In Real Life Books Who Is God? Engaging the Mystery

Exploring tough questions facing youth today • Also available as an eResource

OPEN THE BIBLE • Help youth apply the Bible to real life and discuss their faith. This all-in-one curriculum guides youth and their leaders on a journey for meaning and identity. In Real Life encourages youth to ask the hard questions, and helps them encounter Scripture in search of answers. In a time of violence, injustice, materialism, and new pressures, this series offers a different point of view. Compatible with a whole family approach.

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Where can we find clues about who God is?

God is, essentially, indescribable—beyond space, beyond time, beyond human comprehension. Yet God desires to be known and to relate to humanity. These sessions focus on a few of the ways we glimpse the character of the divine: in what God created, in the biblical record of God’s faithfulness, through the psalmist’s witness, in the images and metaphors the biblical writers use, and through church tradition. (5 sessions, plus extender session)

Sessions:

1. God Creates • In a culture that is sometimes suspicious of the relationship between nature and God, invite participants to clarify what we can discover about God in creation, as well as what creation cannot tell us about God.
2. God Keeps Promises • In a culture where people demand immediate gratification and often fail to keep promises, challenge participants to understand God as trustworthy and responsive.
3. God Is Present • In a time when people (even parents) often are too busy to “be present,” help participants to understand that the ultimate relationship of life is with God, who is closer than we are to ourselves, whether or not that Presence is felt or recognized.
4. God Is Like... • Help participants to understand how metaphors function in understanding God, and to consider both the strengths and weaknesses of using these comparisons to describe the divine Mystery.
5. God Is Trinity • Empower participants to wrestle with the mystery of God’s being as three-in-one and one-in-three, and to see how each part of the Trinity expands their understanding of God.
6. God in Music / Ways of Knowing (Extender Session option) • Discuss and evaluate what musicians have expressed about God.