Looking for a way to discuss New Year’s resolutions with your small group? Below are some discussion questions I put together for our small groups at Grace. Feel free to use them with your group. If you’d like, you can listen to Ron Edmondson’s sermon from this past Sunday HERE (the questions were designed to somewhat parallel Sunday’s sermon).
Interruptions
Are you interrupted very often? How do you normally take an “interruption?”
Have you ever set out to do something, yet realize half-way through, that there was no way you could finish that project? How did that make you feel?
What were a few of your New Year’s resolutions for 2009? How long were you able to keep them?
Read the Christmas story, as told by Matthew 1-2.
Somehow, I doubt that Mary’s goal was to have a baby out of wedlock. I don’t imagine that she had always hoped and dreamed that she could one, special day, tell her fiancé that she was pregnant…and that it wasn’t his baby.
God had different plans for Mary than she likely had for herself.
How did Mary respond to the interruption by God? Women, how would you have responded?
How did Joseph respond to the interruption by God? Men, how would you have responded?
Where have you seen your plans for your life changed by the plans God had for you?
Ultimately, God’s plans for Mary were much bigger, farther-reaching, and glorious than any Mary could have dreamed up herself.
Has this felt like a relatively good year or a relatively bad year? Were you able to accomplish all of your goals, or did “interruptions” get in your way?
What kind of plans do you have for the new year? How do you plan to do things differently in 2010 than in years past?
What kinds of things do you see that God may use you to do?
Turn to the person on your right. What kind of plans do you think God could use them to do this next year? What could He do in and through them?
Never quit dreaming.
