Contact: josh@joshhhunt.com

575.650.4564

The Great Books

I am pleased to introduce the release of a new curriculum outline. For years I have written four lessons a week, based on the suggested texts of someone else’s outlines. With this new outline, I will invite groups to join me in reading The Great Books and discussing the Bible verses in those books.

What are The Great Books? Here is a partial list. (I’d be open to your suggestions. Email me at josh@joshhunt.com )

• Knowing God, J.I. Packer (available now)
• Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritual Life, Donald Whitney (projected release: Fall, 2015)
• Holiness of God, R.C. Sproul (projected release, late 2015)
• Pursuit of Holiness, Jerry Bridges (projected release, early 2016)
• Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster
• Desiring God, John Piper
• Trusting God, Jerry Bridges
• Being a Contagious Christian, Bill Hybels
• Basic Christianity, John Stott
• Ultimate Priority, John Macarthur
• Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow, Peter Wagner
• Prayer, Richard Foster
• Experiencing God,  Henry Blackaby

I plan to write these first four and then evaluate from there. If I get positive feedback, the plan would be to write about 6 a year. This way, you will always have choices. I will be writing more than you have time to complete. These studies will be suitable for Sunday morning as well as mid-week groups.

Participants will be encouraged to buy and read the corresponding book. I will be writing a study guide in the form of Good Questions Have Groups Talking. These will be available on Amazon, in both print and Kindle versions. In addition, they will be available by subscription as part of www.mybiblestudylessons.com . On this site, churches can have access to hundreds of lessons for about $10 per teacher per year. Churches would be encouraged to subsidize the cost of the books. I do not encourage churches buy the books outright, as they typically do with Sunday School curriculum. If people will not pay for the book, they are likely not going to read it. I would not pass them out for free.

Nothing has influenced my life—except for reading the Bible itself in Christian Quiet Time—like the reading of The Great Books. My dream is that this plan will encourage thousands of Christians to benefit from these books in the same way that I have.

Nearly every church I am in is struggling with the question: how do we make true disciples. Encouraging people to read The Great Books is part of the answer.

How to have contentment in God

Those who know God have great contentment in God. There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God’s favor to them in life, through death and on for ever. This is the peace of which Paul speaks in Romans 5:1—“since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”—and whose substance he analyzes in full in Romans 8. “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.... The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. . . heirs of God. . . We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him. . . Those he justified, he also glorified. . . If God is for us, who can be against us?...Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?...Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?...I am convinced that neither death nor life. . . neither the present nor the future. . . will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (vv.1,16-17, 28, 30, 31, 33, 35, 38-39).

-- J.I. Packer, Knowing God