Hoboken Grace · Dinner Groups
Discussion Guides
Weekly discussion questions for your dinner group.
Week 5 has three discussion guide options. Pick the one that fits your group best. If your group completed the Four-Day Plan together, start there. If not, the men’s and women’s chapters work great on their own. You only need to pick one.
Day 1: Present yourself to God. Radical honesty. Bring whatever is actually happening inside you. Fear, anger, resentment, gratitude, confusion. Put it in front of God without spinning it. Anchor: Psalm 73 (MSG).
Day 2: Attend to how you are thinking of God. Examine your functional picture of God. Not the theological one you’d give in a Bible study, but the one that actually shapes how you pray and what you expect. Anchor: Isaiah 6:1-4 (NIV).
Day 3: Purge yourself of what blocks the relationship. See the self-obsession underneath the behavior. The hidden ways you protect yourself from vulnerability and put your own comfort, reputation, or approval ahead of God and others. Anchor: Psalm 139:23-24 (MSG).
Day 4: Approach God as your First Thing. Come to God not as a negotiator, not as a petitioner with a list, but as a child who simply wants to be with their Father. Stop bargaining. Stop demanding. Just come. Anchor: Hosea 14:4-9 (MSG).
We spent four weeks learning the PAPA prayer. We looked at why prayer so often feels broken, what it means to pray relationally instead of transactionally, and how each letter of the framework moves us closer to God. We explored what it looks like to present ourselves honestly, to attend to who God actually is, to purge the self-obsession we can’t always see, and to approach God as our First Thing. That’s a lot to take in.
This week we took it a step further. The Four-Day Plan gave us a simple, structured way to practice each movement of PAPA prayer over four days. Each day had a Bible passage to read in the morning, a reflection question to carry through the day, and a prompt to write out a prayer in the evening. The author designed it to be done with someone else, because tracking the experience together is part of what makes it real. The goal was never to get it right. It was to begin.
If most of your group worked through the plan before tonight, use these questions to reflect on the experience together. If not, no worries. The discussion questions below are built around the same content and work just as well.
What went well? Was there a day or a moment where the plan clicked for you?
What was hard? Where did you get stuck, want to skip, or find yourself going through the motions?
Where did you experience God? Did anything surprise you about what happened when you actually sat down and prayed?
What would you do differently? If you ran through the plan again, what would you change about how you approached it?
Friendly reminder that you do not need to cover all the questions and we encourage you to select and discuss as you see fit. If you need a refresher, feel free to reference the Dinner Group Question Guidelines.
Most of us know the difference between understanding something and actually being able to do it. Reading about it and doing it are two very different things.
What’s something you learned to do by actually doing it, not by reading about it or watching someone else?
In Psalm 73, the psalmist is furious that the wicked seem to have it better. He nearly said it out loud but held back. He didn’t want to discourage others. So he took it to God instead, and that honesty is what led him somewhere real.
No doubt about it! God is good—good to good people, good to the good-hearted. But I nearly missed it, missed seeing his goodness. I was looking the other way, looking up to the people at the top, envying the wicked who have it made, who have nothing to worry about, not a care in the whole wide world.
Pretentious with arrogance, they wear the latest fashions in violence, pampered and overfed, decked out in silk bows of silliness. They jeer, flaunt their elevated position, and strut their stuff. They bully their way with words, and swagger in a walk of pomp and pretension. They think they own heaven and they boss the earth around.
And people actually listen to them—can you believe it? Like thirsty puppies, they lap up their words. What’s going on here? Is God out to lunch? Nobody seems to care. Billionaire bullies! They jeer at God. Is the High God aware of all this? Look at these people—having it made, piling up the money.
I’ve been keeping my nose clean, living a clean life, getting up every morning to an honest day’s work, and here I am, slapped around daily, punished every morning. If I’d have given in and talked like this, I would have been a traitor to your dear children. Still, when I tried to figure it out, all I got was a splitting headache.
What do we lose when we only bring our polished prayers to God?
Day 2 of the plan asks us to examine our functional picture of God. Not the theological one we’d describe in a Bible study, but the one that actually shapes how we pray and what we expect. Isaiah 6 is one of the most arresting pictures of God in all of Scripture.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
Isaiah 6:1-4 describes a God so holy that even the seraphim cover their faces. How does that image of God change what it means to approach Him?
Day 3 is the hardest day. The author asks us to look past the behavior and see the self-obsession underneath it. He says most of us resist that kind of honesty because we’re afraid of what we’ll find. But his claim is the opposite of what we expect.
The author says the more clearly you see your sin, the more amazed by grace you become. Has that ever been true for you? What did that look like?
Day 4 is the invitation to come to God not as a negotiator, not as a petitioner with a list, but as a child who simply wants to be with their Father. The author says stop bargaining. Stop demanding. Stop treating God as a means to something else. Just come.
Ephraim, what more have I to do with idols? I will answer him and care for him. I am like a flourishing juniper; your fruitfulness comes from me.
Hosea 14:8 says “everything you need is to be found in me.” What would it look like to actually live as if that were true?
This is the last week of the study. The author’s hope was never that you’d finish the book and move on. He wanted the PAPA prayer to become a rhythm, a lifestyle, something you return to.
What will you take away and implement into your prayer life as a result of this study together?
- Pray for honesty. Ask God to help us keep bringing our real selves to Him, not the polished version. The Four-Day Plan was a beginning, not a finish line.
- Pray for rhythm. Ask God to make relational prayer a daily habit, not something we return to only when things get hard.
- Pray for each other. This group spent five weeks on this together. Ask God to keep the conversations going beyond the study.
- Pray for First Things. Ask God to keep loosening our grip on second things, and to grow in us a genuine hunger for Him above everything else.
This is the last week of the Papa Prayer study. Take a few minutes before your group wraps up tonight to celebrate. Five weeks is no small thing. You showed up, you read, you had honest conversations, and if you did the Four-Day Plan, you actually tried something new with God. That matters.
As a church this summer, we’re moving into the book of Acts together. It’s a natural next step. Acts is the story of what happens when people who have learned to pray and encounter God start moving. Watch for more details on how your group can engage with it.
Before you close out for the year, celebrate with your group. Acknowledge what happened here. We’ll have some tools coming to help you do that well.