Being specific

The Leader Guide summarizes Isaiah 6:6-7 with “What has the Lord done for me?” to serve as Step 4 of “Do You Volunteer to Serve?” Isaiah confessed specifically his unclean lips and God responded by changing him to remove his guiltiness and forgiving him of his sin. The key idea is to focus on being specific in confession of sin.

Being specific with God offers obvious benefits over that of remaining general, so how is the Lord working in your life now to encourage confession of specific sins today? Is He using particular passage of Scripture? Some work of the Holy Spirit? A current trial, or failure? A relationship with a particular person?

I think I will remind members of 1 John 1:9 and Psalms 32:5. You could ask members to privately write a specific sin on paper, confess it, and write 1 John 1:9 over it. Then tear the paper up and place it in a garbage can. Or you could emphasize the nature of being specific using selected quotes such as “Milestones must be concrete, specific, measurable events, defined with knife-edge sharpness.” Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

Bill Gaither describes in It’s More Than the Music (chapter 5) how he wrote the song “He Touched Me”. Bill writes, “I had noticed that no matter what a person has done, no matter how deeply the scars have been cut into a person’s soul, when that person cries out to God in simple faith, he or she can be set free from the hurts of the past.” You might consider singing this song as a class (with the lyrics on screen).