This Week’s Training Notes

[Due to a period of time being short-staffed on our team, we have been unable to produce our weekly leader training podcasts for The Gospel Project for Adults for Spring 2022. We plan to begin making these podcasts available again for Summer 2022. We are sorry for the inconvenience but look forward to providing this assistance again soon. In the meantime, we hope the content below helps for your weekly preparation. We also provide weekly devotional blog posts that reflect on the message of each session. And please take advantage of the Additional Resources for each session, which include links to sermons, articles, and various other items to aid in your planning. Thank you for your patience!]

Continuing in the Spring curriculum of The Gospel Project for Adults, From Conquest to Kingdom, we have been reading through the book of Joshua, seeing how God helped the Israelites conquer Jericho with the help of the prostitute Rahab. But now, we will see the disobedience of one man and the consequences that follow.

This week, your group will be studying Unit 8, Session 2, Experiencing God’s Justice, a session on Achan and how disobedience results in negative consequences, not only for the sinner, but for those around him as well. But when we follow God in faith, He wins the victory for His people.

So this week, here are your three things to know, watch, and do as you prepare for this week’s session:

Something to know

For some of us with an individualistic mindset, it would seem unfair that God was angry at all of the Israelites for Achan’s sin. But in the ancient middle eastern culture (as well as many cultures with eastern cultural values today), they understand the importance of the collective unit and why God’s anger affected the whole people group. It is too easy today to see our actions and sins as only affecting our individual selves, but we know from experience that whether we prefer it to be so or not, the reality is we are seen as a collective unit. When a Christian sins, the world around notices and could blame all Christians. We are a representative of our “tribe,” a group we call Christian. And we are ambassadors for Christ. We represent more than just our self. More is at stake when we sin than our own individual consequences.

Something to watch

For something to watch, we’ve included a link to a video sermon by Robert Fowler on the story of Achan in the Additional Resources called What Makes God Angry (21:06). Here are his three main points about what makes God angry from the text:

1. Presence of perpetrators
2. Pursuit without providence and provocation
3. Prayer without penitence.

Something to do

Confession is not a natural thing for us to do. Yet it is essential in our spiritual walk and relationship with the Lord. Consider encouraging your group members to have a personal confession notebook (or buy each member a small notebook), for their eyes only. It’s easy to have a prayer notebook with just praises and requests. But a separate notebook or simply in their Notes app on their phone, to daily confess to the Lord and to look back and see how God has forgiven and given strength to overcome a sin might help us remember God’s grace and forgiveness as well as His power and might to overcome sin and evil.