Faith Under Fire 3 Tough Faith Questions Participant's Guide

Tough Faith Questions Participant's Guide Copyright © 2006 by Lee Strobel and Rocket Pictures Requests for information should be addressed to: Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530 ISBN-10: 0-310-26856-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-310-26856-7 All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. The website addresses recommended throughout this book are offered as a resource to you. These websites are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement on the part of Zondervan, nor do we vouch for their content for the life of this book. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other - except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Interior design by Angela Moulter Printed in the United States of America 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 - 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Session 1 Is Anything Beyond Forgiveness? -Read It! Keeping Score? I wonder if God bothers to keep track of how well human beings perform here on earth. If he does, it seems like he would need a massive computer with sophisticated software to help him remember how we're doing. Maybe he uses a point system to track sins. If that's the case, he's probably got a complex mathematical formula to calculate all the trouble we cause. So what's God's scheme? Maybe something like this: There are little sins - can they even be counted as real sins? - like telling a white lie to make someone feel better about her bad hair day or sharing a bit of gossip picked up at the water cooler to satisfy someone's curiosity. No one seems too alarmed by these indiscretions - there's no harm done here. The tracking system might assign only a few points to those "mistakes." Let's say they get a 1 or 2. You're only in trouble when you get a lot of them piled up over time. The points start to add up more quickly with weightier sins. Think back to when you lied to your seventh-grade teacher to get out of detention, peeked at Sally Goodman's test answers during Chemistry, or stole a candy bar from the soccer snack bar. Those should get more points than a white lie. Let's say you earn 10, 12, or 14 points for those. Then there are those arguable sins, the things that one person sees as a sin and another person laughs about as nothing. What about eating ten more crab legs at the all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, even though you weren't hungry: One person calls it gluttony - 35 points? - while someone else calls it a great deal for the money - no points, only calories! You called someone a name that shouldn't be repeated in mixed company. You noticed that the person felt wounded. What do you think, maybe a 56? But then if you were to actually hit or punch a person, how much worse would that be? 62 points? Unless you're boxing, of course - that's zero. Then there are the big ones. How about stealing stuff worth over a thousand dollars? What about sleeping with someone else's husband? Are those in the upper 90s? They'd better be! What about murder? How many points represent a life? Nothing less than a thousand points in my book. Then again, maybe God should add another scale to track all the good things we do to bring our points down. It would be only fair - just like our court system, where we pay our debt to society by reimbursing for damages or doing time according to the enormity of our crime. Maybe if we sing Christmas carols at the nursing home, we bring our total down 10 points. VoluStrobel, Lee is the author of 'Faith Under Fire 3 Tough Faith Questions Participant's Guide', published 2005 under ISBN 9780310268567 and ISBN 0310268567.