Category: Using my study guides

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Thank you for your interest and your appreciative words. Here’s how you can subscribe to this blog by email. When you visit any page on the blog, a little screen should pop up in the lower right hand corner that says “Follow.” If you click on it, you will have the chance to supply an email address. Copies of all future posts will then be sent to that address. You can always unsubscribe at any time. Thanks again for your interest.

Q. Can I get your Luke-Acts study guide directly from you, since IVP no longer offers it? I want to offer a men’s Bible study at my church. I’d like either to purchase multiple copies or to obtain the rights to reproduce a digital version.

I have made all of the study guides in my Understanding the Books of the Bible study guide series available for free download through this blog, since they are no longer in print. You can access them through the “Free Study Guides” link at the top of this page. The Luke-Acts guide specifically is available in PDF format at this link.

As I say on that page that makes all of the guides available, “In reading or downloading the guides, I ask only that you respect ‘fair use.’ The content of the guides may not be sold in any way (for example, by being incorporated into another published book). If you quote from the guides, please acknowledge the source. You may print out copies of individual lessons to distribute to participants in Bible studies, but I ask that you not charge anyone for their copy. Rather, I would like you or your church or other organization to pay even the printing costs. As you can tell, I’m eager for this resource to be made available truly free to everyone. Thank you.”

So you may distribute the Luke-Acts guide to the participants in your group either in printed or electronic form, at no cost. I hope you have a great study with the men in your church. And if any questions come up while you’re using the guide, please feel free to ask them here.

From 2010–2013, I published a series of 14 study guides on individual biblical books and small groups of related books. The series was called Understanding the Books of the Bible. The rights to these guides have now reverted to me, and I am making them available free of charge through this blog for online reading and electronic download. Just use the “Free Study Guides” link that appears at the top of each page on the blog.

I originally started this blog to support groups that were using these guides. The publisher, InterVarsity Press, felt that because people usually approach the Bible as a single reference volume divided into chapters and verses, they could probably use some real-time help approaching it instead as a collection of individual creative works, as my series would lead them to do. So if you start using one of the guides yourself and find that you have a question about it, feel free to ask it. (You can use the “Ask a Question” link at the top of each page.) That was, after all, how this blog got started!

The cover of the John study guide, the first in the series.

Q.  I’m trying to get my small group to study the gospel of John using your guide, but they’re hesitant to begin with a read-through out loud of half the gospel (the “book of signs”), with a read-through of the other half coming up several weeks later.  They think these sessions will be long and tedious.  What can I tell them to encourage them otherwise?

Maybe the best thing I can do for you is to quote from the place in my book After Chapters and Verses where I discuss reading through biblical books, or large sections of them, out loud in groups. This part of the book relates several positive experiences that groups I’ve been in, or have heard about, have had with such read-throughs:

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A campus staff worker in California was going to be leading a semester-long study from the first part of Mark. She recounted what happened when she asked the group to read this whole portion aloud at their first meeting:  “I could tell that the students were not excited about it when we started, and doubtful of how helpful it would be.  But reading it out loud together was engaging.  As we read, people could jot notes and thoughts on their manuscripts.  We took 30 minutes to read the section, much faster than anyone imagined.  Then I gave them time to look for big themes.  They did a great job seeing big themes and putting things together.  I was impressed, and they enjoyed it.  That set us up well for our semester of studying the book.  They knew what was coming in the book and were able to read in depth more in context.”

I had a similar experience in a Bible study I participated in.  This group began its consideration of Romans by reading the entire epistle out loud.  We took turns reading sections of the epistle.  This took just about an hour, so it fit very well within the usual hour-and-a-half time we devote to reading and discussion.  People were surprised that it didn’t take any longer.  After we finished reading the epistle, the leader asked what our impressions were.  Many members spoke about key themes in the epistle:  the resurrection life; the relationship of Jew and Gentile; law and Spirit.  An international student who was reading the Bible for the first time asked, “What is ’righteousness’?”  She very perceptively zeroed in on this term, which is truly a key one in Romans, as essential to understanding everything she’d just heard.  And this was in a first-time encounter, in a second language!

