What’s Your Influence?
Youth Ministry No Comments »This is a lesson taught to a group of senior high students. This was adapated from a talk from “Reaching the Generations Talks Database”-the link is on my blogroll in the sidebar. This is just the handout that accompanied the lesson. The entire talk focuses on how we let things affect us, and what happens when we let SIN affect us as believers. This is the first of a series of teachings on the Roman Road….
What’s the Influence?
What’s the Influence?
1. Parents
2. Teachers
3. Peers
4. Ministers
5. Youth leaders
6. Heroes and idols
7. Extended family
8. Tv, films, music
9. Printed media
10. Advertising
1. Peers
2. Parents
3. Tv, films, music
4. Teachers
5. Heroes and idols
6. Ministers
7. Printed media
8. Advertising
9. Youth leaders
10. Extended family
1. Tv, films, music
2. Advertising
3. Printed media
4. Heroes and idols
5. Peers
6. Parents
7. Teachers
8. Ministers
9. Youth leaders
10. Extended family
What years do you think these “influences represent?
1960, 1980, 1990
If this were done today, what would the list look like?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Is there anything that needs to be added or taken away from these lists, that are no longer influences in people’s lives?
Romans 6:15-23 The Message translation:
What Is True Freedom?
15-18So, since we’re out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we’re free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!
19I’m using this freedom language because it’s easy to picture. You can readily recall, can’t you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing—not caring about others, not caring about God—the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is it now as you live in God’s freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness?
20-21As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn’t have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you’re proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end.
22-23But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.
Is your influence sin?
Or
Is it God’s Grace and Love that you received?
