WEEK EIGHT Loving God Lesson Plan

WEEK EIGHT
Loving God
Objective: Lead your group members to a fuller understanding of what it means
to love God, and to maintain a relationship with him. In addition, help your
fellow disciples recognize how the mysteries of the Old Covenant are fully
illuminated in the New Covenant.
Preparation: Think about the relationship between faith and love.
• Read these texts:
Exodus 19: 1 – 8; 20: 1 – 17
Matthew 22: 34 – 40
Matthew 19: 16 - 30
• Prepare yourself by meditating on the story of the rich young ruler.
Ponder why Christ gave him such a stringent command after he
volunteered he had kept all the commandments since childhood.
• If you are not familiar with the concepts of left brain/right brain thinking,
go online and briefly familiarize yourself with the differences.
The right brain is visual, dealing with images, pictures and
experiences. It processes emotional content.
The left brain is verbal, processing words, numbers and symbols,
and performing methodical analyses.
Lesson Plan
Invocation: Express your gratitude that God is good and loving; that he has
demonstrated in love by sending Christ to die for us while we were yet sinners.
Talk with the Father about the love he has expressed to us in Christ.
Q1: In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ will reduce the Ten Commandments to two
very basic ones: love God and love your neighbors. Where did he find the
concept of love within the Ten Commandments

Q2: Dr. Francis Schaeffer has written, “Man can understand and respond to the
One who, having made him and communicated with him, called upon him to
show that he loved Him by a simple command: ‘Don’t do this.’” Does this
statement make sense to you and would you agree with it
Read Exodus 19: 1 – 8
Instruction:
Review the basic details of this text and elaborate on the ideas that speak most
powerfully to your life.
• 19:1 Ninety days into their desert journey, the Hebrews finally reach
Mount Sinai where they are called to worship the Almighty.
Three months may not sound like a long time to your or me, but
these 90 days have been spent on the move in the desert.
The trip has taken longer than one would have expected because
instead of traveling due East, the group has traveled far to the
south and then back north and east.
• 19:3 God calls to Moses from the mountain and explains that his
relationship with the Jews will be unlike his relationship with any other
nation or people. It will reflect two elements:
The works of God which the people have experienced, and are
called upon to remember for generations.
The words of God which the people are called to hear and keep for
future generations.
• Illustration: You’re probably familiar with the concept that the opposite
halves of the human brain perform different functions.
The right brain is visual and deals with images and experiences at
an emotional level.
The left brain is verbal and processes words, numbers and
symbols in an analytical fashion.
Notice that God is carefully preparing his people to know him and
learn about him through experiences that draw on both sides of the
brain. In this way, God calls for a whole hearted response from us.
• 19:7 Moses communicates this basic preamble from God to the people.
They agree to enter this kind of relationship/covenant with God. So God
tells them to prepare for an unforgettable and once in history meeting
with him.

Processing the Text:
Ask leading questions to help your friends think about the ideas that lie at the
heart of this relationship between God and his Chosen People.
• What will the custom of remembering the works of God accomplish in the
lives of each generation of Israelites
• Will keeping God’s commandments make the Jews sufficiently righteous
to be pleasing to God
Will keeping these commandments make them distinctive and set
them apart from other nations
Will keeping these commandments demonstrate a deeper
relationship between Israel and the Almighty
• 20:1-6 Does this covenant between God and man compare more favorably
to a business partnership, a religious partnership, or a marriage
• Q: Some have commented that the tenth commandment, which prohibits
covetousness, is the hardest command to keep. Perhaps. But why is the
first commandment foundational to everything that follows
Personal Application:
Lead your students to consider our utter inability to be righteous before God,
and our core need to know our Creator and be in relationship with him.
• Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn became a follower of Christ while
trapped in a miserable, brutally cold Soviet Gulag. His confession of faith
resulted in part from the sacrificial death of another Christian he knew.
He later explained: “The meaning of earthly existence lies not as we have
grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul.”
How do the Ten Commandments reveal God’s loving desire to
develop our souls
How does our emphasis on soul development demonstrate love for
an Eternal God
• In the incident with the rich young ruler, Jesus clearly wanted the young
man to recognize his complete failure to keep the commandments since
childhood. How did his directive- “sell all you have and distribute it to
the poor-“ underscore a failure to keep the Commandments
• Do you believe that most Americans (and many Christians) are guilty of
idol worship in our 21 st Century culture
• Are there any idols currently on display in your life

Concluding Question:
German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote simply, “Only he who believes is
obedient. Only he who is obedient believes.” Would you agree with him
Benediction:
Pray for a hunger for God and a willingness to surrender in love regardless of
circumstances.