Monday, July 11, 2005

Good Morning!

Wanted to check and see who needs a study book. Email me and let me know by Wednesday and I will try to have new ones for you at church on Sunday.

The new unit for this week is Unit 11, The Means of Grace

Focus Scripture for the Week: 1 Peter 1:2

May grace and peace be yours in abundance

Today's topic: 1 Peter 1:13-25

-- this is an important unit and an important concept for us to grasp. We have talked in a general way about the need for daily Bible study and prayer, and what the benefits to us might be. This unit really gets into expanding that idea, and gives us some reasons to believe why it is important.

-- as noted in the Reflections section, Wesley felt that there were five activities that were means of grace -- activities that, if engaged in them with the right frame of mind, would help us draw closer to God, and that served as a conduit for God's grace to grow within us. The five are:

-- prayer
-- fasting
-- Bible study
-- hearing the preached word
-- communion

-- as we look at this list, we probably see two that we do most days (prayer and Bible study), one that we do about once a week (preaching), and one once a month (communion). And then there is fasting. Fasting is something that most people don't do, for any variety of reasons. One of them, I think, is that fasting is something that you do out in the world, and could possibly be noticed by the world. We can pray and do Bible study in the privacy of our own home, and we hear preaching and do communion at our church, but fasting is something that we do all day.

-- more on this as we move through the week.

Today's prayer request: A prayer of thanks

Dennis has generally turned out to be not the disaster that people had feared -- we need to give thanks for that, and to pray for the people who did have some damage from the storm.

Today's class member prayer:

Ron Ray

Have a great day.

Jay