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    A Way Through the Wilderness: Experiencing God's Help in Times of Crisis
    A Way Through the Wilderness: Experiencing God's Help in Times of Crisis
    A Way Through the Wilderness: Experiencing God's Help in Times of Crisis
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    A Way Through the Wilderness: Experiencing God's Help in Times of Crisis

    By Paula Gooder

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    About this ebook

    When faced with times of trial, how can we find strength not in self-help but in God’s help? This five-session course exploring God's promise to comfort his people as they struggle through life's wildernesses.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChurch House Publishing
    Release dateDec 9, 2014
    ISBN9780715146385
    A Way Through the Wilderness: Experiencing God's Help in Times of Crisis
    Author

    Paula Gooder

    Paula Gooder is one of the UK's leading biblical scholars and is passionate about making the best of that scholarship accessible to a wide audience. She is Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, a Reader and the author of numerous bestselling titles.

    Read more from Paula Gooder

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      Book preview

      A Way Through the Wilderness - Paula Gooder

      Acknowledgements

      In the writing of this course I am enormously indebted to a number of people for their advice and expertise. Kathryn Pritchard has offered me support and encouragement every step of the way from the conception of the idea to final submission of the manuscript and for that I am enormously grateful. Her mix of thoughtfulness, intuitive good sense and great sense of humour makes her a pleasure to work with.

      In addition this course would not be what it is without the help of Terri Dauncey, who has provided unstinting, wise suggestions on how to improve both the content of the course as a whole and, in particular, the questions for group work. I am also grateful to Joanna Cox, Hannah Walpole and Penny Pierce and their respective house groups for being prepared to trial this course at an early stage in its development and for suggesting many helpful ways in which it might be improved.

      Contents

      Title

      Acknowledgements

      How to use this course

      The course at a glance

      How to use this course

      Introduction

      A trip into most bookshops will bring you face to face with a barrage of self-help books that seek to help us to find happiness, boost our self-esteem, relax and be less stressed. A lot of people find these books invaluable as they seek to face and work through the many challenges that life throws at them, and one of their greatest values is that they represent a refusal to accept that our lives should be made up only of unhappiness, stress and anxiety.

      I have always felt, however, that self-help is somewhat bleak and lonely: a little like battling up a cliff face on your own. It is possible you’ll make it to the top but the ascent will be hard going and somewhat precarious. For me the essence of the Christian message is that we don’t have to do it alone. We are surrounded by other Christians who, to continue the metaphor, are scaling the same cliff face with us and who can offer advice on the best route to take, which points to avoid and even, when we slip, to pull on the rope and keep us from falling. Even more important than this, however, is the fact that God, who loves us, has let down a rope for us and wills us to catch hold of it. Of course we can go nowhere until we catch hold of it (that’s the self-help element of our relationship with God) but when we do, we discover that we are not alone but are loved with an infinite love.

      What then is the ‘God-help’ that God yearns to give us? The answers to this question could take up a number of books, let alone one short Bible study course. What this course seeks to do is to introduce you to one particular passage (Isaiah 40) that talks about God’s comfort, and to help you to reflect on the help that God tried to give to his people in this passage. There are no easy answers but there is the assurance of God’s love and care as we make our way through life and negotiate the good and the bad times.

      It may seem an obvious thing to say but you do not need to be going through a bad time yourself to do this course. One of the values of courses such as this is that they help us to stock up life’s tool kit. You may not need everything in your tool kit right now but there may come a time when you do. If you have been able to think through some of the issues before a crisis strikes (either a crisis of your own or that of someone you know and care for) then you may feel just that little bit more prepared than you would otherwise: a word of Scripture, a quotation, something wise said by a member of your group might come to mind when you need it most.

      These five sessions focus, in turn, on five elements of help that God has offered and still offers to his people. They include:

      • an encouragement to change and embrace the comfort that God offered

      • a summons out into the wilderness to prepare to encounter God

      • a challenge to become the messengers of the comfort that God seeks to give us

      • an encounter with the God who created the world

      • an encouragement to wait for God who will renew our fading strength with his own everlasting strength.

      This is not the only help God wants to give us, but it’s not a bad place to start.

      Using this course

      Your group

      Some of the groups undertaking this course will be well established and know each other well; others may be relatively new or will have come together solely in order to undertake this course. It will be important to work out the needs of your group and to adapt the course material accordingly. The course seeks to weave a middle way between inviting people to share things about themselves (and people that they know) with the group and being more anonymous. For some groups this will be too intimate; for others not intimate enough. As a group leader you need to

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