Celebration of God’s Grace Part I – Lesson 4 TW Class 2014

Celebration of God’s Grace Part I – Lesson 4 TW Class 2014

grace

Image courtesy of graur razvan ionut at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Last week’s study of our Identity in Christ provided so much great material for our deck of truth cards. I hope you added some new cards to your deck and are reveling in the wonder of who GOD says you are! If you haven’t yet seen it, this Who I Am in Christ document is filled with wonderfully rich truth gleaned from the Scriptures!

The recording of our webinar where we wrapped up Lesson 3, Identity in Christ, can be found here. I will share the discussion questions for the webinar as soon as they are available. You will probably want Tina’s Power Point Slides in pdf format to have in front of you while you listen. 🙂

Now, we CELEBRATE that wonderful NEW thing that God is clearly doing! His grace is an ocean and we are ALL sinking! We are covered, saturated, and floating in an ocean of grace. So far removed from our sin, condemnation is something so foreign to our God’s way of relating to us, “God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense” is free though it cost Jesus everything.

Here is this week’s video:

Video Questions:

1.  How is Thin Within different from dieting relative to this subject of “Grace?”

2. God’s intent is that I would _p___________ the __g_________ to myself every day. What are ways you can do that?

3. How can you identity with 2 Corinthians 12: 7-10?

4. Some people are delivered and never experience a struggle with food and eating again. (I don’t know  that I have ever met someone like this, but I am sure they exist.) What is the more likely type of healing that most of us will experience?

5. God’s grace is a pardon, provision, a constant _p_________, and the p____________ to say no to sin. (03:25)

6. Where does the sense of failure come from that I bring into Thin Within? (03:35)

7. God takes __f__________ and __r______________s it. (04:29)

8.  What does grace give us? (04:55)

9.  How is Observation and Correction a tool of grace?

10. (06:32-07:19) What are some strategies mentioned that you can employ when you struggle with obeying the Lord?

11. (07:50) What are two tools that I challenge you to dive into this week? How can you try to carve time out for this?

Renewing the Mind – Pressing On

Select one new way of renewing your mind this week. Will it be to journal through some of the questions in I Deserve a Donut? I have been at this imperfectly since 1999 and I still feel like I need to renew my mind at least once each day. Barb’s book is one of my favorite ways of doing this!

At our class’ private Facebook group page, some of the members have been posting pictures of their truth cards. They are absolutely wonderful! You could use some of the ideas there (or come up with your own) and add to your spiral bound deck of index cards. What do you do with the cards? Read through at least 5 of them each day…out loud. We can act differently, but we won’t sustain the behavior changes until we learn to think differently! Renewing our minds (Romans 12:2) is a great way of doing that.

If you need more ideas for renewing your mind, click on this search here at the Thin Within blog.

Trade Book Assignment – To Be Completed by February 3rd.

Here is Study Guide Week 4. I hope you are encouraged as you make your way through the material.

Workbook Assignment – To Be Completed by February 3rd.

1. Read, highlight, mark Lesson 4, Celebration of God’s Grace, Part One, on pages B48-B53 or listen to the audio file of Lesson 4 at Sound Cloud.  Discuss it here in the comments section below this post or at our Class Facebook Group.

2. Complete the exercises for Lesson 4 on pages B54-B60. Next Monday before the webinar, respond to the Review questions on page B-61.

3. Continue to add to your “God List.” Can you add 10 things this week? What is your favorite attribute of God that you have added to your list so far?

4. Have a Praise Fest this week when you are tempted to break your boundaries. Share with us how doing so affected you.

5. Use the entries for Day 16 through Day 28 in the Temple Toolkit. Continue to ask the Lord if you should use the Thin Within Food Log, remaining sensitive to HIS leading about this. You can also consider a modified use of it by just recording your hunger numbers. Again, this is optional.

6. Memorize Jeremiah 29:11 this week. Personalize it and add it to your truth cards. “God has plans for me. God plans to prosper me and not to harm me. He plans to give me a hope and a good future.”

