Tips for Teaching This Week’s Session of The Gospel Project for Adults
Every week for Volume 4: From Captivity to the Wilderness, Ken Braddy, Lifeway’s director of Sunday School, will offer guidance to help leaders prepare to lead and teach each session of The Gospel Project for Adults.
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This week’s training notes:
This week, your group will be studying Unit 3, Session 4, A Plan Unhindered. This session is a quick survey of the fracturing of Isaac’s family, the brokenness that severs the relationship between Jacob and Esau, and how God’s plan to bless the world continued, even in spite of the sin and dysfunction of HIs people.
So here are three things to know, read, and do as you prepare for this week’s session:
Something to know
First, this session is another one where the Leader Pack comes in handy, and this session provides an opportunity to revisit the Promise of Genesis poster and handout, items 3 and 4 in your leader pack. I would revisit these in this session and for the remainder of the unit, as it is will give your group a great visual reminder of God’s promise to bless the world through Abraham’s descendents. And that’s important because this family truly is a mess, and keeps being a mess through each successive generation as we’re going to see in the remaining sessions in this unit. But even so, God is faithful to fulfill His promise. He uses this messed up dysfunctional family to form a great nation and from that nation came Jesus, the fulfillment of all of God’s promises.
Something to read
For something to read, do check out the article in the Additional Resources called The Light of Weakness by Allyson Todd. This article is a short reflection on the power of God’s transforming work in Jacob’s life. Along with that, I would definitely encourage you to read through the illustration material in the Extra section, especially for point 2, which deals with the issue of barrenness. This is a matter that needs to be treated with a great deal of sensitivity and the illustration provided does so extremely well.
Something to do
Finally, spend some additional time focused on the essential doctrine for this session, the new identity of the believer. We see this come about literally when Jacob is renamed Israel, but in our lives, it is a spiritual reality more than a matter of the name we go by. When we put our faith in Jesus, we are truly new people, even though so much of us is the same. And so we need to help our group members to see this, to remember it, and to live confidently in light of it. To no longer be defined by who they were, but to always be called back to who they are now, as redeemed and beloved children of God.
