Contact: josh@joshhhunt.com

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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.

The Holiness of Jesus

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:

Notice the reaction of the disciples. The sea was now calm but they were still agitated:

They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!” (Mark 4:41, NIV)

We see a strange pattern unfolding here. That the storm and raging sea frightened the disciples is not surprising. But once the danger passed and the sea was calm, it would seem that their fear would vanish as suddenly as the storm. It didn’t happen that way. Now that the sea was calm, the fear of the disciples increased. How do we account for that?

It was the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, who once espoused the theory that men invent religion out of a fear of nature. Man feels helpless before an earthquake, a flood, or a ravaging disease. So, said Freud, men invent a God who has power over the earthquake, flood, and disease. God is personal. We can talk to Him. We can try to bargain with Him. We can plead with Him to save us from the destructive forces of nature. We are not able to plead with earthquakes, negotiate with floods, or bargain with cancer. So, the theory goes, we invent God to help us deal with these scary things.

What is significant about this story in Scripture is that the disciples’ fear increased after the threat of the storm was removed. The storm made them afraid. Jesus’ action to still the tempest made them more afraid. In the power of Christ they met something more frightening than they ever met in nature. They were in the presence of the holy. We wonder what Freud would have said about that. Why would men invent a God whose holiness was more terrifying than the forces of nature that provoked them to invent a god in the first place? We can understand men inventing an unholy god, a god who brought only comfort. But why a god more scary than the earthquake, flood, or disease? It is one thing to fall victim to the flood or to fall prey to cancer; it is another thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

The words that the disciples spoke after Jesus calmed the sea are very revealing. They cried out, “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” The question was, “What manner of man is this?” They were asking a question of kind. They were looking for a category to put Jesus in, a type that they were familiar with. If we can classify people into certain types, we know immediately how to deal with them. We respond one way to hostile people and another way to friendly people. We react one way to intellectual types and another way to social types. The disciples could find no category adequate to capture the person of Jesus. He was beyond typecasting. He was sui generis—in a class by Himself.

The disciples had never met a man like this. He was unlike anyone they had ever encountered. He was one of a kind, a complete foreigner. They had met all different kinds of men before—tall men, short men, fat men, skinny men, smart men, and stupid men. They had met Greeks, Romans, Syrians, Egyptians, Samaritans, and fellow Jews. But they had never met a holy man, a man who could speak to winds and waves and have them obey Him.

That Jesus could sleep through the storm at sea was strange enough. But it was not unique. I think again of my fellow passenger on the airplane who dozed while I was gripped with panic. It may be rare to meet people who can slumber through a crisis but it is not unprecedented. I was impressed with my friend on the plane. But he did not awaken and yell out the window to the wind and make it stop at his command. If he had done that, I would have looked around for a parachute.

Jesus was different. He possessed an awesome otherness. He was the supreme mysterious stranger. He made people uncomfortable.

R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1993), 78–81.