7. If you haven’t already, you probably soon will experience a shift in how emotionally sensitive you are. If so, know that this is perfectly normal. We aren’t numbing ourselves with food any more. Emotions we didn’t even know we felt will surface. Ask the Lord to help you process them in a manner that honors him and demonstrates respect for your body, His temple!

How About You?

How is the journey going? What questions do you have? Is there any way that you can offer just a bit more of your heart to the Lord in this?

Blast from the Past – From Exercise Obsession to FREEDOM!

Image Courtesy: ME - It's my daughter and her friend!

Image Courtesy: ME – It’s my daughter and her friend!

I chose this image to open today’s post because it sounds like such a great illustration of freedom to me.

Today, I am blowing the dust off the archives. 🙂 This video is from 2002. (Subscribers, please visit the website to see it.)

Here I share how I went from fat gram counting and exercise obsession to freedom  as I began to trust my hunger and satisfied signals–even through a period of bed rest!  I also talked about the hunger graph, one of the Thin Within tools available for you to try!

If you are interested in trying the hunger graph for additional accountability, you can download a copy from the Thin Within website here. When our Thin Within/God is Doing a New Thing app comes out (we are getting to the last stages of development) it will include, among other things, a hunger graph tool! I am excited about that!

How About You?

Do you struggle with fear any time you don’t get the activity that you are accustomed to getting? Are you free? Are you able to trust your body’s hunger/satisfied signals? Where are you in this journey? If you are just starting out, please share with us in the comments. I know there are many veterans here who would like to support you!

HEAL Group Session 05 – 2013

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This week’s lesson was perfect for me personally this week. Instead of condemning myself for my mistakes (which I shared here at the blog yesterday), I have been able to press on and in closer to the Lord and receive his acceptance, love, forgiveness and encouragement. Thank you for your kind emails. I appreciate it very much!

You know, legalism lurks in the most innocuous of places in our lives. If we aren’t careful, we can be taken by surprise…and even taken hostage. This week in Lesson 5, we had a chance to evaluate this and expose the legalism wherever it was found. Grace is there–abundant and free–ready to wash over, in, and through us! Like a raft floating down a river, let’s rest and let the current of grace carry us along. This isn’t a “devil-may-care” attitude. We know that Titus 2 says “This same grace that brings salvation teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions…” But we also know that God has promised that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ (Romans 8:1). We embrace the truth that God has demonstrated his love before we ever have done a single thing that could possibly have “earned” it. In fact, we could not earn it. Period.

In the video below, I share with you as if we were sitting in my living room (or a hotel room in Houston, Texas, as the case may be!).

There is an activity on the bottom of page 89 called “Walking on the Tightrope of Perfection.” I couldn’t actually do this with you for obvious reasons. 🙂 So I used video clips of young women I accessed on a service I subscribe to. When you get to the first one, I am sure you will see why I say doing this actually was so hard for me. In fact, it broke my heart. It was really hard for me to do this activity–even in this format! I can’t imagine how I would feel if we were together trying to do the activity as it is written. I hope that it somehow ministers to you–even with it’s “shock value.” :-/

What creating (and editing) this video did, though, was to help me to ask God to make me sensitive to where legalism exists in my life at all and where it is expressed to others. If someone–like my daughter, son, my husband–was on the tightrope (that you will see in this video), would the way I live be more congruent with saying those things? I hope not! I fear that the answer is yes.

And then I also wonder if I do that to myself as well. If I am the girl on the tightrope, do I shout at myself some of the awful things that I say on the video to the girl trying desperately to perform, to walk on the tightrope while balancing something on her head, using one foot to move a hubcap on the line, holding the pole around her shoulders–all without “messing up?” As you watch the video, you may evaluate if you do it to yourself as well!

Anyhow, if you watch the video below, please know during the tightrope section that I was VERY uncomfortable with that. Don’t hold it against me. It is a dramatization only!

Enough with the disclaimers! LOL! Before you begin the video, please read Psalm 139 out loud. Ask God to continue to help you to know the truths of the Psalm  full well. 

