Basic Christianity Bible Study

By John Stott, Dale Larsen and Sandy Larsen

God himself is seeking you. Through his Son, Jesus Christ, God offers you his love. How can you know God's love? How can you trust Jesus? These six studies, based on John Stott's bestselling book Basic Christianity, explore who Christ is and what he has done for us.
As companions to the IVP Signature Collection, IVP Signature Bible Studies help individuals and groups explore and apply biblical truths. Each session includes quotations from Basic Christianity matched with Scripture passages, study questions, and application ideas that draw readers to discover the person of Christ in new ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVP Bible Studies
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780830857937

John Stott

The Revd Dr John Stott, CBE, was for many years Rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, and chaplain to the Queen. Stott's global influence is well established, mainly through his work with Billy Graham and the Lausanne conferences - he was one of the principal authors of the Lausanne Covenant in 1974. In 2005, Time magazine ranked Stott among the 100 most influential people in the world. He passed away on July 27, 2011.

Book preview

Couverture : John Stott, with Dale Larsen and Sandy Larsen, Basic Christianity (Bible Study)IllustrationIllustration

CONTENTS

Getting the Most Out of Basic Christianity Bible Study

INTRODUCTION

God Is Seeking Us

SESSION ONE

Are You Ready to Meet Christ?

Mark 10:17-31

SESSION TWO

The Claims of Christ

John 8:51-59

SESSION THREE

The Character of Christ

John 13:1-17

SESSION FOUR

The Resurrection of Christ

Luke 24:36-48

SESSION FIVE

The Meaning of the Cross

1 Peter 2:21-25

SESSION SIX

The Spirit of Christ

John 16:5-16

RESPONDING TO CHRIST

LEADING A SMALL GROUP

SUGGESTED RESOURCES

NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MORE TITLES FROM INTERVARSITY PRESS

KNOWING CHRIST is where faith begins. From there we are shaped through the essentials of discipleship: Bible study, prayer, Christian community, worship, and much more. We learn to grow in Christlike character, pursue justice, and share our faith with others. We persevere through doubts and gain wisdom for daily life. These are the topics woven into the IVP Signature Bible Studies. Working through this series will help you practice the essentials by exploring biblical truths found in classic books.

HOW IT’S PUT TOGETHER

Each session includes an opening quotation and suggested reading from the book Basic Christianity, a session goal to help guide your study, reflection questions to stir your thoughts on the topic, the text of the Bible passage, questions for exploring the passage, response questions to help you apply what you’ve learned, and a closing suggestion for prayer.

The workbook format is ideal for personal study and also allows group members to prepare in advance for discussions and record discussion notes. The responses you write here can form a permanent record of your thoughts and spiritual progress.

Throughout the guide are study-note sidebars that may be useful for group leaders or individuals. These notes do not give the answers, but they do provide additional background information on certain questions and can challenge participants to think deeper or differently about the content.

WHAT KIND OF GUIDE IS THIS?

The studies are not designed to merely tell you what one person thinks. Instead, through inductive study, they will help you discover for yourself what Scripture is saying. Each study deals with a particular passage—rather than jumping around the Bible—so that you can really delve into the biblical author’s meaning in that context.

The studies ask three different kinds of questions about the Bible passage:

Illustration Observation

Reviews for Basic Christianity Bible Study

[gottfried_leibniz-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

John Stott in this book goes through basics of Christian faith. It's simple, easy read and loved his lucid writing. I would recommend this for new followers of Christ, and skeptics who want to understand what the Christian faith really means.

--Deus Vult
Gottfried

[learn2laugh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent treatise on what Christianity is and apologetic of the Gospel.

[david.alfred.sarkies · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There seems to be a plethora of books that run upon the theme of this book: a basic outline of the Christian faith with a plea at the end to give one's life to Christ and then what to do once you have made that step. However this book was originally published a lot earlier than I though since I originally though that it was released sometime in the early 70s, though I now notice that this particular book was released back in the late 50s. It sort of undermines my argument a bit, but I think I will still go down that path considering that I will be looking at why so many of these books have been written in the last forty to fifty years when you didn't actually get anywhere near as many published beforehand.My suspicion is that it is because there was a change in society's attitude during the 50s that suddenly exploded in the 60s, that being the realisation that one did not need to go to church every Sunday, and then the general acceptance that one did not need to be a Christian to be a member of society. Okay, there had been debates for the previous 200 years over the truth of Christianity, however many of the loudest opponents of Christianity were still in the minority. This began to change in the 50s and the 60s with the baby boomers beginning to throw off the shackles of society and beginning to embrace their own freedom.Up until that point, pretty much everybody went to church, and it was only the die hard academics that would be promoting Atheism. This began to change, and the main reason that it began to change was that the idea of separation of church and state began to grow, a separation that basically said that there should be no national church, and that any church could co-exist within the state. This movement began in the United States and slowly spread across the Atlantic to Europe. Once the acceptance of multiple denominations co-existing had been established, it was a small step to take to accept that people not only did not need to belong to specific national denomination, but did not need to be a Christian, or follow the Christian creed, if they did not want to.Thus the reason we are seeing pretty much every pastor and his dog writing a tract, book, or bible study, on what Christianity is and what it means to be a Christian, and how to be a Christian, is because people are not going to church any more, and because they are not going to church, they are no longer regularly exposed to Christian teaching. Okay, when people did regularly go to church, a lot of them weren't exposed to such teaching either, however things were beginning to change around the time Stott wrote this book.As for the book itself, I found that it was very basic and there was nothing here that I had not read before. The book begins with evidence supporting the existence of Christ and his divinity, then goes on to his death and resurrection, and finishes off with how one becomes a Christian and then what one does after one becomes a Christian. However there are a few problems.First of all, he writes as if Jesus is the only God-man in myth that took human form, died, and rose again. That, frankly, is wrong. Okay, the difference is that Jesus' incarnation and resurrection occurred in history as opposed to legend, but once again he is not the only one. As C.S. Lewis once indicated, the only thing that separates Christianity from the other religions is not the incarnation, the virgin birth, or the resurrection, but grace.Secondly the thing about living a Christian life is very objective and does not seem to recognise that one's relationship with God, like all other relationships, exists on a subjective level. Okay, the ideas of reading the Bible and regularly praying are helpful, but I get the feeling that the evangelical Anglican movement (in fact the entire evangelical movement) has a very problematic attitude towards subjectivism to the point that the idea seems to scare them, and in respose tries to create a robotic, objective, version of Christianity.Finally, the idea about sin was particularly harsh. Stott's writing suggests that the world is full of monstrous self-centered individuals, and while I don't accept the idea that everybody by nature is good, I feel that he has gone the opposite direction. Granted, in God's eyes we are all monstrous, but the problem with the teaching is it instils such a huge amount of guilt into people that it can be very difficult to escape. My position is that yes, in God's eyes, we are all monsters, but subjectively, people differ and differ a lot. There are a lot of really nice, helpful, and selfless non-Christians out there, and a lot of greedy, arrogant, and tyrannical Christians (or at least call themselves Christians). Somehow we need to find a way to create some sort of balance with these opposing truths.

[tcarter_77 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A really well written, clear and logical presentation of the foundations of the Christian faith. There were some insights which expressed things that I have believed for some time, but which I don't recall seeing so concisely and clearly summarised anywhere else.