Talk (Guilt and forgiveness / What Women Want)
Talk Introduction
- In our day to day lives, we experience loads of different feelings
- Some are easy to cope with
- Some are hard.
- Tonight we are going to talk about two things that I think a lot of us
find hard to cope with: "Guilt and forgiveness"
- In a minute, we're going to watch a clip from a video, but before we do
that, I'd like us to think further about what those words mean
- What does the word guilt make you think of?
- What words / feelings come to mind?
- Guilt is "A feeling of responsibility or shame for wrongdoing etc."
- Forgiveness is "1. To give pardons for a fault etc. 2. To cease to
resent: 'to forgive one's enemies'. "
- Guilt is a bit like when you blame yourself for doing something wrong
- What does the word forgiveness make you think of?
- What words feelings / come to mind?
The middle bit
- The clip starts when Mel Gibson, who plays the part of Nick Marshall, goes
to see his daughter Alex at the prom
- Later, he tries to make up with Darcy…who got fired from her job because
he stole all her ideas…
- [What Women Want – the last 11 minutes]
- What do you think Nick (Mel Gibson) was feeling guilty about?
- He lied / he forgot / He stole her ideas
- What kind of things can we feel guilty about?
- Things we have done that have gone bad …
- Things we have not done …
- If you could go back in time and change something, what it be?
- What would you have changed about last week?
- Sometimes people feel guilty about things they had nothing to do with. For
example:
- Blaming your self because your parents get divorced
- Blaming your self because someone died or got ill
- Blaming your self because of what your parents did…some people from
Germany feel guilty because of what their country did in the past
- Why do you think people do that?
- Have you ever felt guilty in that way?
- Guilt is very powerful feeling…it can mess us up big time
- Do you think God wants us to feel guilt?
- What about the Ten commandments?
- [Read one or two of them out - Exodus 20]
- Guilt can end up controlling our lives...
The Bible bit
- Psalm 32 v1-7 Page 499 Verse 3:
"When I kept things to myself, I felt weak deep inside me. I moaned all day
long"
- Are you the kind of person who keeps stuff to themselves, locked
inside?
- Why?
- Do you talk to your friends / parents about this stuff?
- Do you talk to God about this stuff?
- The Bible tells us it helps
- Verse 5 says "…I will confess my sins to the Lord and you forgave my
guilt"
- We are told this all over the Bible
- What ever it is we are carrying around…God can help us with it
- So why do we carry guilt around with us?
- Sometimes we don't want to admit it…
Conclusion
- There are things in all of our lives where we need to seek Gods
forgiveness
- You know what they are…
- But the problem is, we keep these things locked inside…
- May be because we don't want to say anything out aloud…
- So I thought we'd try something a little different…
- [Hand out big lumps of blue tack]
- I'm going to give you a couple of minutes, and want you to make something
that to you expresses where you are at…and then we will pray…
- [Pray]
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Copyright 1998-2003 Nigel Coates