Five Things God Uses to Grow Your Faith (1) – Big Faith

Welcome to CROLCC, we are so glad you are here worshiping with us.  We just ended our series on Church and I have heard so many good feedbacks about this series that I want to thank you for taking Church seriously.  Thank you for taking your faith seriously in asking the question “how can I engage the culture with my faith so that I can impact the culture?”  I sincerely believe that we exist not just to believe in Jesus so that we could go to heaven.  We believe in Jesus or we put our faith in Jesus because we believe there is a calling in all of our lives, and that we are to spend the rest of our lives living out that calling.

The thing that God wants most from us is to trust Him.  Think about it, wouldn’t you have to trust someone or something every day when you are making decisions about your life?  Where should I live, where should I work, who should I date and hopefully eventually marry?  Imagine how different it would be to make decisions if you had absolute confidence that God was with you?  Imagine how differently you would respond to difficulties, temptations, and even good things if you knew with certainty that God was in all of it and was planning to leverage it for good.  Did you also know that God is very interested in growing your faith?  That’s what we will be talking about in this series.

Moving Forward

Sermons come in all shapes and sizes. But if you listen closely, you’ll hear God saying the same thing in most sermons—trust me. That’s not to say that the message in the Bible is shallow and simplistic. Rather, in all the ways that you could respond to God, the most important thing that God is asking you to do is to trust him. When things are going well, it doesn’t require a lot of faith to trust God. But when life turns messy, is your faith leading you to depend on God, or do you put your trust in something else?

In the next several weeks, we’ll discuss five catalysts that God uses to build that kind of faith. For this week, reflect on what have been the most faith-building events/relationships in your life. How have these things affected your confidence in God?

Discussion Questions

1. Do you know people whose faith in God is so strong that at times you would describe it as amazing? What is it about them that make you think their confidence in God is so strong?

2. How would you describe the relationship between obedience and trust?

3. As you think back on your childhood, how was the obedience/trust relationship manifested in your home? Did you trust your parents? How did that impact your response to their authority?

4. What is more important in a relationship: trust or obedience? Answer this question within the context of several types of relationships. If you are a parent, how would you answer this question as it relates to your children? What about within the context of marriage?

5. Kevin listed five ingredients to developing BIG faith. Which ones do you remember? Of these five, which one has made the biggest difference in your confidence in God? Why?