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How are you being restored in order to rebuild? God is working in your life to restore you in order to give you the strength to rebuild. Find out how God is doing so and in what ways.
CATCHING UP/LOOKING AHEAD
CATCHING UP/LOOKING AHEAD
- Did you have the opportunity to encourage someone this week? Did God give you some ideas for a ministry to others that can grow out of what he is restoring in your life?
- Would you rather celebrate quietly or celebrate loudly?
KEY VERSE
“The joy of the LORD is your strength.”
- Is there someone you need to put things right with so you can deepen your celebration in worship?
- Describe a time when the truth of God’s Word shone out to you as you worshiped with others.
- How have you found celebration in feasting, in sharing with others, or in stillness?
- How do you relate to the following sentences from this chapter?
“You find yourself grinding away at spiritual habits, trying to become more powerful, when the real intent is that you become more joyful. Feeling powerful is not your strength; the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
LIVING ON PURPOSE
God’s five purposes for each of us are evangelism, discipleship, fellow- ship, ministry, and worship. In this section, we’ll look at how we can take practical steps to fulfill one of those purposes based on the truths we’ve looked at in this study.
EVANGELISM
A burst of joy often comes when we share with someone else the good news of what God is doing in our lives. Go around the group and have each person share the name of someone they’re praying for to begin a relationship with Christ.
In the week ahead, pray for these people whose names have been shared—that they will come to faith in the Lord Jesus.
PRAYING TOGETHER
PRAYING TOGETHER
Pray for this group of people you just mentioned and for one another’s needs.
Talk about whether there is another book you’d like to read together and discuss after you finish this study next week.
Creators & Guests
Host
Tom Holladay
Tom Holladay is a teaching pastor at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Tom’s passion in ministry is to help people discover a love for the Bible and an understanding of God’s truth that changes the way they live. In addition to his pastoral leadership and weekend teaching ministries at Saddleback, he assists Rick Warren in teaching Purpose-Driven Church conferences to Christian leaders all over the world. Books he has written include The Relationship Principles of Jesus, Love Powered Parenting with his wife Chaundel and (with Kay Warren) Foundations: Core Truths to Build Your Life On. He and Chaundel have three children and five granddaughters.
What is Putting It Together Again When It's All Fallen Apart: Saddleback Small Group Series?
Life crises can throw you into a tailspin, a lost job, a failed relationship, a struggling business, a financial mess. Where do you start? How do you pull it together? How do you begin again? Tom Holladay experienced a catastrophe first-hand when a sudden flood in California destroyed his home, his church, and the homes of many church members. Tom and his congregation had to rebuild, and they used the principles in the book of Nehemiah to get back on their feet. Now a teaching pastor at Saddleback Church, Tom will help you discover seven principles for putting it together again that will give you the direction you need to get rolling on that fresh start. Holladay will walk you through seeing every problem as an opportunity, facing the obstacles head on and taking your first step, knowing how to expect and reject opposition, build on your success, and dedicating yourself to the One who rebuilds our souls. The task of starting again can seem impossible. And sometimes you just need to rebuild your confidence and regain a sense of purpose. If you're trying to find the emotional energy, but you just don't have it in you, let Tom Holladay encourage you. He understands how difficult and rewarding the business of rebuilding is.
Download the study guide with each episode. And of course, check out the book "Putting It Together Again When It's All Fallen Apart" by Tom Holladay on Amazon or your favorite bookstore.
Welcome back for week six of, uh, our video studies that go along with putting together again after it's all falling apart. This week we talked in, uh, the book about the power of celebration, the fact that if you can't to celebrate it, you're going to run out of strength and around a power to rebuild because you need that continued motivation in your life. God needs to continue to restore you. In order for you to rebuild, you need to see that he is restoring your heart and your strength in a continual way. So what I'd like to do this week in this study is look at three verses from the Book of Psalms that are all about God restoring you. What happens when we celebrate is that we get restored. And when we get restored, we have the strength to keep rebuilding. So these verses talk about the specific strength of restoration that God wants to bring into you, into your life, into your heart. First way that God wants to restore you is he wants to restore your relationship to Him. So first it restores our relationship to Him. And the Bible talks about that in Psalm 80, verse three, when it says, Restore us. So God, make your face shine upon us that we might be saved. Only reason you're saved, the only reason you can have a relationship with Christ is because God decided to restore you. I love this picture. He made his face to shine upon you. That means he turned his face towards you in love. If he hadn't turned to you in love, you couldn't have turned to Him. He had to make the first move. In any relationship, somebody usually has to make the first move in order for it to work. Well, God made the first move towards us. He turned his face towards us, and we couldn't have been saved. To be saved means to be rescued and back into a relationship with Him. We couldn't have been saved except that he turned his face towards us. And here's the amazing thing. God turned his face towards you before you turned your face towards Him before, for many of us, you even thought of Him. That's what happened on the cross in Jesus Christ, because his face turned toward you in love. Now, if you're not sure that you've been saved in using this word, if you're not sure that you've turned your face to Him, that you've trusted in Him, you can be sure right now. You don't have to do a lot of things and make sure you're a good person before you get to Heaven in order to be saved. The Bible says that happens because of what Jesus did for us, not of what you do for Jesus. That comes later. What you do for Jesus comes after you're saved, not before you're saved. So if you're not sure, pray right now. Ask him to save you. You can do it with your eyes open. You don't have to close your eyes to pray. Just say Jesus Christ. Would you begin in my heart, in my life, a relationship with you? I want to be saved, I want to be rescued back into a relationship with you. Would you save me? I trust you to forgive the wrong things I've done. Thank you for dying on