The leader himself admitted that in the past he’d always stopped reading Romans “after the first 3 chapters.” He would get to the declaration that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus,” get himself saved (as he put it), and not read the rest of the book.  Now he saw that this opening part of the epistle flows into an extended discussion of how we can be not just “saved,” but transformed by the Spirit.  In fact, he noted, all of creation eventually gets in on God’s salvation.  When he saw how everything in the epistle flowed together, his understanding of salvation was greatly expanded.  At the end of the evening one of the participants said, “This was the best Bible study I’ve ever been in.”  So a valuable new practice we can adopt in our group Bible studies is to read entire books, or major sections of longer books, aloud together before studying their parts in detail.

This is very close, in fact, to how the New Testament letters were received by the churches they were originally sent to.  They were read aloud in their entirety to gatherings of those communities.  The Bible itself records other times when the people of Israel assembled for an extended reading or proclamation of God’s word.  The book of Deuteronomy, for example, tells us that its contents were originally delivered orally by Moses to a great assembly of the Israelites “in the wilderness east of the Jordan.”  And after the return from exile, Ezra read “the Book of the Law of Moses” to a special assembly in Jerusalem “aloud from daybreak till noon.”  So the extended public reading of Scripture is part of the heritage of our historic community of faith.

Readers of The Books of The Bible have called this to mind as they’ve seen the literary forms of the biblical writings recaptured in that edition.  One pastor told me he could “picture what it would have been like in Colossae when the letter from Paul first arrived and everyone was very excited and gathered around to hear the letter read.  How cool would that have been?”  Another reader told me that while he could “remember being astonished the first time I learned that the early church read whole epistles at church services,” he now thought it would be very appropriate to use the Scriptures in a format like The Books of The Bible for “corporate reading at a small group or congregational level.”  Yet another reader noted, “The Bible is an oral document to be read in community and not just to be studied individually. Paul’s letters often were addressed to churches (literally, gatherings) and were read aloud to those congregations. I think this Bible would lend itself to that activity.  This is something to which maybe we need to pay more attention.” 

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Beyond these thoughts from After Chapters and Verses, let me share that since writing that book, I’ve been in several more small groups that have read through biblical books out loud together before studying their parts in detail, and in every case the read-through was a real highlight for all the participants.  In fact, in one group where we were using one of my guides that covers multiple books, I suggested that perhaps we wouldn’t need to read through one of them out loud, and they wouldn’t hear of it!  They told me how much they’d been looking forward to it.

So in my experience, and from everything I’ve heard from others, reading through a biblical book, or a large portion of one, out loud in a group is not a long, tedious exercise.  The time goes faster than anyone expects, and the experience is a fresh and invigorating way to set up the study of the book in its individual parts.  I trust that your group will discover the same thing!

Q.  In our small group we’re using your guide to biblical wisdom literature to study the book of James.  We have a question about the first session for the book [Session 21 in the guide], in which you have us read all the way through James out loud.  Is this really what the early communities of Jesus’ followers who were sent the book would have done when they received it?  As you say, “it’s not really a letter at all” and “it doesn’t develop like one.”  So would these communities have treated it like the other actual letters they received, which we know they read out loud in their gatherings?

Of course I can’t say for certain what these early communities would have done, but I believe that they would have read the book of James out loud in one of their worship gatherings, just as they would have done for a normal letter, even though, as I explain, James is actually “a collection of sayings and observations about life, written in the same stream of wisdom teaching that flows through Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.”

I suspect these communities would have done this in order to give everyone an overview of what was in the letter, so that they could later return to particular parts of it when questions or issues arose that specific teachings addressed.

