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Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents
1. If you were to write a “Dear Diary” entry to describe your struggle with sin, what would it say?
2. If you were to place yourself into the analogy of the airplane, where would you be and why (held by captors, confused about the plane, building the plane, flying …)?
3. How is gaining wisdom related to walking in the Spirit?
4. What are the advantages and disadvantages to working with a support group?
Chapter Two. Wisdom Shouts in the Street
1. Describe what it means in practical terms that wisdom shouts in the streets?
2. If you had a dream in which wisdom was pictured as a place, what would you expect that place to be like?
Chapter Three. Wisdom Killer 1: Loving Simplicity
1. Before reading this chapter, what was your understanding of the relationship between wisdom and simplicity? How has that changed as a result of reading this chapter?
2. How do you feel when you attempt to do something you lack the skills to do? How do you handle these feelings?
3. What sort of complexity do you believe you would face (or have faced) as a result of giving up your coping mechanisms?
4. The section “The Complexity of Practice” says that the path to wisdom often involves dealing with discontent, fear, a sense of abandonment, and a desire to justify ourselves. Why do these feelings tend to show up while we are making our way to wisdom?
Chapter Four. Loving Simplicity in a Complex World
1. How does the presence of evil around you and sin within you make your life complex?
2. Describe the difference between singleness and simplicity. How are they similar? How are the different?
3. When we are perplexed, how does this open the door for God to be glorified? What should we do to cooperate with Him in this?
4. How should an understanding of the perplexity of life affect our compassion for others?
Chapter Five. Wisdom Killer 2: Delighting in Scoffing
1. Describe a time when a “need” to look competent kept you (or someone you are aware of – without revealing their identity) from stepping out into an area in which you (or they) needed to learn wisdom.
2. Describe how scoffers bring contention and strife into situations.
3. How do you handle times when you learn that the Bible disagrees with you?
4. What can you do to help yourself work through insecurities and learn from humbling experiences?
Chapter Six. Wisdom Killer 3: Hating Knowledge
1. Explain the saying: The naïve says, “I can’t learn wisdom.” The scoffer says, “I don’t need to learn wisdom.” And the fool says, “I don’t want to learn wisdom.”
2. How do you react to situations in which you know you should do something but you lack the skills and understanding you need to get the job done?
3. Describe what it is like for a person to have a “spiritual learning disability,” or a “hedge of thorns,” that keeps them from learning the wisdom they need.
4. Explain the saying: Choose your pain wisely, and learn to deal with the pain you choose.
Chapter Seven. The Day of Adversity
1. How do you handle times when there seem to be few consequences from foolishness?
2. Based on Proverbs 1:23-32, discuss what happens when we don’t focus on learning to hear wisdom’s voice during times of learning?
3. Why is it important to remember Romans 8:28 (God works all things for good) during our days of catastrophe?
4. Describe how times of testing can lead to quantum leaps of growth.
Chapter Eight. A Practical Guide to Gaining Wisdom
1. Explain the saying, “Knowledge through repetition …Understanding through reflection …Wisdom through practice.”
2. How does treasuring knowledge, understanding, and wisdom create “personal interventions,” where truth reaches our hearts.
3. What steps can you take to practically treasure knowledge, understanding, and wisdom?
4. What steps can you take to regularly cry out for wisdom?
5. Do you feel it is worth the effort to rearrange your life in order to find wisdom? Why or why not?
Chapter Nine. The Lord Gives Wisdom
1. In Philippians 3:8, Paul says that he considers everything else to be rubbish when compared to knowing Christ. How do you feel about other treasures in comparison to knowing Christ?
2. In what ways can you personalize your growth in wisdom so that you see it as part of a relationship with the True God Who loves to teach you about life?
3. What is a person’s life like when knowledge is pleasant to their soul?
Chapter Ten. Wisdom and Sexual Freedom
1. Some people fall into condemnation when they experience a sexual temptation, believing they have already lusted in the heart. Explain the difference between sexual temptation and lust in your heart.
