Gospel Fluency: The Gospel In My Mind

1/26/2020

Thanks to Saturate the World for major sections of this study.

While the war of the mind is a personal war for everyone, it doesn’t have to be an individual war. It’s helpful to know that the ultimate Helper—God the Spirit—and those in your close community are in the foxholes with you, fighting on the front lines for your holiness. In chapter eight of Gospel Fluency, Jeff Vanderstelt writes:

When I am teaching people how to fight with gospel truths, I introduce some cues to help them discover the aspect of the gospel they may need to press into. For instance, if someone is struggling with guilt or shame for what he been done, I encourage him to go to the cross where Jesus died and remember his words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). We need the reminder that Jesus’s death paid for all our sin, past, present, and future. He atoned for our sin, removed our guilt, and covered our shame.

If someone is struggling to overcome sin, I might encourage her to remember and believe in the resurrection, where Jesus condemned sin’s power. He gives us the same power to overcome by the Spirit who raised him from the dead.

Some are dealing with feelings of inadequacy in their behavior and lean toward performance-based acceptance. If so, I direct them to remember Jesus’s life, perfectly lived in their place, and the Father’s words spoken over Jesus (words that are now ours in Jesus): “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17).

Whatever the struggle, the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus gives life, hope, and power. And by faith in Christ, every attribute, characteristic, and blessing that belongs to Jesus is available to us because of our unity with him.

In essence, fighting with gospel truths is trusting in and putting on ourselves all that is true of Jesus, and therefore also true of us in Jesus.

This week’s group exercise puts that into practice as you consider going from “fruit to root” to “root to fruit” together. If your group is larger than six people, you might want to divide into groups of three or four to make sure everyone gets a chance to participate. We’ll encourage you to “let your group in”—especially if there are areas you’re having a hard time reconstructing right belief. It can feel shameful, but by God’s design you need each other in those areas especially!

First, looking at the Tree Diagrams and considering the four questions, have each person…

Share one or two areas of unbelief he or she processed (unbelief in the sense of continued patterns of difficulty in trusting God in a particular area or type of situation / places in our lives in which we have not trusted God to rule well over us, we’ve desired control when it really belongs to him), along with specific ways God used that process to establish greater belief in his or her heart and mind. This is the process we walked through in our groups last week using some of the x-ray questions.
Share at least one area you need help deconstructing disbelief based on the “fruit to root” process and reconstructing right belief based on the “root to fruit” process.

After each person shares, together as a group . . .

Celebrate God’s work in each person as He worked through His Spirit to establish new areas of belief in former unbelief.
Lovingly serve one another as you help deconstruct unbelief and reconstruct right belief in areas others need help.
Why is it so easy to miss the “root” of our sin and disbelief, and instead try to merely solve or fix the “fruit”? What’s the result, both short-term and long-term of stopping at the “fruit” instead of getting to the “root”?
Apply the gospel, even to this conversation: sometimes it’s hard to get to the root of things. Discuss why it’s difficult to “dig beneath the surface,” and why it’s hard to ask others for help in our own fights for holiness. Consider those reasons, in light of this week’s and previous weeks’ content.
Consider if there are any commitments you need to make to help one another live consistently in light of newfound belief.

If you still have time, look together at Ephesians 6:10-18. List off the items of the armor of God that Paul talks about and discuss which is the most difficult for you to think about putting on. Dig into why this may be. How can you speak the gospel to each other and help to see Jesus as the one who has given this to you already. What do you need to begin believing about him in order to allow you to conquer this?!