January 22, 2012 Message by Steve Wiens
Practice:
At the end of his message, Steve talked about the journey from “tohu va vohu” (chaos, disharmony) to “exceedingly good” (what God calls His creation after the sixth day), as it relates to your own identity. Spend time journaling about the state of your identity these days, without pretending it’s better than it is. Then, spend time asking God for what you need to help you to return to how God made you originally – as a fully alive male or female. Remember that as you’re journaling out your thoughts to God, you can be totally honest. God will meet you there.
Experience:
Seek out a person of your own gender, who you believe is living in their identity as a fully alive man or woman (see definitions below for a reminder). Ask them out for coffee or for a meal, and spend an hour or two asking them questions about their journey and their relationship with God, in order to learn from them and apply it to your own journey. It’s true that everybody is different, but we need to learn from others who have been where we want to go.
Fully Alive Woman: Fashioned by God with intricacy and strength, she’s learning to open up and provide a life-saving environment in which people can grow and be restored.
Questions:
- When you were growing up, you learned some things from your parents, teachers and life experience about what it means to be a real man or real woman, for good or for bad. Can you identify what those characteristics were, for each gender?
- When you heard Steve’s definitions for a fully alive man and woman, what was your reaction for your own gender? What are your questions?
- Steve invited both men and women to return to their true identity as God made them, by first repenting – men for using their power to simply get what they want instead of giving themselves away, and women for using their strength to close down and either consume people or starve them, instead of creating an environment of growth and restoration. What rose up in you during that time in the message?
- What has your experience been with the opposite gender? What do you think might need to be healed in you as it relates to how you see the opposite gender?
- What do you need from God in order to pursue your identity as a fully alive man or woman?
Fully Alive Men and Women (PDF)
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