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 (available now)
• 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.

What is Holiness?

We are pleased to announce the third Bible Study in our series, The Great Books. The newest Bible Study is on R.C. Sproul's classic, The Holiness of God.

The Holiness of God forever changed my view of God. I developed a deep and life-changing respect for God that has shaped my life. My prayer is that this study will help many more believers explore the truths of this great book.

Here is an excerpt:

Here we are, already in the third chapter of this book, and I still have not defined what it means to be holy.

I wish I could postpone the task even further. The difficulties involved in defining holiness are vast. There is so much to holiness and it is so foreign to us that the task seems almost impossible. There is a very real sense in which the word holy is a foreign word. But even when we run up against foreign words there is always the hope that a foreign language dictionary can rescue us by providing a clear translation. The problem we face, however, is that the word holy is foreign to all languages. No dictionary is adequate to the task.

Our problem with definition is made more difficult by the fact that in the Bible the word holy is used in more than one way. There is a sense in which the Bible uses holy in a way that is very closely related to God’s goodness. It has been customary to define holy as “purity, free from every stain, wholly perfect and immaculate in every detail.”

Purity is the first word most of us think of when we hear the word holy. To be sure, the Bible does use the word this way. But the idea of purity or of moral perfection is at best the secondary meaning of the term in the Bible. When the seraphim sang their song, they were saying far more than that God was “purity, purity, purity.”

The primary meaning of holy is “separate.” It comes from an ancient word that meant, “to cut,” or “to separate.” To translate this basic meaning into contemporary language would be to use the phrase “a cut apart.” Perhaps even more accurate would be the phrase “a cut above something.” When we find a garment or another piece of merchandise that is outstanding, that has a superior excellence, we use the expression that it is “a cut above the rest.”

R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1993), 55–56.