Resources

Tools:

For You This Week

To Try This Week:
Pay particular attention when you read in the Psalms this week in Woodlands in the Word to references to the importance and necessity that your heart longs after God. Reflect on its prevalence throughout Scripture. Why do you think it is such a repeated refrain?

This Week’s Reading:

Monday: Acts 21, 2 Samuel 1-3, Psalm 58
Tuesday: Acts 22, 2 Samuel 4-8
Wednesday: Acts 23, 2 Samuel 9-12, Psalm 59
Thursday: Acts 24, 2 Samuel 13-15
Friday: Acts 25, 2 Samuel 16-18, Psalm 60

For You + Others

Open your time in prayer: Ask for God’s help in understanding your own heart’s longings during this time. Invite God’s Spirit into your discussion to convict, reveal and assure where He sees necessary.
Community Builder:
- Share a story about a time you reunited with someone you hadn’t seen for a while. What did you do? How did you feel?
- If you could meet anyone who lived at any time, who would it be? Why?
Look to the Word:
- Pastor Brian talked about relationships fully and ultimately restored in three different ways. Recall the three words he used and brainstorm their inverses/opposites. How do these three interact together in your experience now? Which one do you long to see fully restored most?
- Pick one or two of the passages Pastor Brian mentioned in Revelation (Revelation 4:2-11; 5:6-14; 7:9-17; 21:1-8; 22:15) that describe our newly restored relationship with God. What about these passages strike you? Do you look forward to this?
- What are your most significant relationships? How are they clouded by sin, time, lack of honesty or health right now? What can you look forward to in heaven in these relationships?
- What are some of your current strained relationships here on earth? What part have you played in that? What can you do in the near future to begin or continue the restoration process that will ultimately be completed in heaven?
- Think through ways your relationship with God is hindered by the fallenness of the world and your own fallen nature. Reflect on how these tensions will be relieved in heaven. Thank God together for the pure and rich relationship He has purchased for you through Jesus.
- Read Job 42:1-6. What is going on here? Why is Job proclaiming this? What brought Job to this place? Now read 1 Corinthians 13:12. How does this help refine what Job is experiencing? What in your life are you seeing dimly right now? Pray for a greater awareness of God’s greatness, goodness, and faithfulness in this situation in your life.
- Read Psalm 27:4. Is this the cry of your heart? Why or why not?
Faithfully Follow: Use the other resources on this page to choose an application that aligns with what you are learning about God and about yourself.

Spiritual Growth Tool:

Woodlands in the Word & Prayer: May 16-20

Click the image above to see the Bible reading and prayer prompts!

Dinnertime Discussion:

What is the cry of your heart? How do you know what the cry of your heart is? Review the memory verse alongside Psalm 84. What do you notice about longings of the heart in these psalms? What are the blessed longings of the heart? Pray for your heart to long after the blessed.

Memory Verse:

On your smartphone, long press this image to download and set as your background image (if it doesn’t download the current verse, try clearing out your cache).

Songs for encouragement:

Developing Disciplines:

Draw a picture that represents your thoughts and feelings about dwelling with God forever. Go outside and quietly ponder Psalm 27 and Psalm 84 and your eternal relationship with God. How do these passages line up with what your picture reveals? What needs to shift in your affections to align more closely with these passages? Pray toward that end.

Practicing Prayer

Pray for those in your life who do not yet know Christ. Pray that the hope of heaven would be part of what compels them toward salvation in Christ.

Series Synthesis

At the beginning of the series, Pastor Brian introduced this topic by saying, “Thinking about there dramatically affects our here”. What’s changed in your thinking about our final home? How has/does that affect your experience of life in the ‘here and now’?

For Further Study

Heaven by Randy Alcorn

Sunday’s Sermon:

RESOURCES FOR DISCUSSING & DEVELOPING SPIRITUAL GROWTH PLANS

Why grow spiritually?

