Are you looking for curriculum for your Adult Sunday school class or discipleship group? Consider the just published Change and Your Relationships: A Mess Worth Making Study Guide by Tim Lane and Paul David Tripp. In the video clip below, Tim gives you some of his thoughts on how this new resource might be helpful to your church or ministry.

Today, we offer you the Introduction to the Study Guide (below the video) and a downloadable version of Lesson 1 so you can see how the curriculum is set up. This is the first of 12 lessons intended to help people identify the deeper issues that impact their relationships. Based on principles from the book Relationships: A Mess Worth Making, the curriculum gives practical direction on how to resolve conflicts, have difficult conversations, grant forgiveness, overlook weaknesses, and celebrate strengths.

There is also a companion Facilitator's Guide which gives directions for leading others through the 12 week study.

VIDEO: CCEF Executive Director Tim Lane talks about the small group curriculum he developed along with Paul David Tripp to complement the book Relationships: A Mess Worth Making.

Change and Your Relationships: A Mess Worth Making Study Guide - Introduction

A Word of Welcome

Welcome to Change and Your Relationships. We are thankful for your desire to grow in this very crucial area of your life. When you think about it, we all spend a majority of our waking hours interacting with people. These interactions, both casual and more personal, have the potential to shape us—either for good or ill. Relationships are always a two-way street!

As you work through Change and Your Relationships, it is our hope that you will learn to think more clearly about the primary purpose of relationships and how important they are in conforming us to the likeness of Christ. This key idea of being conformed to Christ can and should radically reorient the way we think about our friendships, marriages, relationships with our children and parents, our neighbors, coworkers, and everyone in between.

Perhaps a few words would be helpful about this course you are about to take:

This resource is connected to several other CCEF resources, including How People Change and Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands (both of these are books and small-group resources such as this one). Change and Your Relationships places the important process of change within its primary context: our relationships! While this may seem obvious, one danger that exists when we talk about personal change is turning inward and forgetting that personal change occurs in the bigger context of our relationships, so all personal change must also affect the way we treat others. This emphasis on living out gospel change in our relationships makes this resource a helpful complement to the other resources from CCEF that focus on personal change.

This resource is intended to point you toward a radically biblical understanding of relationships. For many, including these authors, relationships can easily become conduits for personal satisfaction and self-centered happiness. While God does want us to find great joy in our friendships, he never states that as the end goal or primary motivation. Rather, he places his purpose for us at the center: becoming more like Christ. The more God’s agenda for relationships lives at the center of our motivation for pursuing relationships, the more likely it is that we will have good relationships, but it does not necessarily guarantee that all of our friendships will be fulfilling. Instead of looking to your relationships to fulfill you, it is our hope that this curriculum will enable you to see the bigger picture of what God is accomplishing in and through your relationships—one that is much grander than your personal happiness. This resource might disappoint those who are looking for several easy steps to more effective and happy friendships, but it will be a great encouragement to those who learn to set their sights on the sanctifying work of the Father, Son, and Spirit.

Our greatest hope is that this resource will provide a way for individuals, mar-riages, and entire churches to be transformed into communities that are growing in bringing together seemingly contradictory things like candor and compassion, humility and courage, patience and godly conflict. “Godly conflict” may sound like a strange thing to hope for—that is, unless you have seen too much ungodly conflict! It is only through God’s Spirit powerfully working in the lives of many individuals that these kinds of communities can emerge. The authors of this material claim no special ability, personally, when it comes to these things—certainly not because we write about it! But we do stand with all who will study this material and say with confidence that progress and movement can and will be made as we embed our lives more deeply in the gospel of grace that is ours in Christ. Our Trinitarian God is one God and three persons. There is unity and diversity. He is a social God, and we are a relational people. It is by his design that this is true, and it is only by his grace that it will be true of us.

Thank you for your interest in the ministry of CCEF and for using this re-source that we trust will help you and many others. It is our privilege to partner with you and to have a small or significant role in your growth in grace. After all, “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building” (1 Cor. 3:7–9).

Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp

* This Introduction is excerpted from the small group resource, Change and Your Relationships: A Mess Worth Making Study Guide, copyright © 2009 by Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp. Used by permission of New Growth Press and may not be reproduced in any way. All rights reserved.

Download sample Chapter 1 from Change and Your Relationships: A Mess Worth Making Study Guide (PDF)

Purchase this curriculum and other CCEF resources from New Growth Press

Authors:

Timothy S. Lane, M.Div., D.Min., is executive director of CCEF, a faculty member, and a counselor with over twenty years of experience. He is the author of many articles, the booklets, Conflict, Family Feuds, Forgiving Others, and Freedom from Guilt, coauthor of CCEF’s Transformation Series curriculum, and coauthor of the books, How People Change and Relationships: A Mess Worth Making.

Paul David Tripp, M.Div., D.Min., is the president of Paul Tripp Ministries, an internationally known speaker, a pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church and a professor at Redeemer Seminary. He is the author of many articles, booklets, and books, including Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide to Parenting Teens; Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands; A Quest for More; Whiter than Snow: Meditations on God and Trouble; and the coauthor of How People Change and Relationships: A Mess Worth Making.