Cheer up!
Mark 10:46-52
Connect:
Share how you have seen God in the Highs and Lows of your week.
Remind the group about the different ways to engage with this series.
Prayer:
Pray that God would lead your discussion time and bring fresh insight, conviction, and hope through your time together.
Read:
Context: Work as group to put together a picture of what is happening around the time of this story:
o Jesus’ fame is spreading far and wide, with people travelling many days to see him
o Jesus already has a crowd of consistent followers.
Read the passage together (Videos start next week)
Reflect:
Describe the experience of escaping depression through your own or a loved one’s experience— what is depression, and how did they “get out” of it?
Discuss what we know about Bartimaeus at this time (Mark 10:46-48)
o Blind from birth, beggar, “useless” to society/family, seen as cursed, desperate to see Jesus
o Where did he get the hope that Jesus, a revered Rabbi, would help him— a noisy nobody— when everyone else told him to shut up?
o How does one hold onto hope when everyone and everything around us is telling us to “sit down and shut up”?
Discuss what we see in Jesus at this point in the story
o With all the people pressing around Him, wanting to be healed, having travelled far to be healed, why pay attention to Bartimaeus?
o Why ask a blind man, “What do you want Me to do for you?”
Discuss how faith and prayer work together:
o “Rabbi, I want to see.” “Go, your faith has healed you.” (Mark 10:51)
o Abide in Him, His words abide in us, ask what we will… (John 15:7)
o Ask and don’t receive because of motives (James 4:1-3)
o Asked 3 times, and heard, “My grace is sufficient for you…” (2 Cor 12:6-9)
How do we find hope in a God Who sometimes says, “Wait” or “No” to our requests for physical healing? (2 Cor 4:16-18, James 1:12, 2 Peter 1:5-8)
Respond:
If Jesus were to appear to you in a dream tonight and simply ask, “What do you want Me to do for you?”, what would you say?
Spend some time in prayer together, committing that to the Lord (Matt 11:25-30)
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