2. If our hearts think of sex in the context of self-sacrificing love, marriage commitment, and family rather than youthful beauty, exaggerated romance, and selfish sensuality, how does this change the nature of our temptations?
3. What do you think Jesus felt when the town harlot washed his feet with her tears and hair?
4. What does it mean to be changed sexually “little by little?”
5. What would a church look like if it encouraged people to be gradually changed in their sexuality?
6. Explain why we should NOT seek to change to the point where we would feel free to look at pornography or walk up to the edge of immoral affairs.
Chapter Eleven. What does it Mean to Lust for a Woman?
1. Why do people find it difficult to give up each of the expressions of sinful lust that are listed in this chapter?
2. Why is it important to distinguish between the seriousness of lusting-adultery versus adultery that involves a physical relationship outside of marriage?
1. Describe how a sexual relationship with a spouse should reshape a person so they can fit together with their spouse.
2. Explain how the same “one flesh chemistry” that was designed to work in marriage sabotages a person when they become one flesh with a harlot.
3. How is a person reshaped by ongoing sexual encounters with pornographic images?
4. Given the nature of sexual perversion as described in this chapter, what must God do to make 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 a reality in the life of a believer who has been damaged in this area?
5. Based on Proverbs 5:18-19, what does God want the nature of the sexual relationship between husband and wife to be like?
Chapter Thirteen. The Fairytale Stronghold
1. Statistics indicate that half of Christen men look at pornography and/or privately act out regularly. What do you believe those men feel if they encounter a Christian culture in which the sorts of temptations they face cannot be openly discussed?
2. Women who have become addicted to pornography or physical relationships often feel especially rejected, because they have fallen to sins that women are not supposed to fall to. What do you believe they feel if the church will not discuss sexual problems?
3. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7:8-9 that people (including teenagers) who are having trouble with their sexual desires should marry, yet many modern societies make this highly impractical. With their one flesh chemistry working in their hearts while they wait, what sorts of problems are likely to result?
4. Describe how the Fairytale Stronghold can affect:
a. Those who are not married
b. Those who are struggling with their marriages
c. Husbands and wives – where one or both are falling to pornography or some other form of
adultery
5. How is wisdom a key for breaking the Fairytale Stronghold?
6. How have you seen the “Christian Fairytale” affect people?
Chapter Fourteen. Evil and Wanton Generation
1. In what ways have you seen yourself (or other Christians) miss God’s voice because you (or they) expected Him to speak in one way while He was actually speaking in another?
2. What can you do to keep your “God Sensor” sensitive?
3. Jesus criticized His generation for not recognizing and participating in what God was doing in their time. What do you believe God is doing in your life now? How can you participate with Him?
Chapter Fifteen. Turn to the Burning Bush
1. What are some common “burning bushes” that people tend to pass by?
2. We often fail to make a commitment to finding out how God wants to speak to us and live through us. What happens when we do this?
3. What does it mean to be a child of the light (John 12:36)?
4. Light brings blessings. What happens to those blessings, and to us, if we don’t become a child of the light?
Chapter Sixteen. Underwhelmed by God
1. Explain how it is that God can want all to repent, and yet He chooses to speak in ways that He knows will leave some in a state where they see and don’t perceive.
2. Do you know of Christians who have received “extreme eye openers?” Share some of their stories.
3. Discuss why it is that people often interpret the fact that God “underwhelms” us to mean that He doesn’t have much to say.
4. Consider the picture presented in Romans 9 of God showing various amounts of mercy and calling for us to respond. If we know that He is working in this way, what can we do to insure we do not miss His mercy?
Chapter Seventeen. Escaping from an Evil and Wanton Generation
1. Describe a current or former “forbidden area” in which you have had a difficult time allowing God’s word do its work?
2. What does it mean that since Christ suffered in the flesh we should arm ourselves with the same mind?
3. What practical steps can you take to ensure that you don’t wither when the going gets tough in your life?
4. What are the “thorns” that most threaten your fruitfulness in God’s kingdom? What steps can you take to keep these “thorns” from ruining your fruitfulness in the Lord?