Please share in the comments section below:

  1. From your study this week How does God want to lavish his grace upon you?
  2. How have you lived under legalism rather than grace?
  3.  What does the verse 1 Corinthians 6:12 mean to you?: Everything is permissible for me but not everything is beneficial.  Everything is permissible for me, but I will not be mastered by anything. 
  4.  What did you think of the tightrope illustration/activity in the video? What have you learned? How can you apply what you have learned to your own life? 
  5. Do the journaling questions on page 90 and share the answers to any of them that you feel comfortable doing so. For those of you without the book, here is the activity–you can join us!  Make a list of your favorite foods. Do you allow yourself to eat all of these foods? Without mentally counting up the calories? Why or why not?  Which foods do you ever restrict yourself from having?  Are any of these foods ever stumbling blocks for you?  What does God’s grace seem to indicate?
  6. Share your thoughts about the following verses:

2 Corinthians 12:9

Hebrews 4:16

2 Corinthians 9:8

Ephesians 2:4,5

Finally, how can we  be praying for you?

I hope that evaluating your life, thinking, speaking for ways in which legalism might be present has been helpful for you. More, I hope you will join me in recommitting to being people of grace. Jesus paid the price of all sin on the cross. All shame for sin was paid for too. One benefit of that payment on our behalf is that we might continue, forever, in the grace of God as an ongoing pardon, provision, power, and presence (of God) in our lives!

HEAL Lesson 5 Preview – 2013

Image Courtesy of Stock Exchange

Image Courtesy of Stock Exchange

The material this week is INCREDIBLE! I am so excited to share it with you!

This week we get a chance to look at our lives and evaluate where legalism may lurk. Legalism isn’t always obvious, but it’s affects are. Like a wind, you can’t always see it, but you can see the impact it has, so we want to invite God to show us where we have bought in to the performance trap, as this is a sure indicator that legalism may be having its way with us.

This week we will see the difference between legalism and grace and one way we will do that is by becoming well acquainted with grace in many forms. This is where this study really gets GOOD!

Do you ever evaluate yourself based on if you ate 0 to 5 today? Or based on if you lost weight in the past week? (Hopping on the scale may indicate you are caught in a performance-based mentality.)

If you are living in a way that how you feel about yourself is based on your performance in some way, you probably feel discouraged and exhausted on the one hand or prideful and energized on the other. That may not sound so bad, but there is no stability on that pendulum! We swing from one extreme to the other. This is what Thin Within calls “The Path of My Performance.” We want to get off of that path and enjoy what God has in mind instead!

Let’s cease striving and know that he is God. Let’s lean into his grace and let him carry us along. In fact, the approval issue has been dealt with. We have God’s love, approval. Let’s tell ourselves the truth: God has lavishly poured grace all over us.

Have you ever thought about diets and how they have so much in common with Legalism? In fact, diets are rooted in legalism. If we have a long dieting history, we may have brought legalism with us (even subtly) into our Thin Within experience.

20 Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules:elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: 21 “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? 22 These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. 23 Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. Colossians 2:20-23

Let’s get the legalistic mentality out of our Thin Within/HEAL journey.

This week, you will get to look at the self-imposed rules you may still have in your life, left over from your dieting history. You may even be combining a dieting approach with 0 to 5 eating. Let’s dissect that mentality this week, too.

Let’s not buy the lie that victory can be bought with our self-will!

God’s perfect love casts out fear and allow us to embark on a freedom filled way of eating and living. Yes, inform your conscience. Turn to the Lord and do it for his glory.

Homework assignment:

  • Complete the Personal Study portion of Lesson 5 – An Aisle of Grace
  • Ask God show you where legalism lurks in your thinking and living. Share with us here what God has shown you already about this or as he shows you this week!
  • Ask him to help you to sense his approval and love for you that is based on Christ’s “performance” at the cross, rather than on your ability to “wow” him!
  • Connect with your accountability partner.
  • Check in here and share how God is at work through the study this week.