Before We Get Started

For our discussion today we will be using the sermon series discussion guides. If you would like to follow along you can access this discussion guide on the website at mosaicchurchaustin.com and then select “community group resources” in the menu options.

Prayer

Because the main goal of our time together is to establish relationships and learn how to walk with one another in all that God has called us to be and do, we’d like to begin by praying for one another. So, does anyone have anything you’d like us to pray for, or  anything to share regarding how you’ve seen God moving in your life that we can celebrate together.

This Week’s Topic

This week we join hundreds of other Every Nation churches around the world as we continue our Amazing Grace series. We will be looking at how God’s grace saves us, changes us, and carries us through even the most difficult of circumstances. “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found. Was blind, but now I see.” Let’s find out what we just might see in Him, ourselves, and in one another as we look at God’s amazing grace.

Discussion Questions

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

In your own words, what do you think Lewis means here?

What are some of the messages we hear in our painful moments?

How do we know which of those messages are God speaking to us, and which ones are not?

Isaiah 53:3-5

“He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.”

What does it mean for Jesus to be “familiar” with our pain?

How might knowing Jesus can empathize with us in our moments of pain affect the way we process through, and respond to, those moments?

As was said on Sunday, “Jesus may not take our pain away, but He can redeem it and give it new meaning,” in light of that what do you think Isaiah is saying when he says, “the punishment that brought us peace was on Him?”

Galatians 6:2

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

What does it look like for us to “bear one another’s burdens?”

How does our doing that “fulfill the law of Christ?”

Closing Thought