During the summer 5 ladies met weekly to listen to lectures on the Life of Christ from a Jewish Perspective. Because two of us have husbands studying the Gospel of John with Bible Study Fellowship and we all have friends who will be studying the Gospel of Luke With Community Bible Study we decided to study the Gospel of John. If you want to visit our group and participate in the discussion, I suggest you read the Gospel of John through to find out John's purpose in writing this gospel, he does clearly state it in one place in his book.
All of our discussions will springboard off of John's purpose to see how he accomplishes his purpose in his book.
We meet on Thursday evening from 7-9 pm.
Our first meeting will be September 10 at St Matthew, room 305.
If we have less than 10 ladies, after that, we will meet in my home in Commerce Township northeast of the Duck Lake road/Commerce Road intersection.
We will be using Precept Ministries inductive study materials.
Inductive means you go first to Scripture to see what it says before consulting Commentaries.
There are three levels of study materials available from Precept Ministries for studying this gospel with different amounts of homework suggested.
The cost also differs.
You would be welcome to join us for this study using whichever book you preferred to use for your study and joining us once a week to discuss what you learned from your study that week.
1. 31 week study: "Precept upon Precept" suggests 5 hours of homework a week.
The cost by the time you add shipping and sales tax:
Part 1 is about $40 (18 weeks)
Part 2 is about $30 (13 weeks)
2. 31 week study "In and Out" written to be used at the same time others in the study are using Precept upon Precept
The "In an Out" study suggests 1-3 hours of homework per week.
The cost by the time you add shipping and sales tax.
Part 1 about $30
Part 2 about $20
3. In addition they also have two books that go through the study of John at a faster pace (13 weeks) combining approximately two lessons of the previous studies in one week and suggesting 1-3 hours of homework a week.
If they were used to prepare for the discussions each week of our study, you would do each lesson over the course of two weeks thus reducing the homework to 30-45 minutes a week.
One book God are you there? contains most of the cross references printed out as well as the Gospel of John, the cost is about $15 if you include shipping and sales tax. This book would also be appropriate for a teen who wanted to study along with you.
The second book The God who cares and knows you. is the bare bones version with nothing printed out except suggestions for study. The cost for this book is about $8. plus sales tax and shipping.
These last two books can be ordered from Amazon.com and you can probably get them cheaper that way.
There are also children's versions of these studies and those books are sometimes available from Amazon.com as well.
The purpose of our digging into God's word is to find out exactly what God says in His Word so we can use the Bible as our plumb line to evaluate what any teacher might say or author write in a commentary.
We do use helpful additional resources like maps, dictionaries, etc to help us in our digging and interpreting what we learn.
Optional and helpful books are:
1) A harmony of the Gospels (by A.T. Robertson also available used at Amazon but also available new.)
There are other harmonies available but this one is the one our lectures on the Life of Christ from a Jewish Perspective were based so I recommend this in case you want to join us when we listen to his lectures.
2) A good Atlas such as: The Moody Atlas of Bible Lands by Barry Beitzel (Available used and new)
or a less expensive alternative is a good study manual called "The History and Geography of the Bible story"
3) A good Bible Dictionary such as Unger's Bible Dictionary.