I try to highlight the character of the book as a collection of wisdom sayings and teachings (which I say are probably “summaries of, or excerpts from, messages that James gave in the synagogues of Palestine”) by instructing groups like yours, when they do this read-through, to “have people take turns reading the individual teachings that make up the book.” (I explain how to recognize them.)  By hearing these various sections read by different voices, group members are enabled and encouraged to see them as distinct teachings that nevertheless, when taken as a whole, present a coherent view of what it means in practical terms to live as a person of “faith” (James’s equivalent of the “fear of the Lord” in Proverbs).

It sounds as if your group is off to a great start, and I’m sure you’ll be getting a lot out of the rich and profound wisdom of the book of James!

Q.  Can I receive your Bible studies through postal mail?

Yes, you can get printed editions of all of the study guides in the Understanding the Books of the Bible series through the mail, even though they can also be ordered through your local Christian bookstore, or downloaded in electronic formats.

Probably the easiest way to get a printed copy of any of the guides, since you’re already on this blog, is to point to the link at the top right of this page that says “The Study Guides.”  A drop-down menu will lead you to pages that describe each guide.  On each specific page, you can click on the link that says “Printed Edition,” which will lead you to an amazon.com page where you can place an order to have the guide sent to you in the mail.  (Just be sure to select “Paperback” rather than “Kindle.”)

Thanks very much for your interest, and I hope you enjoy using the guides!

Q. Our Bible group is wondering if you can give us your thoughts on the following question from your John study guide so we can better understand what you were thinking when you asked the question (in Session 20, 2nd discussion section):

In the gospel of John, Jesus speaks both of his unity with the Father (“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father”) and of their distinct personalities (“the Father is greater than I”). They are one, but they’re distinct. What are the dangers of losing sight of either side of this paradox, and saying either that the Father and Son aren’t distinct, or that they aren’t one?

As I mention in that particular discussion section, the unity that Jesus enjoys with the Father even while the two of them remain distinct persons is “one of the most profound and difficult concepts in the gospel of John.”  So I’m not surprised that you’ve asked about this question, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to expand on it a bit further here.

Basically I wanted groups like yours that are working through the gospel of John to think about what is lost from the paradoxical but magnificently balanced picture we get in that book of Jesus’ relationship with the Father if we lose sight of either their unity or their distinctness.

For example, if we see Jesus as operating too independently from the Father (losing sight of their unity), we might conclude that he is able to do the significant things he does simply because he’s divine himself.  In that case, we miss out on the way Jesus in his humanity provides an example and model for all of us of how to be a channel for God’s powerful works through attentive obedience.  Jesus explains earlier in the gospel, “The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does.”  This is the phenomenon of “co-operation” (working together) that I explain in Session 21 of the study guide and it is a model for all followers of Jesus today.

On the other hand, if we lose sight of the way Jesus is nevertheless a distinct person from the Father, we might make the mistake of believing that he was in some way just an “appearance” or “manifestation” of God on earth.  In that case he would not have taken up our humanity and he would not have become the agent of our salvation as a representative of the entire human race, as a “second Adam” (as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians).  Or, as the second-century Christian theologian Irenaeus of Lyon expressed it (as described in this post), “What has not been assumed has not been healed.”  If Jesus was just a “manifestation” of God and he did not take on our humanity, then he did not redeem that humanity.

In addition, if we don’t see Jesus and the Father as distinct, then we can fail to recognize the amazing community between persons that lies at the heart of the Godhead.  John writes in his first epistle that “God is love,” and we come to appreciate some of what this profound declaration means when we recognize that a loving community between persons that has existed from all eternity, and which will have no ending, is a constitutive part of the very essence of God.

I wonder, however, whether in expanding on my original question here I might be introducing further profound and difficult concepts in order to try to explain the first one!  But that’s the nature of John’s gospel:  it poses profound paradoxes for our consideration, but it then rewards us with deeper insights into the character of God when we ponder them, even though we can never resolve them completely.  Those are the rewards I wanted for groups like yours when I invited reflection on the paradox of Jesus’ simultaneous oneness with and distinction from the Father.

I hope you continue to have a good experience using the John study guide in your group, and thanks again for your question!