Christ Church Studies

Living in a broken world, pain is not something we can avoid. Betrayal, loss, and injustice enter our lives as unwelcomed guests, just as they did for King David and the other psalmists. Learning to pray the psalms of lament can teach us that healing for our grief and sorrow always happens in God’s presence.

Everyone desires wisdom. Each of us wants to find the "good life," a life of flourishing and blessedness. The wisdom psalms speak to this desire, but take into consideration the realities of lived existence, especially the fact that sometimes the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer.

The psalms of wisdom provide teaching about the way of righteousness set in contrast to the way of wickedness. How can we pray them? Because prayer is formative, not just expressive, the psalms of wisdom can shape our response to God.

The Psalms are at the core of our common prayer life, even though they emerged from a world so different from our own. The more shocking psalms confound us with their raw emotion. By learning to understand and pray the entire Psalter, we will grow not only in our prayer lives, but also as human beings made fully alive, formed more and more into Christ’s likeness.

Throughout Acts, we witness early Christians such as Peter, Philip, Stephen, and Paul proclaiming the news of Jesus's resurrection. They preached to any and all who would listen. Our call is likewise: to bear witness, even unto the political rulers of our age, that there is only one true Lord. Christ is King; to him all knees must bow.

From his arrest in chapter 21 until the end of Acts, Paul remains bound, a prisoner, an apostle in chains. In this session, we focus on Paul's experience as a prisoner, on his reflections recorded in the letters he wrote during his imprisonment, and we discover a vital truth about our calling as Christians and the mission of the Church today.

The mission and message of the early church was sometimes met with hostility, as we see in Acts 19, when a riot breaks out in the city of Ephesus in response to Paul's preaching. But why did the Ephesians react so strongly? In this lesson, we examine what happens when the all-encompassing claims of Christ as Lord threaten the local economy.

Acts 17 records the story of Paul’s experience in Athens, the time when the preeminent Christian missionary first visited the cultural and intellectual capital of the ancient world. And for centuries, Christians have been reading and studying this story as a model for how to understand the relationship between Christian faith and pagan philosophy.

In Acts 15, there arises a disagreement so fierce that it threatens to fatally undermine the unity and mission of the church. And yet, the leaders of the church took counsel to seek the will of God and interpret Scripture faithfully. Through their story, we find a pattern for resolving conflict and disagreement today.

The young covert Paul would go on to become the most impactful missionary in all of Christian history. In this session, we look at Paul's first missionary journey to the isle of Cyprus and southern Galatia, examining just how revolutionary the Gospel was and why it was beginning to "turn the world upside down."