Welcome to the Mariners Church Life Group Leader Podcast. This weekly conversation is designed to equip and resource youth to build a healthy life group community that studies God's word, practices spiritual rhythms, and changes the world together. Hey Life Group leaders, welcome to the weekly podcast. This is Kim.
I'm so excited to be your host today and we have Tiffany with us today. Welcome Tiffany Lyons. Hey, hey, super glad to be here. Awesome to have your input and the joy that you bring and the love that you have for Life Groups.
So we're excited to share with you Life Group leaders from the message, grateful for God's will. Great is it that grateful is landing on Thanksgiving weekend preparing us for this whole week ahead. I love that word, grateful. Amazing.
Yeah, so good. So grateful for God's will. That's a huge statement for sure to be able to be grateful for God's will. And we're going to land just on the grateful word first and that posture and hopefully help prepare us for time with family and friends as we celebrate Thanksgiving.
If you guys are having a friend's giving next week, you can still put some of this in there. Hopefully you've had some sweet time with your group already to share what you're grateful for and to give thanks together. If not, hopefully it's having this coming week and it will be a beautiful time together. But let's start our time together today by reading the section of scripture.
We're in James chapter 4, 13 through 17. It says, come now, you who say today or tomorrow, we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there or do business and make a profit. Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What your life will be for you are like a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
Instead, you should say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. It is sin to know the good and yet not do it.
Wow, what a great passage. To be grateful for where we are, for what we have, for a God who sees us and loves us and knows us and trusting him that his will is better than ours. His will is good and he loves us so much. What stands out to you from that section of scripture?
Tef will be here through that. I hear this idea of reminding us of a reality that we often forget about because it's easy, even as Christians. My guess is if you're a life leader, you've read this verse before, you've read these verses before and we have to remind ourselves all the time because it's so easy to think that we are in complete control of our lives, that we are making our plans and that those plans are what we can expect. Those plans are what we can plan for and this reminds us that yes, we can make plans.
It's not bad to make plans, but at the end of the day, we're actually not in control of our lives. That God is the one who is in control of our lives. He knows what tomorrow is going to look like in the next year or the next 10 years. He knows all of it and it puts it all in perspective, especially that part about our life is like a vapor.
It can be a discouraging thing or it can be a okay in light of all of eternity. This life that I have that seems like it's going to be a long time is actually not as long as we think and it helps us prioritize what we should be doing and what we should be thinking and how we can think about how to spend our days and our years. So true. While you were saying that, it made me think we can make all the plans and be in control of things and in the world we live in, there's a strength in that.
That seems to be admired, right? If you move forward with confidence. But I also think about when I was little and my dad was in charge of a decision. There was such safety in that I didn't have to know what we were going to do tomorrow or I didn't have to decide where we were going to live or what we were going to have for dinner.
Like I knew that I was protected because my mom and dad were caring for me and it was okay then. So what happened between then and now as an adult that we forget to lean into the one who loves us the most and is there to protect us. What a beautiful thing that is to have his shield around us. That's so good.
That's so good. It's probably because you believed that your dad loved you and that his plan was actually going to be for your benefit. I wonder if it could be that as we grow up. We start to think that I am now the chief of like as far as what am I trying to say.
I'm trying to say that like it's easy for us to now think we are the only ones that are out for our benefit and out for the best version of our lives. And it's so refreshing to remember we have Heavenly Father who just like your dad is actually looking out for us and is wanting the best things for us. It is refreshing because when we run full speed ahead without seeing all the pieces and just trying to move forward and feel that pressure of the decision it changes the decisions we make many times I was speaking for my own life. It doesn't change the decision because I think I have to make a decision.
If I just waited and ran into Jesus to show me his will to go before me I think the decisions will be different and better. So good. I'm not sure for sure. Yeah such a good passage.
I know your dad is a pastor too we talked about this before. We both grew in Pastor Holmes. So what do you guys do on Thanksgiving speaking of gratefulness and dads and sharing that together. Do you have some special traditions as you come to the table?
We do. Every Thanksgiving we gather together and before we eat we are all standing around the table and my dad especially as of late he gets really just like sentimental. But it's beautiful because we take so much for granted you know and so he just reminds us of how grateful we are for our country but more importantly how grateful we are for Jesus and for our freedom from sin and it's just the most beautiful thing and often as he sharing it's not uncommon for him to tear up a little bit at just the goodness of God in our lives and then as we're sitting and eating we ask each other okay what are you grateful for this past year. It's been really special because at the beginning of our year as a family we do this thing called Dream Big and we write down prayer requests and we talk about God what do we pray that you'll do this year and so we're intentional to pray for a lot of stuff and it's been really beautiful to see some answered prayers and so you know last year we sat around the table and my brother-in-law was there for the first time and I was like teary and I was like Kevin we've been praying for you for a long time.
I just didn't know your name. Like we've been praying that God would give Holly a really great husband and this year we're going to get to look at my niece and say like we've been praying for you for a long time. So it's beautiful. That is so beautiful and it's so good for our hearts.
Yeah. Gratefulness is so good for our hearts. If we set out to be happy and we miss the fact that gratefulness is what creates the happy in us we miss the richness of that and being able to celebrate the things you have dreamed for that is so beautiful. So beautiful.
How much you can what do you guys do? Yeah we do kind of the same thing. I mean we get the food on the table so I think there's this urgency to eat it before it's cold. Yeah.
You know so we pray together and give thanks and then we start eating and while we eat we talk about what we're going for so the food does not just get cold. Super smart. Last year we did a blessing box that we added to for all of fall and we just dropped things in so some of the thinking was already done and it was a little bit more widespread and creative but then during the dinner we just emptied out that blessing box and talked through the things that we had written down so it's really special to have that time for that purpose. Like to miss that opportunity would feel kind of empty in our family.
