03-02-18 - A Life of Introspect

INTROSPECTION:  A CHANCE TO LOOK AT WITHIN

Songs for today

GROUP DISCUSSION: 

1.  How much do you know yourself?  Do you think you will ever change?  If so how will you change? 

2.  Who knows you more than anyone else?  and How would you respond to someone who really knows you? 

LESSON: 

A lesson adapted from:  Six Truths for Introspection

INTRODUCTION:   Too often, we simply go along.  My parents used to tell me, "would you jump off the bridge if your friends do so?"  Can you state some problems when youth just go along without thinking?  

God wants us to be engaged, to be introspective and to be thoughtful.   

1. God wants me to "think."  The Scripture presents introspection as natural, and even good.

• Romans 12:2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
• I Cor. 14:15 So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit,but I will also pray with my understanding; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my understanding.

2. God wants me to think about my relationship with Him.  The final destination of my inward thinking is upwward.   God-focused, not self-focused. 

• Psalms 32:3-5 - When I kept silent,
      my bones wasted away
      through my groaning all day long.
  4 For day and night
      your hand was heavy on me;
  my strength was sapped
      as in the heat of summer.[b]
  5 Then I acknowledged my sin to you
      and did not cover up my iniquity.
  I said, “I will confess
      my transgressions to the Lord.”
  And you forgave
      the guilt of my sin.
• Paul urged the Corinthians, “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves” (1 Corinthians 13:5). It was after the prodigal son “came to himself” that he returned to his father. Introspection should lead us to consider our relationship with God.

3.  In this life, I will never completely understand myself, and I will often be deceived about myself.

• 
  
•  “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
• James 1: 23-25 -  23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 25 But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.