On Wednesday night we held our weekly Bible Study and talked about Rick Warren's SHAPE concept from the Purpose Driven Life. He suggested that we were shaped for serving God in that we have been given one or more spiritual gifts, a heart or passion fro doing certain things, several natural abilities that can be channeled to use for God, and numerous experiences that can be used as well to minister to others.
The discussion got lively when we began to talk about the Calvinistic idea of predestination. Warren tends to suggest that everything in life is pre-ordained. He talks about our life experiences as though god sent them to us. Some in our group really didn't buy into that. It makes God look awfully mean. Who would want to have cancer or go through a tragedy to learn something you can pass on to someone else? Why would a loving God do that?
I suggested that we need to filter some of these thoughts and check them out as we were doing. Warren is very careful to say "God allows" things to happen and not "God sends this difficulty." Although I believe that Warren does tend to believe some stuff is God sent, he really wants to simply make the point that God can and often does turn these tragic events around to bring hope and encouragement into others lives.
Anyway, you never know what is going to come up when you stop in for a Bible study. We may not have all the answers but we just keep going back to God's Word to see if we can learn something each week.
We have two more sessions this time around. We meet tonight, Sunday, November 2 at 6:00 p.m. and on Wednesday November 5 at 7:00 p.m. to close out the six week study. The good news is that we are going to run it again on Monday nights starting November 17th at 7:00 p.m. Come and join us. I still have copies of the book available for those who want to read along.
Cal
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment