9 Study Guides
Classic Devotionals
Sit with the writers who have shaped Christian devotion for centuries. These guides help groups read the classics slowly — a chapter at a time — and bring old wisdom into honest conversation about life with God today.
The Knowledge of the Holy
by A.W. Tozer
A. W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy is a passionate, poetic call for the church to recover a high and worthy concept of God. Tozer's central thesis is simple but devastating: the church's decline in vitality, worship, and moral seriousness is traceable directly to a shrunken idea of God. "What comes into our minds when we think about God," he writes in one of the book's most quoted lines, "is the most important thing about us." The book moves chapter by chapter through the classical attributes of God — His self-existence, eternity, omniscience, sovereignty, love, holiness, and more — not as a dry theological exercise, but as an act of worship and a corrective to the popular religion of Tozer's day (and ours), which has traded the majestic God of Scripture for a more manageable, domesticated deity.
View Discussion GuideA Grief Observed
by C.S. Lewis
A Grief Observed is not a book about grief in the abstract — it is grief itself, written in real time. When C. S. Lewis's wife, Joy Davidman, died of cancer in 1960, Lewis found several blank notebooks in his house and began writing in them — not to publish, not to teach, but simply to survive. What emerged was a raw, unsettling, and ultimately redemptive record of a man's soul being unmade and remade by loss. Lewis — the great Christian apologist who had written so confidently about pain in The Problem of Pain — found himself on the other side of the argument, not as a thinker but as a sufferer. The result is one of the most honest documents of faith under pressure ever written.
View Discussion GuideConfessions
by Saint Augustine
The Confessions of Saint Augustine is one of the most remarkable books ever written — a sustained, searching prayer addressed directly to God, in which Augustine recounts the story of his own wandering, sinning, seeking, and ultimate conversion. Written around AD 401, roughly a decade after his baptism, the Confessions is at once a spiritual autobiography, a philosophical inquiry, and an act of worship. Augustine's central thesis can be heard in the book's most famous line, uttered in the very first chapter: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee." Every episode in the book — from infant envy to the stolen pears, from the seductions of Carthage to the garden in Milan — illustrates what happens when the human heart tries to rest in anything less than God. This study guide follows the nine books of this abridged edition, exploring Augustine's argument chapter by chapter.
View Discussion GuideThe Imitation of Christ
by Thomas à Kempis
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis is one of the most widely read Christian devotional works ever written, second only to the Bible in its influence across five centuries and countless traditions. Written in Latin in the early fifteenth century, most likely by Thomas Haemmerlein (à Kempis), a monk who spent seventy years in quiet Augustinian monasteries near the Rhine, the book makes a single, urgent argument: that a life of intellectual achievement, worldly success, or even religious busyness means nothing unless it is rooted in humble union with Jesus Christ. "What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity," Thomas asks, "if thou lack humility, and be thus displeasing to the Trinity?" The work is divided into four books — practical admonitions for the spiritual life, counsel on the inner life, a sustained dialogue of the soul with Christ on inward consolation, and a meditation on the Eucharist — each pressing the reader deeper inward, away from self and toward God.
View Discussion GuideHinds' Feet on High Places
by Hannah Hurnard
Hannah Hurnard's beloved allegory Hinds' Feet on High Places follows Much-Afraid, a young girl in the service of the Chief Shepherd, as she journeys from the Valley of Humiliation to the High Places. Along the way she is accompanied by two unlikely companions — Sorrow and Suffering — and faces trials, fears, and the persistent whispers of her Fearing relatives. The devotional companion to this allegory, written for women, draws out the spiritual heart of the story: that God calls each of us — no matter how crippled, fearful, or ordinary we feel — into a deeper walk with Him, and that the path to the High Places almost always leads through the very valleys we most dread. The central thesis is one of surrender and trust: as Much-Afraid keeps saying "yes" to the Shepherd even when the way seems impossible, she is transformed, and the reader is invited to do the same.
