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Feb 25, 2024
Hope Seeds
Isaiah 6:9-13
God asked Isaiah to give the people of Israel a message. Although they won’t listen to Isaiah, God tells him to keep preaching until the land is laid to waste and the people are carried away into exile. God says Israel will ‘look like pine and oak forest with every tree cut down, every tree a stump, a huge field of stumps.’ God continues to speak to Isaiah: ‘BUT there’s holy seed in those stumps.’
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Isaiah 6:9-13
- How do you relate to the Isaiah 6 picture of a ‘field of stumps’? Why does loss sometimes feel like a stump?
- Has there been a time when you’ve been between two things, for example, between jobs, between relationships, between places to live? What did that feel like? Were you able to find God in the midst of it?
- False hope is when I try to convince myself to be hopeful by thinking that things aren’t as bad as they look. Have you experienced false hope? How did that impact you?
- Brueggemann describes the prophetic tasks of the church as, to “tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, grieve in a society that practices denial and express hope in a society that lives in despair.” Which task do you relate to the most? The least? How can we do these three things better?
- Why is having hope hard sometimes? Is there a promise that God has made that helps you stay hopeful today?
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Recent Sermons
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Like some of us, perhaps, he felt like some people should be excluded by virtue of where they were born or how badly they have behaved.
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All along, we’ve been saying that God’s heart is to see us INCLUDED. That’s why Jesus came, and that’s the subject of Paul’s letter to the Romans. At times, Christians forget God’s radical inclusion of them and go back to the old patterns of competing and comparing. Sadly, that was happening in the Roman Church. Paul has one powerful dose for that sickness.
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