1. Since God has offered to give to us according to the measure we are willing to receive, how should we live our lives?
2. All of the activities listed in Luke 14:16-24 that kept people from God’s banquet were good, non-sinful activities. What sorts of good, non-sinful activities keep you from God’s banquet?
3. There are few character qualities as helpful as a deep hunger for God and His living reality in our lives. What can Christians do to develop and sustain this sort of hunger?
Chapter Four-1. Naïve Theology
1. How do you feel about theology? Do you see it as mere theory with little connection to practical life, or do you see it as a guide for living?
2. What does it mean to “trivialize even the smallest item of God’s law” (Matthew 5:19)? How does this trivialize us?
Chapter Four-2. Beyond Naïve Theology
1. In what ways can a person treasure the wise traditions passed down to them by previous generations (even if they pick and choose which traditions they will actually follow)?
2. With reference to the woodpile analogy, Christians often fall into one of two camps: the “gather-and-stack Christians” or the “fire Christians.” The “gather-and-stack” Christians study and talk, warning about the dangers of experience-based religion. The “fire Christians” seek power-based experiences, warning about the dangers of dead traditions and empty knowledge. What can we do to both love the written word and experience the supernatural life which that word describes?
Chapter Twelve-1. Some Basics about the Law
1. Explain the difference between keeping the Law in order to be justified and keeping it as an expression of love.
2. What should we do when it seems that God’s Law contradicts love?
3. Describe the difference between moral and ceremonial Laws. Give examples of each.
Chapter Twelve-2. Civil Punishments under the Law
1. What is the difference between a sin and a crime?
2. It is easy to see how a law like “Whoever kills anyone shall surely be put to death” is an expression of God’s justice. Is it possible to also see it as an expression of God’s love? If so, explain how it shows God’s love.
3. What does it mean that God “devises means” for mercy rather than justice?
4. Describe the struggle that Christians face as they try to balance justice and mercy in their dealings with society.
5. How is it beneficial for us to go through the difficulty of meditating on God’s Law, including the parts of that Law related to justice?
1. Describe the struggle a person goes through when they have been wronged and have not received justice.
2. Why do you think God has reserved the right to bring justice for Himself and for legally constituted authorities? What happens to a society when large numbers of people return evil for evil?
3. Describe the sort of fear, guilt, and anger that could lead someone to punish themselves. Why does God call for us to receive His forgiveness rather than punish ourselves?
Chapter Twelve-4. The Dowry Penalty
1. Given what we know about the cost to a society for extramarital sex, in what ways was the dowry penalty an expression of God’s love for ancient Israel?
2. How might our modern society change if laws were put in place to point people in the direction of the message: “Remove your way far from her, and do not go near the door of her house, lest you give your honor to others, and your years to the cruel one; lest aliens be filled with your wealth, and your labors go to the house of a foreigner; and you mourn at last, when your flesh and your body are consumed,” Proverbs 5:8-11?
Chapter Twelve-5. The Fountain
1. Explain how godly fulfillment of our sexual desires requires a lifetime of service.
2. How is godly sex a fountain of life for husbands, wives, children, and society as a whole?
3. Once a person realizes they have misused sex, they can feel overwhelmed by guilt. How would you counsel someone who feels this way?
Chapter Twelve-6. Protecting the Family
1. In a society of easy adultery and easy divorce, spouses and children can feel unprotected. How did the Law in ancient Israel show God’s commitment to them?
2. Discuss how a society’s tolerance of extramarital sex ends up placing pressure on its citizens to practice extramarital sex.
3. This series of books has emphasized that turning from God tends to lead to sexual sin. Many want to justify the resulting misled lust as normal for them. How does the Law confront this and call for us to cry out to God for mercy and grace?
4. What sort of spiritual revolution is necessary for a society to escape from sexual sin?
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