Lesson 5 - A Bit, a Rudder and a Fire

October 4, 2026 • Hunter Davis, Rich Walker • James 3:1–12

James does not give one picture of the tongue. He gives six in twelve verses: a bit, a rudder, a fire, a beast no man can tame, a spring and a fig tree. This lesson opens our four weeks on speech by looking at the pictures in order and watching them change the subject. The first two are about steering. The middle ones are about damage nobody can control. The last two are not about the tongue at all. They are about the man it belongs to. Count the pictures yourself in James 3:1-12 before you come. Bring your number.

Lesson 4 - Three Men You Have Never Heard Of

September 27, 2026 • Rich Walker • 1 Corinthians 16:15–18, Philippians 2:25–30, 3 John 5–8

Stephanas, Epaphroditus and Gaius. Most Christians could not tell you one thing about any of them. The Holy Spirit put all three names in the book anyway. Each man quietly held up work that other people depended on. And each passage gives the congregation watching him a command. Not a feeling. A command. This lesson runs the three side by side and finds that encouragement in the New Testament is an action taken where other people can see it. Then it asks about the workers in this congregation nobody has said anything to in a long time.

Lesson 3 - Somebody Else's Property

September 20, 2026 • Hunter Davis • 1 Peter 4:10–11, Romans 12:3–8

When Peter describes a Christian who has received a gift, he does not call him talented. He calls him a steward, a man managing property that belongs to somebody else. That one word changes the question. It is no longer whether you are gifted enough. It is what you are doing with what was placed in your hands. This lesson works through 1 Peter 4:10-11 and Romans 12:3-8, sorts every kind of service into two kinds and ends with an honest inventory: what you are good at, what this congregation needs and whether any lines connect the two.

Lesson 2 - When You Are Tired of Doing Good

September 13, 2026 • Hunter Davis • Galatians 6:6–10

Galatians 6:9 names two things that can go wrong in a person who is doing good and the first one is invisible. Long before anybody quits out loud, the heart quietly goes out of the work. This lesson is for the member who has been at the same quiet job for years. It goes through sowing and reaping, asks whose calendar the harvest is on and ends at the verse Paul wrote for tired workers: the reason to keep going is not results. It is something that has already happened. Bring a pencil. You will draw your own life on a line and look at it.

Lesson 1 - The Part That Counted Itself Out

September 6, 2026 • Hunter Davis, Rich Walker • 1 Corinthians 1:4–7, 1 Corinthians 12

The church in Corinth had every gift and it was still coming apart. Paul's answer was to let the body parts talk. The foot counts itself out because it is not a hand. The eye counts the hand out because it thinks it does not need one. This lesson follows both errors to the same answer: God placed every part in the body on purpose, one at a time. When one part suffers, all of them suffer with it. If you have ever wondered whether you really belong at church, start here.

Week 3: Two Mountains

September 22, 2026 • Hunter Davis • Isaiah 2—4

Lesson 2 ended with a measure God handed out. Lesson 3 takes up something else God handed out, and this one hurt. Paul asked three times to have it removed, and what came back instead is the sentence that governs this whole quarter: My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness, 2 Corinthians 12:9. The lesson works the thorn that was given, the three prayers, the answer that refused the request and settled the man, and the boast Paul finally makes. It closes at a cross, where Christ was crucified in weakness, but he lives by the power of God, 2 Corinthians 13:4.

Fall '26 Facilitator Schedule

September 1, 2026

Week 2: Rebellious Children

September 15, 2026 • Matthew Allen • Isaiah 1

Week 1: Introduction and Overview

September 8, 2026 • Matthew Allen

Why give that much time to one prophet? Because the New Testament does. Outside the Psalms, no Old Testament book turns up in the New more often. From there, it sketches the man and his times. Four kings. We can put close to forty years of preaching on a calendar. A prophet with the run of the palace, a wife called the prophetess, and two sons whose names were sermons. Three dates that frame the whole book: 722, 701, 586. Next come five things that make a prophet readable. He preaches before he predicts. Hebrew poetry rhymes thoughts. The book isn't in chronological order. A prophecy can land twice. Apocalyptic language is language. Then a single page of one-line profiles: the four kings of Judah and every nation Isaiah names, which is what keeps a reader on his feet through chapters 13–23. Five threads to watch and mark in your Bible. One verse to carry, Isaiah 12:2, read at the start, again at chapter 12, and again at the end. And a plain word on how to work the study: read the chapters cold first, write out the questions, and come when you're behind.