John 17:16-18 is part of what Jesus prays for his followers. Read it together. Discuss what “sanctify” means and the means God sees for doing that work.
Read Psalm 19:7-11. Talk through some of the phrases of what the Word of God is and does. How have you seen these in your own life? How has God’s Word led to your spiritual growth?
“Your habits don’t change God’s love for you. But God’s love for you should change your habits.” – Justin Earley
Agree or disagree? Why?
“Bible reading and prayer are grace-empowered habits and Spirit-empowered disciplines. These are a means God has given for drinking at the fountain of life. They don’t earn the enjoyment. They receive it. They are not payments for pleasure; they are pipelines.” – John Piper
Discuss the idea that these habits are pipelines to God instead of payments to God. How do we guard against these disciplines becoming legalistic? See Ephesians 2:4-9.

What is it?

Bible + Prayer time – learn more here!
Use the “how it could look” section to start the brainstorm of what your own spiritual growth plan could look like. These strategies have come from other Woodlanders on their own path to deeper friendship with God.
By no means do you need to do all of these strategies (in fact, don’t!), but rather use these strategies as suggestions – pick and choose from each category or maybe one strategy sparks an idea for you to build your own.
This is an intentional, thought-through, written-out plan for your spiritual growth this year, which means it will be unique to your season and stage. Give yourself lots of grace while fervently praying that God’s Spirit would grow you this year!

How it Could Look:

Connecting to the Word

- Reading Woodlands in the Word 3-5x a week. Start small if you are new to this habit, but start!
- Listening to the Bible with an app while doing mindless chores or on a commute to work or school. While your hands are busy, tune your mind to the things of Jesus.
- Sometimes using a devotional is a good way to start the habit of being in Scripture regularly. New Morning Mercies by Paul David Tripp is an excellent one. Have your Bible open as you read to follow the Scriptural foundation for the day’s ponderings.
- Use the Woodlands Kids reading plan to read the Bible together as a family. Choose a time when you can be consistent (bedtime, around the breakfast table, commute to school, etc).
- Pick a verse for the week/month/season. Write it out on post-it notes or on 3×5 cards and place those cards in as many places as you can (on the mirror, by the kitchen sink, above the stove, on your dash, set it as your phone’s wallpaper, use the first letter of each word as your password, etc). Read, meditate, pray through your selection as often as you can.

Connecting in Prayer

- Spend time pondering and praying through what you’ve read in the Word that day. Many have linked this time praying through the Word with a walk.
- Set an alarm to pause and pray throughout your day. Pray through a list of people, requests, concerns, for missionaries, for your church, advancement of the Gospel…
- Choose a psalm to memorize. As a method for memorizing, read and pray through the lines at specified times (when you wake up, when you go to bed as you brush your teeth, before you eat your lunch, etc.).
- Pray through the 5 prompts from the What’s Happening @ Woodlands newsletter updates. (If you aren’t getting those updates yet, text UPDATES to 888-225-7675)
- Use prompts that are already set to spur you to pray for things you might not regularly pray for (31 Days of Prayer cards from The Daily Grace Co., The Joshua Project’s Unreached of the Day app, Compassion International prompts for kids, etc)

Pursuing Christ Together

- Commit to your spiritual growth plan with a friend or two and keep each other accountable (with lots of grace) on a weekly basis through text or in-person.
- Make time regularly to share what you are learning in your time in the Word with your Life Group, accountability group or other friends following Jesus (maybe during your regular meeting, through text, or using Marco Polo).
- Join a Men’s or Women’s class that is studying a specific book of the Bible or topic.
- Talk with others about what has helped them grow (people you serve with, your life group, a staff member, family members). Who can you share a helpful practice you have with?
- Leverage your family in your spiritual growth. Engage with your kids so that your spouse can get individual time with God. Serve together. Use the Dinnertime Discussions published weekly on the Woodlands app to process the sermon as a family. Read Scripture and talk about it together.