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 led His people into the promised land with His power and His presence and that God commanded Joshua to continue following His words and commands. Unit 7 was “Lord, Teach Me Your Statutes,” and now Unit 8 is titled “Fear the Lord and Worship Him.”

This week, your group will be studying Unit 8, Session 1, Witnessing God’s Mercy, a session on Rahab and how God provides salvation to all who trust in Him and how He makes them part of His people.

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

Something to know

The story of Rahab is a beautiful example of God’s heart for all people to come to Him that they may be made a part of His family. It’s easy today to underestimate this story because we’ve seen and heard stories of redemption before—gang members coming to Christ or drug dealers finding Jesus. But remember, during these times, Jesus the Messiah had not yet come, and God’s people were an elitist group of people. But throughout Scripture we see God making a way and making room for all people to come into His family when they pursue Him, obey Him, and worship Him alone. God makes Himself known to the nations and sometimes He uses us to do so. His heart is for the misfit, the foreigner, the rebel that we may follow in His example in bringing the gospel to the nations and to all people types.

Something to listen to

For something to listen to, we’ve included a link to an audio sermon by Sam Storms on the story of Rahab in the Additional Resources called Two Spies and a Shady Lady (43:29). Here is an excerpt from his teaching in case someone in your group may be nervous about Rahab’s lies:

Was Rahab justified in lying and in deceiving the soldiers? Now it’s important when we look at this to remember that when you read the Bible, it’s a very important principle of interpretation that you need to be aware of, that there is a difference between what the Bible records and what it requires. Or a difference between what it reports and what it recommends. Scholars use more technical terms. They talk about descriptive text in the Bible and prescriptive text. Descriptive texts are passages that merely describe some action, some decision, or they simply record somebody’s words. Prescriptive texts are ones that prescribe or recommend or endorse or approve of what is written.

Click on the link to listen to more of his sermon.

Something to do

We sometimes can get stuck in a rut, or stuck in our ways of doing things, and cannot appreciate other ways of doing things like eating different types of foods or acknowledging how other cultures may do things differently. Consider planning a field trip for this quarter with your group, to do something related to a global culture, i.e. go to an ethnic restaurant that most are not familiar with, or an ethnic minority church service, or an ethnic art display at a museum. Think about what it feels like to be the outsider or the minority. Think about how different the food tastes or the art looks. Think about how many minority ethnic people in the U.S. feel this way everyday. Encourage your members to continue finding more cultural experiences in their lives, to broaden their minds, and help them have a heart for the global world and people who might be different from them. Remind them that God’s heart is for all nations to come to Him in worship and that they would be convinced of the good news of Jesus Christ.