Fans of The Chosen will get to dive deeper into the Bible while following the popular streaming show.
God's Goodness for the Chosen: An Interactive Bible Study Season 4 is available for purchase and is an eight-lesson study that dives into topics of suffering and seeing God's goodness through it.
"It's not a subject most people want to dive into, and so I wasn't sure how it was going to go. As we were studying it ourselves we were really experiencing and seeing God in our suffering in a really new and different way," Amanda Jenkins, the lead creator of additional content for the hit series The Chosen and writer of God's Goodness for the Chosen: An Interactive Bible Study.
"To be in it and to be at a really low place and then to experience how the goodness of the Lord actually eclipses our suffering, even when He doesn't remove it. We asked it to be removed, but God's goodness, how that enters in and how it teaches us about who He is and how He mitigates our suffering," Jenkins says.
Walking through her own challenge as a family, with a chronically ill child, suffering is a theme that Jenkins knows well. "We take a passage from First Peter, who suffered quite a bit. When you look at the first followers of Jesus, we can't even compete with some of the things that they endured. In it, we take that verse by verse and it really allowed me to invite God in in new ways where it wasn't just that I was having to put on a good attitude, that it was really like I've got nothing left and I'm just in this space with the Lord."
Jenkins hopes that anyone can pick up and be encouraged with the study. "We sound the way we would in a conversation. We also don't ever use things like christianese where there are terms that somebody who wasn't raised in Christianity would understand."
While she admits that Jesus is called the Man of Sorrows, Jenkins says, "I just didn't appreciate it until I was in my own season of suffering. Then I began to study Him and realize there's literally nothing I've been through that He hasn't had to go through, whether it's betrayal or losing someone that He loves or watching people suffer and be sad. So I think I'm identifying with Him in a new way."
Each study can be done individually or in groups. Jenkins says, "It's a great study to do at least to prep on your own and to grapple with some of the hard things and be honest with yourself first. But I think it also is great in groups because we need more of that and this Community and the Christian community, we need more hard questions and honest answers. And then met with the truth of Scripture."
Copies of God's Goodness for the Chosen: An Interactive Bible Study Season 4 can be purchased here.