Lessons:

The Good and Beautiful God, Lesson #1
What Are You Seeking?
Matthew 11.28 - 20

The Good and Beautiful God, Lesson #2
God Is Good
Psalm 145.8 - 9

The Good and Beautiful God, Lesson #3
God Is Trustworthy
2 Samuel 7.28

The Good and Beautiful God, Lesson #4
God Is Generous
Exodus 34.6 - 7

The Good and Beautiful God, Lesson #5
God Is Love
Luke 15         

The Good and Beautiful God, Lesson #6
God Is Love
Isaiah 6.1 - 5

The Good and Beautiful God, Lesson #7
God Is Self-sacrificing
Romans 5.6 - 8        

The Good and Beautiful God, Lesson #8
God Transforms
2 Corinthians 5.17 - 21

The Good and Beautiful God, Lesson #9
How to Make a Pickle
2 Corinthians 5.17 - 21

This book is the culmination of twenty-five years of learning from these great men. In particular, the idea for this book started soon after I began working with Dallas. He kept talking about the need to create “a curriculum for Christlikeness” for individuals and churches. His blueprint for such a curriculum can be found in the ninth chapter of his great book The Divine Conspiracy. Even as he was developing that chapter, I kept pressing him with the question, “Can this really be done, Dallas?” He would say, “Yes, of course.” Then I would ask, “Why don’t you do it?” and he would say each time, “Because I think you should do it, Jim.”

No pressure.

In 1998 I began creating a curriculum based on Dallas’s simple blueprint for a course in learning to live as Jesus taught us to live. In 2003 I went to the church leadership board of the church where I attend (Chapel Hill United Methodist Church, Wichita, Kansas) and asked them if I could invite some people in the church to go through this curriculum with me. They eagerly agreed, and the first year I led twenty-five people through the thirty-week course. Midway through that year I began to suspect that Dallas was right all along. Genuine transformation into the character of Christ really is possible.

Since that time I have led another seventy-five people through it, and the results have always been the same: significant life change. In church, spouses come up to me and say, “What are you doing to my husband—he is a different person! He is more patient and more attentive to our whole family than ever before. I don’t know what is going on, but you can be sure I am taking the course next year.” In addition, this curriculum has been used by high school students in youth groups and college students on campus. When people ask me who the target audience is for this material, I always say, “Anyone who longs for change—young or old, new Christian or mature Christian, male or female, it doesn’t matter.”

James Smith, The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).

Check out our Bible Study on The Good and Beautiful God by James Bryan Smith.

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