the cross for me. I trust you to give me a new life, the kind of life that only you can give. Thank you for your resurrection, and so I trust you to save me. In Jesus name, amen. It's a very simple prayer. Changes everything, changes your eternity. If you prayed that prayer for the first time, or maybe you're not sure you ever prayed that prayer before, if you prayed it, make sure you tell somebody else about it, because they're going to be able to encourage and strengthen you in this new step of faith that you've taken. The Bible says in Romans five, verse eight, god showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. So even before we knew anything about Him, he died for us, he died for you. And for some of you who just started a relationship with Him, god restores us, uh, to salvation by shining his face on us, by giving his life for us on the cross. There's a second restoration that is talked about in the Book of Psalms. This is the most familiar one, he restores our soul. Number two, he restores our soul. Psalm 23, verse three says those simple words, he restores my soul. You know, that's the shepherd psalm, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. And then he restores my soul. One of the things that needs to be restored in our lives continually and constantly is our soul. I can't think of anything more important than our soul that needs this continual restoration. When you're tired from thinking all day, when you're worn out from the project of rebuilding that you're involved in, there are a number of ways that you can try to get restoration. If your restoration is, uh, just about your intellectual thoughts, then there's a lot of ways that you can get some restoration. You can do something to relax. You can watch some TV when you're physically tired, there's a number of ways that you can relax. You can put your feet up for a little bit. But what about when your soul is tired? What do you need to do to restore a soul? When your soul is worn down, only God can restore your soul. You can't restore your own soul. You're not built that way. Only God, our Creator, can restore our soul. Entertainment will not restore your soul. Recreation will not restore your soul. Only God can restore your soul. You connect to Him in a fresh and new way. Let me show you another verse from the book of Psalm, psalm 19, verse seven, says, the law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The law of the Lord is the word of God. It's the Bible. So as you look at God's word, as you look at Scripture, there's a power there to restore your soul, to feed your soul like nothing else can. I know when I get tired, when I get worn down emotionally, even spiritually, sometimes I look to other places to restore my soul than God, and it never works. I don't know if you've ever tried that. It never works. I have to go to Him, spend time with Him. I got to go to his word. Let it begin to fill me up again. Uh, now, it's not as easy and quick as you might like it to be sometimes, but if you'll spend time with Him, if you'll let his heart soak into your heart, he will restore your soul. Then the third thing in the book of Psalms that God wants to restore, he restores you to salvation, to a relationship with Him, and restores your soul. And then number three, he restores your joy. He restores your joy. Psalm 51, verse twelve says, restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. This is a prayer of David. And the fact that David praised this prayer shows that there are times in our lives when our soul needs to be restored. He wouldn't have prayed it if our soul didn't need to be restored. And then out of that restoration of our soul, god needs to restore our joy. Have you ever lost the joy of your salvation? I really don't know. Anybody who's been a believer for a long time who hasn't at times lost the joy of their salvation. They feel like it's become routine, um, or they feel like God is far away. Even though they're spending time in the Word, they feel like what they're doing may not matter. They've lost the joy of their salvation. There are a lot of reasons why we can lose the joy of our salvation. And in this psalm, David and even writing this is pointing to one of the main reasons, one of the hard to face reasons why we lose the joy of our salvation, our own sin. David had gotten caught up in sin. This psalm is from the heart of David after he'd gotten caught up in sin with bathsheba, and he goes to God and says, god, I'm far from you, I need the joy of your salvation. When he's confronted about his sin, that confrontation caused him to see that he'd lost the joy that he needed to live by. And maybe there's some kind of confrontation that needs to happen in your heart and your soul, and maybe about your sin. It may be about your trusting yourself, or it may be about something else, some other reason that the joy of your salvation has been lost. Disappointment with somebody else in your life or disappointment was happened that you expected the church or someone in the church to be something that they weren't able to be for you. And so you've lost the joy of your salvation. The place to start is to talk to God about it. Restore to me, God, restore to me the joy of your salvation. Grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. The place to start is the place of confession. God, I can't do this without you. It might be confession of your sin. I confess the wrong that I've done. It might be confession of your need. God, I need you. No other person nor other thing can meet this need in my life. God, would you restore to me the joy that only you can give in my life? If you're going to live out what it means to be a rebuilder, you're going to need to be able to celebrate God. But you cannot do that apart from these restorations that God wants to bring into your life. This week you read in chapter six about the joy of the Lord being our strength. The joy of the Lord is our strength. So if I'm going to have strength, I'm going to continually need to go to God and say, will you restore my joy? Because I need your strength. You might need to pray for him right now to restore the joy of your salvation. Let me lead you in that prayer. Let's pray together. Our Father, we take this moment to pray and we ask, as David asked so long ago, that it would restore the joy of our salvation. God, it may be that we need to confess the sin in our lives. We do. We bring it before you. But we know that sin does not mean that we can no longer be close to you because of Jesus Christ. You can restore the joy of our salvation. It may be that we need to confess our disappointment to you, that life hasn't turned out like we wanted, that people have disappointed us. But God would come to you. You're greater than those circumstances. You're greater than those people. You can restore joy even in the face of the fact that they've disappointed us, because you will never disappoint us. And so Father, right now we pray restore the joy of our salvation, and we pray it in Jesus. Amen. Amen. Enjoy the next few minutes talking together in your groups, encouraging each other, praying for each other.