Christ Church Studies

For thousands of years, praise songs have been central to Christian worship. But why so? Does God need our adoration? In this session, we discuss the reasons to sing praise and examine its effects upon us.

Instead of gathering for church on Sundays, why not stay home? Listen to a great sermon, read an inspiring devotional, spend time in prayer by yourself. Millions of contemporary American Christians do just that, and in this session, we ask whether gathering for public worship is actually important, and if so, why?

Why devote eleven weeks to the study of worship? In this introductory session, we explore why worship is worth our time and attention. In fact, we cannot avoid worship, for we are made to worship, and God uses worship to forms us.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is both bad and good news: we are helplessly trapped, and also, God in his mercy has liberated us. Deuteronomy ends on a similar note. It reminds us of the tragic condition in which Israel finds themselves and promises that God will bring redemption. In this session, we examine this gospel given to Israel.

Deuteronomy culminates in a long series of blessings and curses: if Israel obeys God, the people will be blessed; but if Israel disobeys God, the people will be cursed. This sounds so much like a relationship based on moral performance. In this session, we explore how to reconcile these passages with what we know about the God of grace.

All that Moses instructs about God’s laws and commands for the Israelites ends with an admonition to give tithes and offerings. Why so? Why should a God who owns everything require us to give at all? In this session, we discuss what Christians today can learn from these laws of Moses.

How should the past influence the way we live today? In two seemingly contradictory passages, Moses tells the Israelites to remember the exodus and show mercy, and in the next, to remember the exodus and show no mercy at all. In this session, we discuss what to make of biblical remembrance.

We know Jesus’s command to love our neighbor; why do we need these additional commandments in Deuteronomy? Without them, we might not understand what loving our neighbor really means. In this session, we explore how and why loving our neighbors includes loving their lives, property, and marriages.

Many of God’s laws in Deuteronomy seem good to modern readers, especially protections those who are vulnerable and provisions for those in need. But some are less pleasant, such as instructions for capital punishment and war conduct. In this session, we consider these laws and what we can learn from them today.

Power tends to corrupt, and in Deuteronomy, we find multiple laws that aim to limit power and hold accountable those who wield it. For the law reveals how God desires to protect his people from the corrupted hearts of their neighbors.

Strange as it is that God commands his people to love, stranger still that he commands them to rejoice. In this session, we’ll discuss the religious festivals that God calls Israel to celebrate in Deuteronomy, and what we can learn today from their traditions of rejoicing.

Practicing the Sabbath is intimately connected to caring for those in need. That is why Moses tells the Israelites that, as long as they follow God’s laws, there will be no poor among them. In this session, we explore one of the most striking and commonly neglected commands in Deuteronomy.

Idolatry is among the greatest dangers God’s people face in every generation, for what we worship determines how we live. In this session, we discuss how Moses’s warnings against idolatry apply to us today.

Proverbs tells us “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,” and Moses tells us the same in Deuteronomy, instructing us not only to fear the LORD but also to walk in his ways. In this session, we discuss how the people of God are to imitate God by doing what he does.

“You shall love the Lord your God” is, perhaps, the most famous commandment in all of Deuteronomy, but it is also strange, for how can love be commanded? In this session, we explore what exactly this command asks of us and why love is owed.

“Remember…” Moses asks the wilderness generation to reflect on how God has taken care of them, how they have lacked for nothing, and what happens when they forget. God’s deliverance, watchfulness, and provision come before Law, and the opening of Deuteronomy underscores the need for God’s people to consider first how God is dependable and worthy of trust.

Deuteronomy, the long sermon preached by Moses on the shores of the Jordan River, is treasured by Jews and Christians and regarded as among the greatest summaries of what it means to be the people of God. New readers may feel Deuteronomy is nothing more than rules and commandments, but in this session, we’ll explore why that is not the case: how these laws, in fact, are an expression of love...

1 Peter began with the idea that Christians are aliens and strangers in their own hometowns, and now, at the end, it explains why this is the case. Our way of life is patterned after that of a crucified Messiah. We Christians are called to follow the way of the cross.

What sort of tale have we fallen into? That oft-quoted question Sam Gamgee poses in The Lord of the Rings is also the question Peter answers in the fourth chapter of his letter. Christians cannot conduct themselves properly in the world without first knowing the grand story in which we take part.

In 1 Peter 3, Peter discusses the gospel in concrete terms. His revolutionary message seems disappointingly mundane. Yet it is through mundane things, the everyday ways we treat one another, that Christians bear witness to the hope that defines them.

The Romans, like us, longed for the respect, honor, and admiration of those around them. This made the message to submit to and serve one another very difficult, and yet, this is precisely what Peter told them to do: a strange, even revolutionary message, implied by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Christians are strange. Early believers tended to stick out, regarded by their neighbors as people who lived by odd values and morals. Yet according to Peter, Christians should expect such regard, because we are sojourners and exiles: resident aliens of our communities who know our citizenship lies elsewhere.

As we reflect once more on the final vision of Ezekiel, we ask a crucial question: where is the Glory of the Lord today?

Ezekiel ends as it began: with a vision. This final vision of a restored temple and city encourages repentance, faithfulness, and hope for the exilic community. Whether taken literally or figuratively, the message of the vision is clear: the Lord will return to dwell in the midst of his people and his Kingdom will transform the lives of all.

Chapter 37 records Ezekiel’s third vision, which occurs after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. It stands among the most powerful images of Scripture, a vision of new life brought forth from death, and confronts us with a burning question of faith.