I Declare Week 1
series overview
Every day we’re making decisions that shape the direction of our lives. Some happen without much thought. Others require courage, faith, and a willingness to trust God with what’s next.
In I Declare, we’ll explore five life-changing commitments that can strengthen your faith, deepen your relationships, and help you become the person God created you to be. Together, we’ll declare our dependence on God, take practical steps of obedience, and discover what happens when faith is put into action.
Whether you’re just beginning your faith journey or have followed Jesus for years, this series will challenge you to take your next steps with confidence.
Faith isn’t just believed. It’s declared.
Before You Start....
This message ends with a decision, and there is a real chance somebody at your gathering is sitting on one. Dave preached it alongside a churchwide baptism invitation, so do not be surprised if the conversation turns personal quickly. Your job is NOT to push anyone toward a decision, it is to make the room safe enough that people can say out loud the thing they have been putting off. The most useful thing you can do is go first, with something current and honest rather than a story you have already made peace with.
Shame is the other thing to watch for.
Dave talked about the voice that says “shame on you,” a parent’s voice, a pastor’s voice, the voice in the mirror at two in the morning, and some people at your table have been listening to that voice for a very long time. If someone shares something heavy, resist the urge to fix it or to hand them a verse. Thank them for trusting the group with it, sit in it for a second, and pray for them before you move on.
You are not going to get through all eight questions, and you are not supposed to. You choose which ones fit your group, and you choose the order you take them in. Spend your time where the conversation is actually alive rather than trying to cover everything.
Be Ready
THE MESSAGE
Dave opened with rumspringa, the season when Amish teenagers get permission to leave home and run around before deciding whether to come back. Most of us run some version of that, he said, we just give it different names. From there he walked through Luke 15, where the prodigal son comes to his senses in a pig pen and then decides to go home, and he named four things that keep us from turning around sooner: pride, peers, pleasure, and procrastination. He closed by flipping the story. The son walked home rehearsing a speech, and the Father was the one running.
ice breaker
Dave told a story about watching his brother use a nasal aspirator on his baby niece completely backwards, squeezing the bulb after he put it in her nose instead of before. What is something you did wrong for years before somebody finally showed you the right way to do it?
Discussion Questions
Five here, and three more in Go Deeper. Take whichever ones fit your group, in whatever order you want. Nobody is grading you on covering all of them.
Dave said “rumspringa is not just an Amish thing, that we run our own versions of it and simply give them different names,” freshman year at college, spring break, the midlife Harley bought without asking your wife. Proverbs says “there is a way that appears to be right” and ends somewhere else entirely. Have you walked one of those roads, where it genuinely looked right at the time? What did it look like going in, and what did it look like once you had been on it a while?
Go first on this one, and pick something you can still talk about honestly rather than a story you have already tied a bow on.
Dave pointed out two separate moves in the story. First the son came to his senses, and then he said “I will set out and go back to my father.” Seeing it and doing something about it are not the same thing, and plenty of us can do one without the other. Which of the two do you tend to get stuck on, and why do you think that is?
3 PROVERBS 18:12 · PROVERBS 13:20
The first two of Dave’s four barriers were pride and peers. Pride sounds like “I can quit anytime,” “I am not going to a counselor,” “I know what God says about this but my situation is different.” Peers is the crowd around you that makes the pig pen feel normal, because everyone else is asleep too. Which of those two is more at work in your life right now, and what does it actually sound like in your head?
If the table goes quiet, let people answer for a past season of their life instead of for today. It is easier to start there, and it usually opens the door to the present anyway.
Dave said the thing most people will not say out loud, that sin is fun, and if it was not fun we would not do it. Then he gave the axiom: “we will change when the pain of staying the same exceeds the pain of changing.” Where in your life are you still tolerating the pain of staying the same, because changing sounds like it would cost more?
In that culture the village would meet a son like this at the edge of town and smash a clay pot at his feet, the community’s way of saying you are cut off. Instead the father runs, which a man of his standing simply did not do, and he gets to his son before the shame does. The village came to say “shame on you,” Dave said, and the father ran to say “shame off you.” Whose voice have you been hearing as God’s when it was never His? What changes if the Father reaches you first?
Go Deeper
Three more, for groups that move quickly or want to push further. The first one is built for the people at your table who love to dig into the text itself.
GD1 LUKE 15:1-2 · LUKE 15:25-32
Start with the two verses that set up the whole chapter, where the religious leaders are muttering because Jesus eats with sinners. Jesus answers with three stories about lost things, which means the younger son was never the only character we were meant to see ourselves in. Now read the ending, where the older brother refuses to go into the party and the father comes out to him too. Jesus never tells us whether he goes in. Why do you think He leaves it hanging there? And when you read it honestly, which brother do you catch yourself defending?
One piece of background worth having in your pocket. The kezazah ceremony Dave described, where the village smashes the pot, comes from later Jewish tradition rather than from Scripture itself. It is genuinely helpful for understanding how shame worked in that world, and it is not something Luke tells us, so say so if somebody asks where it comes from.
GD2 1 JOHN 1:9 · ROMANS 8:1
Dave said that somewhere along the way a voice told you “shame on you,” and you assumed it was God’s voice. Read both of these and work out the difference between conviction, which points at something specific and always offers a way home, and shame, which points at you and offers nothing. Where have you had the two confused?
GD3 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7 · ISAIAH 61:3
Kezazah smashes the pot. Kintsugi does the opposite, putting the broken pottery back together with gold so the restored piece is worth more than it was before it broke. Dave said “that is what the Father does with broken lives, and that it is not gold holding it together but the blood of Jesus.” Where has God already done that with something in your life? And is there anything still in pieces that you have not handed Him yet?
This one often surfaces the story somebody has never told the group. Leave room for it and do not fill the silence.
WRAP UP & PRAYER
Dave ended the weekend by having the whole church declare it out loud together: “With God’s help and the power of the Holy Spirit, I will not put off until tomorrow what God is asking me to do today.”
Ask your group whether anyone wants to name their today out loud, and then pray over the people who do. If somebody named a decision they are ready to make, do not let the week go by without checking on them.