Iron Sharpens Iron
Studying God’s word

The kickoff meeting for OFRBC’s new Men’s Bible Study, Iron Sharpens Iron, was a great success this morning if turnout, learning, and fellowship are indications of success.

Twenty-six men met this morning to study the concept of making disciples and being disciples of Christ. As part of our study, Pastor Mike challenged us to consider which of the six types of people as described in Gordon Macdonald’s Restoring Your Spiritual Passion most closely resembled each of us:

  • Very resourceful people: People who stimulate and challenge the ministry leaders. Those whom the ministry leaders consider mentors.
  • Very important people: People who share with the ministry leaders in their ministry, often considered associates.
  • Very trainable people: Those who have potential for ministry, who can be trained by the ministry leaders.
  • Very nice people: Very nice people who add little to the ministry and do very little ministry themselves.
  • Very draining people: Those who could easily consume most of the ministry leaders’ time and energy. They are takers who seldom become producers or givers—needy folks who drain the ministry leaders of their strength and time.
  • Very nasty people: Those whose life’s calling seems to be to harass and trouble the ministry leaders. Similar to the Pharisees.
Pastor Mike Teaches
Pastor Mike teaches the men

As Mike drew our attention to Luke 6 and Jesus’ choosing of his disciples/apostles and Jesus’ sermon on the mount (including the Beatitudes), we were directed to reflect on the fact that Jesus made it clear that to be true disciples, we must be willing to sacrifice earthly things. We were asked: 1) Are we willing to make those sacrifices? 2) What roadblocks in our lives are keeping us from being true disciples? 3) What strategies can we devise to remove those roadblocks through God’s power?

This was an outstanding time of study and fellowship. If you didn’t make it to this meeting, don’t miss the next one. You won’t regret it!

We will be meeting the second Saturday every month.

Resources mentioned in today’s meeting:

To read PDF files,
get the free Adobe Acrobat Reader here.

When I Don’t Desire God by John Piper.
This is the full version of this book in PDF format. This has been provided by Desiring God Ministries. You may print this out and use it to further your study of this morning’s discussion.

This book is also available in the “Downloads” section of the OFRBC web site.