There are many people who love Jesus, who have the Holy Spirit dwelling inside them, and who have experience thinking through and applying their faith to many different situations. If you are struggling to cope after the birth of your first child, know that there are likely many in your church who can give practical help or just good advice, having gone through this before. If you don’t know how to help your elderly parents, it is more than possible that someone sitting near you on a Sunday has also grappled with this. If you have no idea how to navigate live in a pure and godly way as a single person, there will be other single people who can encourage you and support you.

Where do you look when you have a problem? When you need to do a task you haven’t done before, or when you find strains and stresses in your closest relationships? When you don’t know the best decision to make when faced with a range of reasonable-sounding options?

All of us have a tendency to be very individualistic when we face such issues. We find ourselves reluctant to ask for help from anyone. Perhaps we are tempted to just think the issue through ourselves, even though we have no experience in whatever the issue might be. Or perhaps we will try to find an answer that doesn’t require us to talk to people.

The most common place to seek answers in our modern world is to look on the internet. Many people ask ChatGPT to answer their relationship-related problems. YouTube is the first port of call when it comes to learning any kind of new skill. We scroll through Reddit comments to get advice on decisions we face and look for online reviewers to help us with purchasing decisions.

Let me encourage you to consider an old-school place to seek advice and answers that you might not have thought deeply about. The local church is full of wisdom.

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