We can bring our questions to God.

Pastor Kurt wasn't able to answer all of your questions during the Sunday message, so he answered a few more here.

We can bring our questions to God.

Last week we asked the congregation to write down questions they or their friends have about faith in Jesus. And they responded! In this message Pastor Kurt responds to 10 of those questions.

You may have had the experience in church where you were made to feel (or perhaps even told explicitly) that you shouldn’t ask questions. Yes, questions can make people uncomfortable. But God is not uncomfortable with our questions.

One of the things that we hope is communicated by this message is that we can bring our questions to God. We can even ask pointed questions in faith. We can have thoroughly troubling questions and still move forward in faith.

If you like questions, this is a great week to be here. Questions can help us to go deeper. In fact, in the gospels we have recorded hundreds of questions that Jesus himself asked (stick around because in January we will have a series, “Questions Jesus Asked”).

Have you ever made a decision that you regretted? Your answer is, "of course!" All of us have a nice little collection of decisions we regret. Some of them were inconsequential; others still affect our lives today.The main source of our regret is often we are ashamed of what we allowed to drive our decision (e.g. inattention, inebriation, fear, lust, disordered values, etc.)In this message we look at 1 Kings 22 where we were able to consider what was driving the decisions of three different people and we saw ourselves in these descriptions:

• We, like Ahab, run into trouble when we fail to let God be in charge, like Ahab.

• We don't often follow Micaiah's example to (only) speak as God would want us to.

• We, like Jehoshaphat,run into trouble when we fail to act on what we know is right.

And it's not all about the big decisions either. Sometimes small decisions end up determining our life more than the "big" ones. For Ahab, it was a seemingly small decision to wear a disguise into battle (a Halloween that ended poorly for him). But for Christians, the decision that we may have felt was small at the time -- to open our lives to God's Spirit -- ends up swelling to shape everything else for us. In fact, for people in Christ, there will be a day when we will no longer regret any past failures because all of them will be swallowed up in the joy of our union with our Savior.

So for you, what is driving your decisions today? Is it to make others care for you? To impress someone? To cover our flaws? Or....are we driven instead by our security in God? By our desire to please God?

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