So my encouragement to you as a life group is to don't miss that in your life group family. Make sure you spend time talking about what has transpired this year. You may have people that have lost jobs, gotten new jobs, lost the parent walked through some really difficult things but they've seen God move and to celebrate those would be transformational for your group to be able to sit in those moments together really beautiful in that space and in that seeing God's will is far and above better than our will and how he has worked in those things of this year to surprise us to bless us to help us see who he is. There's some questions in your book that we hope you will get to some of them.
I think gratefulness and thanksgiving we just go. Don't we just go on a roll with conversation but there's some great questions in here. One of them in the lookout section as we move towards that most people want full control of their lives what may be at the root of the common desire or control. What do you think of that?
You know I wonder if the root could be for some this idea of I'm in control and I know I'll be happy or we think that if we are the ones in charge then it's going to go all our way and so I wonder if there's a bit of that. I think about my oldest niece four years old and we don't have to do assertiveness training for this girl. She is like a leader and that's a nice way of putting it. And so she is always she always has a plan.
She always wants to do something and she's so furious when it doesn't happen the way she wants it to happen. And I think about I think it's sometimes easier to understand ourselves when you look at kids because it's so simple but I think the same things are true. So when I think of my sweet niece Eleanor if she wants to watch a movie but we say no we're done with TV or something like that the reason she's upset is because she thinks to be the most joy field in that moment is for that particular thing to happen. And if that thing doesn't happen then joy is now off the table.
And so I think that we see it so clearly in kids and even if I'm turning off the TV to take her to Disneyland like she doesn't know what's next you know what I'm saying like they don't always know what's next but you as the adults as her and see I know what's next and so it's better. It is better. I don't always take her to Disneyland or drop TV but we see the whole and we see that it's actually going to be so much better for her in the long run. I wonder if we can sometimes act like four-year-olds when we don't get what we think we want when we are striving for control and we lose it and it doesn't go the way we want.
We start to you know metaphorically hopefully metaphorically throw a fit. And so it's because we're just confident that that was the one thing that was going to bring us joy and happiness and we can't see how maybe God's sovereignty is going to guide us somewhere else. That's right because we hold on tight to it like double fisted like hold on tight but this is the way it's going to be. Yes.
I'm going to get this house. I'm going to get this job and when we don't to pry our fingers open and to be open handed to whatever God has knowing that he knows it's far better. Yeah. We just don't see that picture yet.
We don't. We don't. And sometimes we have to go off on a tangent again sorry to do this but sometimes we have this idea of even not just where we want to go but we think it's a particular path. And often God has a you know perhaps a different like route to get us there.
And I'm just reminded of the story of Jesus going to the pool of Bethesda and sees the man who has been laying there for I forgot how long 30, 35 years something like that. Don't quote me on that but it's a long time. And this man had been staring at this pool because there were times where the pool there were angels that did something like that. Thank you.
The water was stir and if you got in first you got healed. So in his mind that was the equation for healing was this pool was like the number one thing and then Jesus comes and asks do you want to be made well. And instead of saying yes he actually says let me explain like there's always somebody who goes before me no one's here to help me get into the pool and he was talking to the God of the universe and explaining why his path was still the right path and it was just like if only Jesus could let him get into the pool he didn't realize Jesus didn't even need the pool to heal him. And so that's right.
Yeah. So sometimes we can be like that man staring at the pool staring at the only path we think to get to the thing we really want and Jesus is right there with us and offer something we don't even see. And we need to be open handed to be able to see that open hearted totally. I love the looking questions here.
I think the end of the calendar here always makes us lean in a bit more to be this algebraic to be thoughtful of what this year has and looking ahead to the next year. But what could be different? What could be different? How have you seen God's hand work in your life?
First of all because when we look back and we gain faith from knowing God has worked. He has been here. He has not forsaken me. And what do I need to do differently?
What am I afraid of? What's the thing that holds me back the most from being grateful for God's will and being able to sit in that uncomfortable waiting space sometimes that space in between not knowing what's going to happen but knowing God's good. What's the thing that keeps me from that? Thinking about those pieces and talking about them as a life group as we head into 2025.
How could it be different this year? What do I need to let God work? That could be a really beautiful conversation. Totally.
Take you through the next week or two, right? As we're finishing up this series, we'll have one more week. You can be serving together. You can be celebrating the season together.
I know there's so much going on. But these rich conversations gifted to us through the book of James are life transforming and will be good for us. You know, as I think about this look in question, you know, to all of your life, your leaders, I would suggest taking a look at this beforehand. You're listening to the podcast beforehand.
So you're already nailing it and coming up with your own story and looking for stories that, you know, people are not impressed by our strengths, you know, but they feel connected to us by our weaknesses. And so being really open and honest of like, ooh, this is actually going to cause like a little bit of pain to share this out loud. I think is the best way to help people describe the things that they're afraid of and the things that they're scared of as well. It breaks the ice.
Totally. It shows an example of vulnerability and it opens the door so much for people to share. Yeah, that's a really great point. Yeah.
And even in your families, yes, I'm going to go there. Even around your family table, some of them are stressful, some are fun, but maybe you as a life group leader, as a Christ follower, as a brother or sister, daughter or son, maybe you start that conversation around your tables this Thanksgiving season, this Christmas season. Mm hmm. What are you grateful for?
What's happened this year that has challenged you? Where have you seen blessings in your life? And we're going to pray that gratefulness comes from that and that the hand of God will be on your family and your times of sharing and with your group as well. We're so thankful for you, grateful for you.
What you pour into the people in your group is just beautiful and we're so thankful that God has you here right now for this time and place. And we pray blessings over you.