(a) If you could summarise Paul’s main point in this passage in a single sentence, what would that sentence be?
(b) What might each of the following have to say about their ‘previous way of life’ (i.e. their life before conversion to Jesus Christ): Peter, James, Lydia, Timothy…and you?
(c) Think of the different places you have visited or lived in. Looking back, what does that say about God’s purposes for his kingdom and for you?…
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6, NIV).
These words constitute the go-to text for Christians who wish to assert that Jesus Christ is the only way to God. It is also the go-to text for those who feel that Christianity condemns itself as abhorrent and intolerant by reason of the very exclusiveness of this saying.
But does does the text actually mean what most of its friends (and, indeed, most of its enemies) think it means?…
(a) Look at the two-fold summary of the law in verse 27. What do you think are the dangers of emphasising one part of this at the expense of the other?
(b) As they listened to this parable, what do you think Jesus’ hearers would have been expecting him to say at verse 33?
(c) In the light of this parable, who is your ‘neighbour’ today?…
Light, commentator William Hendriksen remarks, is associated in Scripture with:-
Sometimes it is a solemn duty before God to warn people, Eze 3:20. See also Pr 29:1.
1. Warnings of Example, Jude 1:6,7,17-19.
2. Warnings of Instruction, concerning,
3. Warnings of Experience,
(Richardson, in The Biblical Illustrator, adapted)
…
The synagogue-worship, developed by and after the exile…was also essentially popular, homelike, familiar, escaping from the exclusiveness of the priestly service. It had four principal parts:
a) the recitation of the shema’, composed of Deut 6:4-9; 11:13-21, and Num 15:37-41, and beginning, “Hear (shema’), O Israel: Yahweh our God is one Yahweh”;
b) prayers, possibly following some set form, perhaps repeating some psalm;
c) the reading by male individuals of extracts from the Law and the Prophets selected by the “ruler of the synagogue,” in later years following the fixed order of a lectionary, as may have been the case when Jesus “found the place”;
d) the targum or condensed explanation in the vernacular of the Scriptures read.…
Read Matthew 6:9-13.
(a) What does the Lord’s Prayer tell us about who God is, and who we are?
(b) Why not pray the Lord’s Prayer slowly, stopping at the end of each phrase to allow each person in the group an opportunity to offer a short prayer of their own?
…
(a) What do you think the disciples’ thoughts and feelings were just before this encounter with the risen Jesus? And just after?
(b) What special mission did Jesus give to his disciples, and how did he equip them for this?
(c) Christians today could be described as ‘those who have not seen and yet have believed’ (verse 29). In what sense are we ‘blessed’ because of this?…
(a) Suppose you had known nothing about Jesus, or about the Christian faith. Then, you pick up John’s Gospel and start to read it through. You reach chapter 20. What might be your thoughts and feelings, as you read this chapter for the first time?
(b) Critics sometimes claim that the resurrection accounts found in the four Gospels are hopelessly at odds with one another. What do you think? If there are variations between the different accounts, why might that be so?…
1. Which is more important: physical healing, or the forgiveness of sins? Why? And why do you think the two are linked together on this occasion?
2. Surely, healing and forgiveness are good things? So why do you think the Jewish authorities were so resentful of what Jesus did?
3. In what ways can we follow in Jesus’ footsteps by bringing God’s healing and forgiveness to others?
…
