Spiritual Growth

Theme: Spiritual growth (How serious are you about your faith?? religion?? God??)

Part I
Sharing

• How do you rate the quality of your life?? (Scale of 1 - 10. 1 being very poor and 10 being very good)
• How do you rate the quality of your life if you compare it with your peers'??
• How do you rate the quality of your life if you compare it according to the standard/norm of the world??

Part II
Sharing

• Do you think God will give you the same grade as you've just given yourself??
• To rate the quality of your life, do you think God will use the same way/standard as you just did??

Discussion

• Obviously, God will not rate the quality our lives by looking at our house, job, salary, bank account, car, etc. It's because everything we have are given by Him. (Insert a bible verse here)
• Obviously, God will not rate the quality our lives by counting how many good deeds we've done. (Insert a bible verse here)
• So, what kind of standards will God use to rate us. Am I still a "okay" person in our God's eyes??
• One of the biggest road blocks which stops us from growing (spiritual growth) is that we think that "I'm a okay person". For example, Some people may say "I respect my parents; I go to church regularly; I help the brothers and sisters, serve our God, etc... I think I'm Okay".
• In fact, we're far below spiritual-okay. Three ways to help us to realize we're indeed spiritual-poor.

1) Examine your relationship with brothers and sisters
Sharing

• Have you ever tried to keep yourself away from some brothers and sisters you don't like??
• Have you ever been angry with any brother and sister??
• Have you ever made any effort to chat with some brothers and sisters whom you think are "boring"??
• God is our source of love. If we're spiritual-rich, we should be full of God's love, and our relationship with brothers and sisters should be very good.

2) Examine your relationship with God
Sharing

• When you're making some decisions, how often you're very confident that they're the right (Godly) decisions??
• Do you often feel that you're very close to God?? If yes, please share with the group how you keep your good relationship with God.
• If we're spiritual-rich, we should have very intimate relationship with God.

3) Examine how often you confess
Sharing

• How often do you confess?? (How many sins did you confess in the last week??)
• "A spiritual-rich person shouldn't have many sins to confess"... True or false?? Why??
• "Only those spiritual-poor persons have a lot of sins to confess"... True or false?? Why??
• If we're spiritual-rich, we should be very sensitive to our sins and we should never have zero sin to confess.

Conclusion (now hopefully every group member realizes that he/she is spiritual poor)

• Now we all know we're far below spiritual-okay. It will be a BIG PROBLEM if we do nothing about it.
• Image Jesus will come again like a thief. At that time, He will rate the quality of our lives.
• We need to push ourselves to grow unless we dare say to our God "那美好的仗我已經打過了；當跑的路我已經跑盡了；所信的道我已經守住了。" 提後4:7