Week 2: The Role of Grace in Change

September 13, 2026 • John Key, Matthew Ringle • Romans 6:1–4, Titus 2:11–14

Most of us have one sin that hasn't moved in months, and we handle it one of two ways: we tighten the screws, or we shrug and call the settling maturity. Paul knew both men. To Titus he writes that the grace of God appeared — it has a date and a face — and that the same grace is instructing us, a word a first-century household used for raising a child. Grace pardons, and then grace raises; one appearing does both, and nothing has to be added to grace to get obedience out of it. To the Romans he answers the man who had done the arithmetic on "where sin multiplied, grace multiplied even more" and concluded he could keep sinning. Paul doesn't answer him with a rule. He answers with a burial: we were buried with Christ in baptism, and what came up out of the water was a person with a life to walk in. That ending was total, the way a graveside is total, and it is why sin no longer rules a Christian even on the mornings he can't feel the difference. The training that follows is usually undramatic — a sentence that won't leave us alone on a Tuesday, a conscience that stings earlier than it used to — and all of it is the same grace that saved us, doing the second half of its work. Christ gave himself to make a people his own possession, and he did not go to that trouble in order to leave us where he found us.

Week 2: The Lord Was With Joseph

September 13, 2026 • George Wacks, Jason Schofield • Genesis 38—39

Genesis interrupts Joseph's story to tell Judah's, and the interruption is the argument. Two brothers leave the same broken household in the same season and both go down — Judah to Adullam by choice, Joseph to Egypt in chains. The free man at home breaks his word to a widow and is trapped by his own seal, until a public humiliation pulls the first honest sentence of his life out of him: she is more righteous than I. The slave in the pagan house refuses a sin he could have gotten away with, names it out loud as wickedness against God, and finally runs for the door and leaves his shirt behind — and is thrown in prison for it. Four times in twenty-three verses Genesis says the Lord was with Joseph, and every time, his circumstances are worse. That refrain isn't describing his situation; it's describing something underneath it that his situation never touched. God's presence and God's rescue are two different gifts, and Joseph waits thirteen years between them.

Week 1: Joseph - the Dreamer

September 6, 2026 • George Wacks, Jason Schofield • Genesis 37

Genesis 37 opens the longest story in the book, and it opens badly. Jacob dresses his favorite son in a long-sleeved robe, and ten brothers who can't bring themselves to speak peaceably to him watch him walk out in it every morning. Joseph dreams twice that they'll bow down to him, and tells them about it both times. So they strip the robe off him, throw him into an empty pit, sit down to eat a meal, and sell him to passing traders for twenty shekels of silver — then hand their father the robe soaked in goat's blood and let the old man reach his own conclusion. God's name never appears in the chapter. Not in the dreams, not in the pit, not in the caravan, not in Jacob's grief. Yet thirteen chapters from now Joseph will look back at this exact week and say that God meant it, and the distance between what anybody in this chapter can see and what God is actually doing is where the whole quarter lives.

Week 2: Love and Gifts

September 9, 2026 • Jim Grushon, Matthew Allen • Romans 12:3–8

Romans 12 turns from what God has done to what a congregation does about it. Paul's first move is a measurement. Before he lists a single gift, he asks every member to think sensibly about himself, because God distributed the measure and nobody in the room arranged his own. Then the picture widens: many parts, different functions, all of them members of one another. Seven gifts follow in three verses, each one a piece of grace with a job attached, and four of them carry a word about how the work is to be done. The lesson closes in an upper room, where the only man who ever knew the full measure of what He had been given picked up a towel.