View Discussion GuideMy Utmost for His Highest
by Oswald Chambers
My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers is one of the most beloved devotional books ever written. Compiled from Chambers's sermons and lectures by his wife Gertrude ("Biddy") after his death in 1917, the book presents 365 daily meditations, each anchored in a specific Bible verse and designed to press the reader toward total abandonment to God. Chambers's central thesis is that the Christian life is not about moral improvement or religious activity but about an ongoing, deepening surrender to Jesus Christ — what he calls giving your "utmost" to the One who gave His highest for you. The meditations are short but dense, often provocative, and always personal. Chambers does not allow the reader to remain comfortable; he presses toward the question of whether we truly trust God in the details of ordinary life, not just in grand spiritual moments.
View Discussion GuideThe Pilgrim's Progress
by John Bunyan
The Pilgrim's Progress is John Bunyan's immortal allegory of the Christian life, written while Bunyan was imprisoned for preaching without a license and published in 1678. Its hero, Christian, flees the City of Destruction and journeys toward the Celestial City, passing through the Slough of Despond, the Hill Difficulty, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, the Delectable Mountains, and the River of Death — each landscape a vivid picture of the soul's experience of sin, temptation, doubt, suffering, fellowship, and hope. Every character Christian meets — Obstinate, Pliable, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Faithful, Talkative, By-ends, Hopeful, Giant Despair, Ignorance — is not merely a person but a spiritual condition. To read the book carefully is to read yourself.
View Discussion GuideThe Pursuit of God
by A.W. Tozer
A. W. Tozer wrote The Pursuit of God in a single sitting on a train, and the urgency of that moment pulses through every page. The book's central argument is deceptively simple: God is not merely a doctrine to be affirmed but a living Person to be known, pursued, and experienced. Tozer believed that the greatest crisis of the modern church was not theological error but spiritual dryness — an orthodoxy full of correct opinion yet empty of conscious communion with God. Against that dryness he set the testimony of the great saints across the centuries, and the invitation of Scripture itself: taste and see, draw near, seek His face. This study guide follows Tozer's ten chapters, plus his Preface, across twelve weeks, ending with a final week of review and reflection.
View Discussion GuideThe Practice of the Presence of God
by Brother Lawrence
The Practice of the Presence of God is one of the most beloved spiritual classics in Christian history. Written by a seventeenth-century French Carmelite lay brother named Nicholas Herman — known in the monastery as Brother Lawrence — it is a slim but inexhaustible book about a single, revolutionary idea: that any person, in any circumstance, can walk in continuous, conscious communion with God. Brother Lawrence did not develop this practice in a quiet study or a peaceful garden. He discovered it in the noise and clutter of a busy monastic kitchen, while rolling over wine casks on lame legs and repairing the worn sandals of over a hundred brothers. His testimony is that God is not reserved for the chapel or the prayer closet, but is available — and eager — in every moment of every ordinary day.
View Discussion GuideClassic Devotionals Studies — Questions Leaders Ask
- How many Classic Devotionals study guides are there?
- 9 guides right now, listed above, out of 202 in the library. Each one is written for a specific published book: a reading, discussion questions, and a closing prayer for every week of it. Browse the whole library →
- How long does a study take?
- Classic Devotionals guides run 6 to 24 weeks, one meeting a week, and each week has its own reading, discussion questions, and closing prayer. Groups that meet every other week or take a break for the holidays simply spread the same weeks further apart. Put your meetings on real dates →
- Can we read part of a guide before we pay?
- Yes. Week 1 of every guide is free — no card and no account. Three of its discussion questions sit right on the guide's page for anyone to read, and the rest of Week 1 opens as soon as you tell us where to send it. Browse the guides →
- What does a guide cost?
- Two ways to pay. This Guide Only is $29 once for the book you pick, and never renews. Leader's Year is $79 a year for every guide in the library — $59 for your first year with code FALL2026, then it renews at $79 a year unless you cancel. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee on the year (with 2 or fewer guides downloaded) and 30 days on a single guide. See both options →
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- We write it. Tell us the title and the author, and the guide is usually ready within about five minutes — we email you the link the moment it is done. Leader's Year includes 3 on-request books a year and $9 for each one after that; This Guide Only covers the single book you name. Ask for a book →
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- Yes. Download the guide as a PDF to print for the table, or send your group a read-only link. One membership covers everyone who shows up — there is no per-person fee and no seat limit.