This blog records what we our studying in our mid-week "gathering" meetings. For more information on our group please visit our website at www.thegatheringwitney.org or you could follow our journey at www.conversationsaboutchurch.blogspot.com .
The document with an outline of the talk and the participant sheets can be downloaded below:
Introductory activity
I handed out "puzzle picture" sheets and people had to guess the purpose of each of the five objects.
How do we find out the purpose of items? Well we ask the maker or read his/her instructions.
It's the same with us:
If we want to find out who we are and what our function is then we need to ask the maker.
For example, our youngest child (Levi) just used to keep getting out of bed at nightime and stand on the landing. We tried everything - telling him off, rewards, putting a stairgate across the door and nothing worked. We got to a point of desperation after a week or two of this and we called out to God for help and this thought came in my head; "leave the door slightly ajar". So I did - and he stayed in bed. Why did it work? Because our Father knows us intimately and knows how we are made.
Who am I?
Next I handed out the sheets with ten "I am _____________" and asked the housegroup to fill them in with a different answer for each one.We chatted through the answers and looked at how we defined ourselves, was it by what we do or what we've achieved or what others have said about us?
This is critical because what we do follows from who we are and what we believe.
For example, I had defined myself by what I did: my job. So when I chopped off my thumb with a circular saw and could do nothing except lie in bed I was faced with the question: who am I? If I can never work again what's the point of my life? I confess there was one day I was so low I wanted to go back to the circular saw and finish myself off. Praise God I pushed into Him instead. I lay there listening to worship from Bethel Church, Redding and discovered that I was a child of God and so I had infinite value and once I understood that everything else flowed from it.
When we become a Christian we have a new self which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator (Col 3:10-11).
How we formerly identified ourselves no longer matters: Our identity lies in the fact that we are children of God and are in Christ.
We are no longer a product of the past but a product of the cross.
However, we have learned to live life independent of God and hence we need to no longer conform to the pattern of the world but be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom 12:2).
We need to be aware that as we begin this journey, Satan will seek to oppose us as knowing who we are in Christ will affect everything.
We used the following videos as a time of soaking in God's presence and listening to what He thinks of us:
Father's Love Letter Narration from Barry Adams on Vimeo.
Prophetic words given during the evening:
Someone saw a picture of Buckingham Palace with a roped-off area and talked about how you see so much more once you're on the other side of the roped off-area. God has given us access-all-areas and is inviting us to go to the other side of the roped-off area. That once we understand who we are we will see so much more.
Another person saw a picture of a vase that had smashed and was being joined back together piece by piece by God until it was made perfect even better than before. Another person added to this that a traditional method was to use gold to attach the pieces - so a beautiful and costly pattern was made in the repaired vase - and how God will make something even more precious than the original vase.
