Breaking Ground
If you could have a “mulligan”—a do-over—of a moment in your life, what moment might you choose? A time you felt humiliated? A time of loss? A successful moment you’d like to respond different too?
The Dig
This Sunday we started a new series: MY ETERNAL SCORECARD where we are looking at how we culturally are shaped by an economy of salvation. This week we consider the scorecard itself. If last week a sin is a bogey and a good deed is a birdie, then the cumulative scores of our lives make up a total score of either sinfulness or holiness.
An Economy of Salvation is a Christian doctrine that asks the question of what and how we are saved. The challenge of this series is that Americans tend to keep a scorecard…and a leaderboard…of who is saved. In the analogy, we tend to think of good acts as birdies…and sin as bogeys. (Birdies lower your score -1 and bogeys add to it +1).
Who are the cultural voices in our lives to say if we are “good” or “bad”?
How has the church historically encouraged this sort of scorecard keeping?
As a group, consider who the prototype, the “perfect” score Christian is: what do they do? How do they act? What do they look like? Vote like? General beliefs? How has this perfect Christian changed over decades?
Read Matthew 20:1-16.
How does this “First will be Last and Last First” confound a scorecard type of economy of salvation?
What ways do we encourage this new type of thinking as a Church? As a Christian?
Getting Out of the Hole
Take time each week to reflect upon the Sunday sermon.
- What areas in your life have you labeled as a double bogey that needs no label?
- What areas in your life have you labeled as a birdie that needs no label?
- What about people in your life who have this same mentality and stay away from the church?
- Journal about what areas in your life you have labelled because society told you, and instead offer up to God –asking for God to reveal how you might look at a specific area?
NEXT WEEK:
- More Scorecard! And, it’s VBS Sunday along with Communion. Join us!