't separate loving God and loving others. So maybe the best way for us to show our love for God is actually by loving other people no matter how hard it sometimes is. Maybe it's the only way.

1. How do you feel about people like bullhorn guy? 2. Are people like bullhorn guy hurting the general perception of Christianity? 3. What things other than bullhorn guy negatively taint the perception of the Christian faith? 4. What draws you to the message of Jesus? 5. What's the most important thing in your life? How does that line up with what Jesus said? 6. What does it mean to love someone with an agenda? 7. Is trying to convert someone to your beliefs and agenda? 8. Does God love people with different beliefs than you? As much as he loves you? How do you feel bout people with different beliefs than you? 9. Do you think it is possible to scare people into loving God? 10. What are some general negative perceptions of Christians out there? 11. Are the negative perceptions of Christianity caused by what we believe or how we're living? 12. Are you doing anything to change the negative perceptions?

__** Episode 8: Dust **__


 * What does God see in us?**

Believing in God is important, but what about God believing in us? Believing that we can actually be the kind of people we were meant to be. People of love, compassion, peace, forgiveness, and hope. People who try to do the right thing all of the time. Who act on the endless opportunities around us every day for good, beauty, and truth. It's easy for us to sometimes get down on ourselves. To feel "not good enough" or feel like we don't have what it takes. But maybe if we had more insight into the culture that Jesus grew up in and some of the radical things he did, we'd understand the faith that God has in all of us.


 * Please respond to 5 of the 10 questions **

1. Why are the "small and unnoticed things" such a big deal? 2. Have you ever thought of Jesus as your rabbi? 3. Would you consider yourself a disciple? 4. Have you ever thought about your faith as being an interpretation? 5. Is it ok to have different interpretations of the scriptures? 6. What message was Jesus sending by not choosing the best of the best? 7. What impact are the Christians of today having on the course of human history? 8. How big of a role do your insecurities play in your life? Do they ever affect your life? 9. Do you believe that God believes in you? 10. What does it mean to be like Jesus? Can you do it?



__** Episode 7: Luggage **__


 * Why is it sometimes so hard to forgive?**

Maybe a friend turned their back on you. Maybe someone you loved betrayed you. We all have wounds and we end up carrying around these things that people have done to us for weeks, months, and sometimes even years. It isn't always easy to forgive these people and after a while these hurts can get really heavy. So the only way to feel better seems to be somehow getting back at the people that hurt us, to get revenge. But does revenge ever truly satisfy? Maybe forgiving isn't something you do for someone else to let them off the hook. Maybe forgiveness is about you. God didn't create you to carry these wounds around. God created you to be free.


 * Please respond to 7 of the 12 questions**:

1. What kinds of wounds do you have? 2. How have your wounds shaped who you are today? 3. Have you ever really gotten revenge? If so, how did you make you feel afterwards? 4. If we take revenge when we get hurt, do you think it's like saying to God, "I think I can handle this better than you?" 5. If God's right there when people get hurt, why do you think he doesn't step in to stop it from happening? 6. Do you trust that God is ultimately going to take care of everything? 7. Why is God's forgiveness of us so crucial to our forgiveness of others? 8. Can we forgive somebody without be able to be around them? Do you have people like that in your life? 9. Do you believe forgiveness is really more about the one forgiving than the one being forgiven 10. Does that view on forgiveness make it easier to forgive? 11. Are there people you need to forgive? 12. If someone you need to forgive died before you made amends, what kinds of regrets would you have?



__** Episode 6: Kickball **__


 * If God really cares about us, why don't we have what we want?**

We always think we know what's missing from our lives in order to really make us happy, don't we? If only I had that car, or that job, or if only I could lose those 15 pounds, then I'd be happy. Really? How often do we want something only to find out that it wasn't that great after all? Sometimes we ask God for things and if he doesn't deliver right away, we start questioning whether God really understands or even cares. Do we really trust God? Do we trust that God is good and sees a bigger picture than we ever could? It's easy to want what's right in front of us, but maybe God knows what's better for us, and sometimes we just can't see it.


