Five Things God Uses to Grow Your Faith 3 – Providential Relationships

Welcome to CROLCC, we are so glad you are here worshiping with us. We are talking about five things that God uses to grow our faith and last week we talked about Practical Teaching, or to be more specific, practical Biblical teaching. I challenged you at the end of the message to live out what you have been taught, because simply knowing doesn’t make a difference, but doing what you know makes the difference. If you want your life to have meaning, or if you are tired of making the same mistakes over and over again, you have to apply what you have learned in the Bible. If you don’t know what to read, I want to encourage you to start from Proverbs, you will find lots of wisdom to apply in your life there.

Today we are going to talk about the second thing that God uses to grow your faith – Providential Relationships. If you are like most people, you can’t tell your life story without referencing people who played significant roles along the way. The same is true of your faith story. There are people who helped you grow your faith, and there are people who you have helped to grow their faith. Being aware of this principle will enable us to leverage how people play a role in the development of our faith.

Moving Forward

The promise from Proverbs 13:20 can be read alongside a similar warning from the New Testament: Bad company corrupts good character (1 Cor. 15:33). The Bible makes it clear that certain relationships are pivotal in our spiritual development, while others can lead us in directions we never intended to go.

But we don’t live in a vacuum. We’re surrounded by wisdom and foolishness from all sides. Is it possible to completely ignore the companionship of fools? Should you? How do you balance the relationships in your life that strengthen your faith and the relationships that could inhibit your spiritual growth? Knowing full well that these relationships could also be pivotal for others to draw closer to God.

Discussion Questions

  1. Read Proverbs 13:20. What is the promise to those who “walk” with the wise? What is the consequence of being a companion of fools?
  1. Based on your experiences, why do you think Solomon highlights what a person becomes (i.e., “wise”) in the first half of the verse, while he highlights what will happen (i.e., “suffering harm”) in the second half? Why didn’t he say, “He who walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools becomes a fool”?
  1. Looking back, is there a time when you feel God brought someone across your path that could have helped you, but you resisted the relationship?
  1. Looking back, are there people you feel God providentially brought into your life at crucial times? Who? How did God use them?

As you close, ask each person in the group to pray a sentence prayer thanking God for a relationship he or she views as providential.

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