Weekly Content for P.A.C.K. Meetings
P – PRAYER
Pray for your time together. Ask God to give you open hearts, open ears, and a willingness to be open and honest with each other.
Wrap up your time together by having guys share any additional personal prayer requests and pray specifically for one another.
You can also pray this prayer as a follow-up to the topic:
Heavenly Father, I pray You give me discernment so that I can make the right decisions and judge rightly. Help me love people well and know how best to serve and encourage them. Help me to see things through a spiritual and Biblical lens, with Your perspective, as I trust in Your guidance. In Jesus’ name, I pray, Amen.
A – ACCOUNTABILITY
Ask guys how their week was. Follow up on last week’s topic about “the wrong crowd” and ask them if they had any additional thoughts about getting stuck in the crowd or the world.
Also, it can be an opportunity for guys to share any struggles or challenges from the week that they need to confess or be held accountable for.
If married, ask how everyone is intentionally serving their spouse…and if a parent, what the biggest challenge is right now.
C – CONVERSATION
Talk about weekly content that connects sports to life and faith.
UNPACKIN’ it Devotional Content:
Thrive With Discernment
The NFL Draft isn’t until April 25th, but the draft season is officially underway now that the NFL Scouting Combine has taken place.
As a result, every draft prospect continues to be evaluated, scouted, and profiled, according to what teams see on their college game film, how they performed during drills at the combine, and what they do at their upcoming Pro Days.
During the buildup to the draft, players will continue to be interviewed by coaches, GMs, and the media, which reveals their personalities and the type of people they are.
The process players go through leads to everyone making judgments about each of them and how they think they will do on the next level.
Every year, teams decide what players to draft and when to draft them, based on how they judge each prospect.
What separates the top teams and elite general managers from the ones who make costly mistakes are the ones who most often make the right judgments about the players they choose to draft. They also make the right call with the direction to take the team or what positions to emphasize in each draft.
No GM is perfect, but some have developed the ability to discern and judge rightly who the best players are and what is the right decision for their team.
Discernment is defined as “the ability to judge well,” “make a smart judgment about something,” or “a wise way of judging between things, or a particularly perceptive way of seeing things.”
As important as it is for GMs to have discernment if they want to thrive in selecting the right players, when it comes to our own lives as followers of Jesus we need discernment to know the best things to do and not do, what direction is God’s best, and to make the right decisions about people.
We often choose to be judgmental about people, but this can be self-righteous, critical, and mean, ultimately leading to misjudgment.
That’s why we need to ask God to give us discernment instead. He can help us understand others so we can know how to love them well, figure out what’s really going on with them, and know when some people or situations should be avoided. We need the ability to discern and humbly judge rightly, which is a gift from God.
Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson writes, “For the only worthwhile discernment we possess is that which we receive in union with Christ, by the Spirit, through God‘s Word.”
To thrive with discernment in all areas of our lives, we must be in sync with the Holy Spirit, walk in obedience, pray, study God’s Word, and abide in Christ.
As we discern God’s will, we will know and follow His commands, and allow Him to guide us in making the right decisions and wise judgments.
Romans 12:2 (ESV) says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
God is the One who knows all and His way is perfect, so let’s continue to seek Him and listen to Him as we develop more effective discernment.
Today, let’s pray these two important prayers: “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ…” (Philippians 1:9-10; ESV).
“I am your servant; give me discernment that I may understand your statutes” (Psalm 119:125; NIV).
I’m Bryce Johnson, and you can UNPACK that!
Further Scripture Reading:
Psalm 119:66 (ESV): “Teach me good judgment and knowledge, for I believe in your commandments.”
Hebrews 5:12-14 (ESV): “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
Matthew 7:3-5 (NLT): “And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.”
Additional Thoughts to Consider or Emphasize or Other Directions to Go:
- Many GMs misjudge certain players and decide to pass on guys who turn out to star on another team…or they draft players who turn out to be horrible fits in the coach’s system.
- Other times, GMs overestimate players whose game doesn’t translate to the next level or develop into the athletes the scouts expected them to be.
- We must discern and test the voices we hear. Is that just me thinking or is that God talking to me?
- With wise counsel, we must discern if what someone is telling us aligns with God’s truth and what He’s confirming to us in other ways.
- We need discernment when it comes to what our true motives are.
- We need discernment to confirm what we are sensing is truly a prompting from the Holy Spirit.
- We need discernment to ask the right questions to someone and determine if they are trapped in sin, hiding something, or lying about something.
- We can trust others to pray and discern something for us which gives us another confirmation of the direction God is leading us.
Podcast-Listen/Watch:
Questions to Discuss:
- What NFL GMs are you the most impressed with?
- What previous draft prospects do you think were the most misjudged?
- In life, in what ways do you find yourself judgmental of others?
- What is the problem with being judgmental and why is discernment so important?
- What are some key times in your life when discernment was crucial to making a decision?
- What is the difference between discernment, wisdom, and knowledge?
- In what ways are you currently using discernment about something?
- How have you used discernment to love, help, encourage, or serve someone?
- How have you grown in your discernment between right and wrong because of your increased Bible study?
- What is an example of when you discerned between something that was good and something that was God’s best?
K – KICKING Around Interesting and Relevant Sports Stories and Topics (You Can Start With This)
Go around the room as each guy shares a thought, a hot take, an observation about their favorite team, or a big story that is going on. Save the conversation about the sports topic from the devotional for later.
THIS WEEK’S SPORTS HEADLINES/TOPICS:
- Any reaction to the NFL combine?
- Kirk Cousins and Russel Wilson’s next team?
- Caitlin Clark’s thoughts.
- Jason Kelce’s retirement.
- NFL free agency.
- March Madness plus Duke vs. UNC.