 * Please respond to 6 of the following 10 questions**:

1. What makes us happy? 2. Do you fell like you often don't get the things you really want? 3. Do you feel like God's denying you these things or maybe like he's not even listening to you? 4. Have you ever been mad at God for not giving you what you'd asked for? 5. Is it okay to question God? 6. Have you ever felt like God did come through for you? If so, how? 7. If you got everything you asked for in life, do you think you'd be happy? 8. Do you see your life as part of a bigger picture, a larger story? 9. Have you ever felt unsure about an important decision in your life and trusted God to lead you in the right direction? How did that turn out? 10. Do you believe God is good? Always?



__** Episode 5: Noise **__


 * Why are we so afraid of silence?**

Why is silence so hard to deal with? Why is it so much easier for us to live our lives with a lot of things going on all the time than to just be in silence? We're constantly surrounded with "voices" that are influencing us on how to think, feel, and behave. Movies, music, TV, Internet, cell phones, and a never-ending barrage of advertising. There's always something going on. Always noise in our lives. But maybe there's a connection between the amount of noise in our lives and our inability to hear God. If God sometimes feels distant to us, maybe it's not because he's not talking to us, but simply because we aren't really listening.


 * Please respond to 5 of the following guiding questions**:

"I was reading about his guy named Bernie Drause, who records nature sounds for film and television. He was saying that, in 1968, in order to get one hour of natural sound, like no airplanes, no cars, that it would take him about 15 hours of recording time, and he was saying that today, to get that same one hour on undisturbed sound, it takes him 2000 hours of recording time."

1. (quote from above) What does the Bernie Drause quote say about how our world has changed? What kinds of noises do we have in our lives? 2. Why is silence so hard to deal with? 3. Do you ever surround yourself with noise intentionally? If so, why do you think we do this? 4. Does all the noise in our lives make it hard to hear God? 5. When was the last time you spent some time in silence? 6. Do you sometimes avoid silence because you're afraid of what God might actually have to say to you? 7. Are you ever alone or do you always need somebody around you? 8. What are some things in yourdaily life you could change to eliminate some of the noises?



__** Episode 4: Sunday **__


 * Do we get so wrapped up in religion that we miss out on what's important to God?**

Why do we do the things we do? Why do we go to church or give money away? Because we're supposed to or because we think God needs it? Do we honestly put on our best clothes for an hour once a week, stand and sit at all the right times, and sing all the appropriate songs for God's sake, or because it'll make us look better to the world around us? We're tired of all the empty rituals and routines. And so is God. God hates it when we call ourselves Christians but ignore all the things he really cares about. He hates it when we go through hollow religious routines out of some feeling of duty or obligation. God doesn't want the meaningless rituals. God wants our hearts.

__**Please respond to 5 of the 9 questions in your journals or through your group discussion:**__ 1. Have you ever attended a church service out of a sense of duty or because you think you're supposed to? 2. When it comes to church, what do you think God has in mind? 3. How much tie do you spend worrying about what other people think of you? 4. Is it possible to be interested in Christian faith but turned off by Christianity? 5. Does God need us to attend a church service once or twice a week? why or why not? 6. How do we know that God has our hearts, and that we're not just going through the motions?

"God hates it, he can't stand it, when we put on a religious show and then we ignore the poor and the broken and the marginalized and the oppressed."

7. Have you been part of the show? 8. What issues in our world today do you think God really cares about? What are you doing about them? 9. What does it mean for our hearts to start beating more and more like God's? How could this change the way the world sees Christianity?



__** Episode 3: Trees **__

Do our lives even matter?
We want to know why we are here. If our lives really matter. How our religion is relevant to this life. Today. We want to understand what significance this minute, hour, week, month, and year has to our lives. To our world. We need a God who cares about this life, in this world, right now. We want to understand why everything we think, everything we say, and everything we do matters. We don't want to just sit back and wait for something to happen or someday to come. We want to know if all the choices we make now will shape our world and lives for eternity. Because we want our lives to have meaning today, and our lives today to have meaning forever.

