Faith and Life Studies

*REALITY CHECK SERIES - Mark Ashton (Willow Creek)

                *Winning at Life…Jesus’ secrets at winning at life revealed.

                *Sudden Impact…Powerful encounters with the real Jesus.

                *Jesus’ Greatest Moments…The week that changed everything.

                *Future Shock…Jesus and the end of the world.

*NOOMA DVD SERIES - Rob Bell  (Christianbook)

This Series is DVD driven, 10 to 14 minutes each.

Today’s generation demands a new format for getting Christian perspectives.  NOOMA  is the new format.  It’s short films with communicators that really speak to us.  Concise and to the point, each session tackles topics like forgiveness, discipleship, and unconditional love – making Biblical truths vivid and relevant for today.

A great way to spark meaningful discussion in your small group. The set contains 15 episodes.

         *#1 RAIN

How can God 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. 

#2 FLAME

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.  God created love, and wired us in a certain way to experience all that love was really meant to be.

*#3 TREES

We want to know why we are here.  We don’t want to just sit back and wait for something to happen or someday to come.  We want to know if the choices we make now will shape our lives for eternity.  We want our lives to have meaning today, and our lives today to have meaning forever.

*#4  SUNDAY

What are we doing?  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.

#5 NOISE

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 listening.

*#6 KICKBALL

We always think we know what’s missing from our lives in order to make us happy, don’t we?  That car?  That job?  Losing 15 lbs.?  How often do we want something only to find that it wasn’t that great after all?  Do we trust God?  Do we trust that He 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.

#7 LUGGAGE

We all have wounds that we carry around these things that people have done to us for weeks, months, and even years.  It isn’t easy to forgive, and after a while these hurts can get really heavy.  It seems that the only way to feel better is to somehow get 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 all about you. 

*#8 DUST

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.  It’s easy for us to get down on ourselves, to feel “not good enough” or like we don’t have what it takes.  Maybe if we had more insight into the culture that Jesus grew up in and some of the radical things that He did, we’’d understand the faith that God has in all of us.

#9 BULLHORN

Jesus said 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 easy to love everyone around us, is it?  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.

#10 LUMP

A lot of us have done things in our lives that we’re ashamed of.  But no matter how big our junk is, no matter how much what we’ve done has impacted the way other people feel about us or how we feel about ourselves, it hasn’t changed how God feels about us.  He loves us, He always has, and He always will, and there’s nothing we can do to change that.

#*11 RHYTHM

Is how we live connected to something that has been in place since the beginning of time?  Maybe Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion, but to show us how to live in tune with the life God has always planned for us.

#12 MATTHEW

Losing someone we love can be the most difficult thing to go through in life.  All the explanations and comforting words in the world don’t really help and everything can seem hopeless.  What might help us is to know that, in facing this kind of loss, Jesus wept.

*#13 RICH

It’s easy for us to fall into a mindset of viewing “our” world as “the” world.  But how does what we have compare to what most people in the world have?  Maybe what we have is more than enough.  Maybe God has  blessed us with everything we have so we can bless and give to others.

#14 BREATHE

How many of us ever think about our breathing?  In the Bible, the word for “breath” is the same as the word for “spirit.”  We’ve all been created in the image of God, but our lives are incredibly vulnerable and fragile.  Maybe if we had more insight into the meaning of breathing, we would better understand how God created us as human beings.

#15 YOU

Some of the central claims of the Christian faith are the source of many discussions and heated debates.   But are we always debating the right things?  Maybe some of our discussions would change significantly if we had more insight into the actual circumstances that surrounded the first people of the Christian movement and what they did in the context of the world they lived in.   Maybe we don’t put enough emphasis on the things that truly should matter in our lives.

*EXPERIENCING GOD - Henry Blackaby and Claude King (Lifeway)

Knowing and doing the will of God.

*CHRIST THE HEALER - F.F. Bosworth ($10.99 Revell)

Reveals the truth about healing.

*THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT - Stuart Briscoe

Tells how to cultivate the Fruits of the Spirit in your life.

*SURRENDERING YOUR LIFE FOR GOD’S PLEASURE - Brett Eastman  (North Point Resources)

6 sessions

Learn to worship Christ throughout your daily life.

*GROWING TO BE LIKE CHRIST - Brett Eastman (North Point Resources)

6 sessions

This study will equip you in some of the habits of spiritual growth, including: relying on the Holy Spirit, cultivating time in the Bible and prayer.