Growing Together: Life Groups for Spiritual Maturity

``And I always relate Christianity and bible reading, I believe, to, as Paul does, to athletes. Athletes are highly trained people. They are disciplined. They they continuously doing the same thing day in, day out. There's nothing they change. They can't change anything. They can't even take a eat a little chocolate bar or eat something that's not in their diet. They can't do that because that takes away energy to process that that that energy could be used for something else. That's how highly trained they are. [01:16:11] (40 seconds)  #FaithLikeAnAthlete

Very interesting to see that Paul often refers to the Christian walk as athletes. And the more I read about athletes and how they stay, I didn't realise that about the little treats and things. They just don't take any treats. They don't deviate one little bit from their program because it takes four years to get to the Olympics. That four years is focused on it could be a race that lasts, you know, ten seconds or less. And can you imagine that the training they have to do to get to that? And it's ten seconds. [01:17:28] (37 seconds)  #TrainForTheRace

I for me, I took to heart what Alan said last week. Some of the the words that he spoke were very, very powerful in the sense of if you think that by watching crazy stuff on telly and putting things before your eyes that are not about the things of God, I'm paraphrasing, and it's not gonna have an effect on you, you got another thing coming because it does have an effect on us. Everything we look at has an effect on us. [01:15:40] (31 seconds)  #GuardYourEyes

what we find is just Sunday is just not enough. Alright? And and not only that, we're social people, and we like to join together with people who like the same stuff as we do. And and it's just that's evident wherever we go. Got golf clubs. You got rotary clubs and lions clubs and all sorts of things where people of like mind gather together. And so we, in church, not satisfied, but just Sunday, we wanna join together on other days as well to grow our spiritual lives. And so we have small groups or life groups as we call them. [01:04:10] (43 seconds)  #BeyondSundayCommunity

Okay. So that's a little bit of a preamble about why we do LifeGroups, preparing ourselves, getting ourselves ready. Alright? Now you found out how to find a LifeGroup. I just wanna reiterate the importance of that part where it says that we're to grow people up into the perfection of the things of God. We're to grow people up. And that's what Ephesians talks about. If it wasn't there for a reason, then we could just sit and be the same forever. But it doesn't say that. It says to grow up into maturity. [01:19:35] (41 seconds)  #GrowToMaturity

But then sometimes, when you're with a group of people, those sorts of things start to interacting with others. You have your brothers to help you along as well. It says, yeah, iron sharpens iron as one person helps another one to grow. Alright? And if you wanna read about the corrections of the Lord and how he helps us, it's Proverbs 12 and Hebrews 12 are really good reading places where we could read about how the Lord corrects us and corrects the people that he loves. [01:09:07] (38 seconds)  #IronSharpensIron

now in our life groups in the church, there's also a little place in the bible where it talks about correction. And we don't like correction, do we? And mostly, I believe the holy spirit speaks to us personally, and he just gives us a little nudge sometimes. You could have done that a little better. Have a think about that the way you spoke to that person. He does to me anyway. And it's called self evaluation. It's the holy spirit actually giving you a little nudge working inside you to bring you up to just to be better at what you're doing, but into the character and the likeness of Jesus Christ. That's what we're here for. [01:08:21] (46 seconds)  #HolySpiritNudge

But how does God correct us? Well, through the holy spirit, but also through our brothers and sisters. And it's nice. They're being kind, and they're not being mean. Alright? And I shared with you once before about how I was in the men's bible study, and I'd been mucking around, hadn't eaten anything for dinner. And it was about 07:00, and I was sitting down, and I thought, I'll just have a mass bar for dinner. I don't remember when I shared this. And I and my good mate said to me, you don't really need to eat that. You know? And I thought, no. You're right. I don't need to eat that. [01:09:45] (41 seconds)  #GentleCorrection