Tuesday, April 2, 2013

WELCOME!

Hello all! I am so happy and feel so blessed that you all are here to go on this journey with me! I have never lead or even completed a Bible study before so when God laid it on my heart to do this my first thought was "no way, I have no clue what I am doing" beyond that I decided that if I start this with friends then it will be OK if I mess up along the way.

SO I posted on Facebook that I was thinking about doing this and 3 of my wonderful friends decided to jump on board this very first Bible study with me. I was super excited! Then this morning the self doubt crept in again, I woke up and thought "Oh boy, what have you gotten yourself into. You can't do this, you have no idea how to have a Bible study, let alone doing it online" I actually thought "maybe if I don't mention it again my friends will forget I even brought it up" but as I am sure you are all aware when God lays something on your heart it is pretty much impossible to forget about it, He has his ways of getting through to us.

I got to school and checked my email, and my daily devotional from Proverbs 31 was waiting for me. The devotional topic was all about... you guessed it - self doubt. I knew that it was meant for me. It was written by Renee Swope and at the end it mentioned her book A Confident Heart. I looked at her blog and saw that she was in the process of doing a book/Bible study using her book. It had like 8,000 participants which is a bit OK a LOT more people than I wanted to work with. Besides I felt lead to start a study on my own. I downloaded the first chapter of her book (you can get the first chapter for free here -  http://reneeswope.com/files/chchapter1.pdf) and I just skimmed through it and KNEW I wanted it to be the topic of my first Bible study.

Therefore this blog was created and we will be starting our very first Bible Study on Monday April 15th. All you need to join us is Renee Swope's book A Confident Heart. We will focus on 1 Chapter each week. I will post the pacing guide for our reading within the next couple days, and then each week I will post the chapter number, correlating Bible verses, and a couple of the Reflection/Discussion questions from the end of each chapter. Please do not feel you have to ONLY respond to the questions I post, you can respond to any of the questions at the end of the chapter or anything in the chapter or corresponding Bible Verses that really spoke to you or that you didn't understand and maybe one of us can clarify for you.

I want this to be an open and ongoing discussion about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit and how they relate to our daily life, how we are applying what the Bible says to our daily lives, how we are growing in our relationship with Jesus.

Please feel free to join us in this first of what I hope to be many Bible/book studies.

You can order your copy of the book from the following links -

http://www.lifeway.com/Product/a-confident-heart-p005420600

http://www.amazon.com/Confident-Heart-Doubting-Yourself-Security/dp/0800719603/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364920323&sr=1-1&keywords=a+confident+heart

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/confident-heart-renee-swope/1103093465?ean=9780800719609


**Right now lifeway.com has the book on sale for $6.99 plus tax and shipping which brings it to about $12 I do not know how long this sale will last so if you are definitely interested I would suggest ordering your book from them as soon as possible.

If you are planning on joining us please leave a comment on this post so I can welcome you personally!

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