Look Back

1. What are you thankful for this week?
2. What are you struggling with and how can we help?
3. What needs have you noticed in our community/campus/school?

It would be good to pray for each other around these needs.

4. How did you apply the lesson from last week?
5. Who did you share the story with, and what was their response?

Look Up

Key Question: How do we live out the Christian life when it can seem so difficult at times?

Statement: In our own strength, we can't live the way God wants us to live, but with his help through the Holy Spirit, we have the power to live the way God wants us to live.

6. Was anything difficult to understand?
7. What does today's article tell us about God? About people? About God's relationship with us?
8. How do you think this article relates to the question we discussed earlier: "How do we live out the Christian life?"
9. Do you have any other questions or comments about this article?
10. How would you summarise what we have learned today?

Conclusion:

By tapping in to the power available to us through the Holy Spirit, we are able to live the way God intended us to live. If we try to live this life in our own strength, we won't be able to bear much fruit and live the way God wants us to live. We need to rely on the Holy Spirit every day.

As we learned earlier, a helpful tool that will enable us to do this is a simple illustration around breathing. Just as we breath in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide, so too we can breathe spiritually. Spiritual Breathing is simply this: We breathe out our sin, through confession (which we touched on a couple of weeks ago), and then we breath in by appropriating the power available to us through the Holy Spirit. If you do this regularly, you'll be able to live the life God wants you to live.

Look Forward

The most important thing will be how we apply what we learn, and so we want to help each other find ways to do that. Some questions to help us do that:

Download outline to print
firststepswithgod.com/eng/print/7