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

Would you like to have abiding peace? Would you like to have a heart that is filled with love? Would you like to have the kind of faith that sees everything—even your failures and losses—in light of God’s governance for good? Would you like to have the kind of hope that endures even in discouraging circumstances?

If this is the life you most deeply desire, then this book is meant for you.

A lot of people want to change and would answer yes to these questions, but many of them do not believe it is possible. After years of trying and failing, they lead a Christian life of quiet desperation, longing for change and yet certain it will never happen. So they sit in their pews each week, sighing silently, resigned to their fate.

I used to think that way. I tried and tried and tried to change. I prayed and prayed, pleading with God, begging God to change me. All to no avail. I wanted to become the kind of person Jesus described in the Sermon on the Mount—a person who loved his enemies and never worried about anything. But when I looked into my own heart, I discovered that I not only did not love my enemies, I didn’t even love some of my friends, and I worried about everything.

 Describe your own experience with trying (and perhaps failing) to change. Could it be that the problem was not a lack of effort, but a lack of proper training? Explain.

Change came when, through two gifted mentors, I learned that transformation happens through training my soul. Richard Foster’s understanding of how the spiritual disciplines work and Dallas Willard’s understanding of how we interact with the kingdom of God are unsurpassed. The passion of my life has been to find the answer to this question: How do we become like Christ?

I have come to believe that the problem is not that we do not want to change, nor is the problem that we are not trying to change. The problem is that we are not training. We have never been taught a reliable pattern of transformation.

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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