2. What does it mean to live how God created you to live? If we believe God's way of life is the best way to live, why is it so hard for us to do it? 3. Do you believe that the Bible's story of creation is not just something that happened, but actually something that's still happening? 4. Are we faced with the same choices as Adam and Eve? 5. How can we help God in taking care of the world? Do you believe you are helping out? 6. Do you think what we do today matters for eternity? 7. Are the choices you're making now shaping you into the kind of person you'll be forever? 8. Does your faith help you understand the world we live in? Does it make your life easier or more difficult on a day-to-day basis? 9.. What are some places in the world where you see God? Are you leaving some of your own fingerprints on the world? What are they? 10. What does it mean to be partnering with God in making this world the kind of place he intended it to be? Are you partnering with God? All the time? Regularly? or on a needs by needs basis?
 * Please respond to 5 of the 10 questions. Some of these are VERY LOADED questions! Discussion can sometimes be better than writing it down! #justsaying**
 * 1.** How do you feel about the World? Do you think the world is getting better or worse?



__** Episode 2: Flame **__

Could love be the most misunderstood and misused word in our vocabulary?
I love those shoes. Really? The same way I love my wife? What's up with the word "love"? It doesn't have much meaning when we use it so loosely. Maybe we don't really get it. Maybe we don't understand what real love is. What it involves to really love somebody. What it means to give yourself to someone else. We mistake things like friendship, commitment, or lust for love, but God wired us a certain way to experience all that love was really meant to be. Not to hold us back or to make us miss out on the best that life has to offer. God created love, and wants us to feel it all in the way it's meant to be felt.

//3 Different word for "Love' in the Hebrew language//:
 * **Raya** - Friend or Companion or someone we hang out with
 * **Ahava** - Love of the will. This is the decision to join your life to the life of another. This is an emotion that leads to a commitment
 * **Dod -** 'carouse' 'rock' 'fondle' The physical, sexual element to a relationship

1. Why is love so complex? Isn't it just a feeling? 2. Do we generally, in today's world, treat the concept of love the same way as the people in Song of Songs? As this sacred, beautiful, and mysterious thing? 3. Do you think the word "love" loses its meaning when we use it for so many things? Does it affect our understanding of what real love is? 4. How many relationships have you seen where all the flames are burning as one? 5. Do you think it's possible to be completely satisfied without having all three flames burning? 6. What does it mean to you to give all of yourself to another person? Are you giving everything you've got?
 * Please respond to 4 of the 6 questions. Remember this is for you to think about in your personal way:**




 * __ Episode 1: Rain __**

**Where's God when life isn't going like we want it to?**

Things don't always work out the way we want them to, or the way we think they will. Sometimes we don't even see it coming. We get hit with some form of pain out of nowhere leaving us feeling desperate and helpless. That's the way life is. Still, it makes us wonder how God can let these things happen to us. How God can just stand by and watch us suffer. Where is God when it really hurts? Maybe God is actually closer to us than we think. Maybe it's when we're in these situations, where everything seems to be falling apart, that God gets an opportunity to remind us of how much he really loves us.

1. If you could freeze a moment from your life, what moment would that be? 2. What are some of the storms that you face in your life? 3. Do you think that God intentionally puts us through trials? 4. Have you ever felt like God failed to come through for you? Looking back, do you still feel the same? 5. Do you ever act like everything is okay even when it isn't? Why do you do this? 6. Do you have anyone in your life who you would do anything for? Why do you feel this way towards them? Is that they way that God is? 7. When you're going through really hard times and everything seems hopeless, do you still trust that God knows the way and that you're going to make it? explain that.
 * Please respond to 4 of the 7 questions as we begin to look at our own personal faith: **