Michlaude Discipleship Project

Appendix D

A Reading Guide (1 of 2)

Using Volume II in Personal Study, Small Group, and Preaching Series

How This Guide Works

Volume II was written to function in three distinct contexts: personal daily study, small group discipleship, and as a preaching or teaching series. Each context requires a different pace and a different emphasis. This appendix gives practical guidance for each.

Context One: Personal Study

Volume II contains nine Parts and thirty-three chapters. For personal daily study, one chapter per sitting is the recommended unit. At that pace, the volume requires approximately thirty-three sessions. For a disciple reading Monday through Friday, that is approximately seven weeks. For a disciple reading daily, approximately five weeks.

Longer Parts — particularly Parts Two (six chapters) and Three (six chapters) — reward slower reading. Consider spending two sittings on chapters that include large tables or extended application sections before moving to the action steps.

The Action Steps

Every chapter ends with three to four action steps. Do not read past the action steps without engaging them. The volume is designed so that the action steps are not optional supplementary material. They are the primary application instrument of each chapter. A chapter read without its action steps has been read but not received.

Recommended practice: read the chapter on day one, write the action steps in a journal, and carry one specific action step through the week before reading the next chapter.

Journaling Alongside the Volume

Four questions to journal with every chapter:

  1. What did the King say in this chapter that I had not previously heard, or had heard but not yet received?
  2. Where is the gap between what I now know and what I am currently living?
  3. What specific action step am I committing to this week?
  4. What did I encounter in this chapter about who Jesus is, as distinct from what He requires?

The fourth question is the one that distinguishes Volume II from Volume I. Volume I produced soldiers by answering “What must I do?” Volume II produces sons by answering “Who is the One I am doing it for?” Keep that distinction alive in your journaling.

Context Two: Small Group Discipleship

For a small group using Volume II, the recommended unit is one Part per meeting, with participants reading the Part independently before the gathering. At one meeting per week, the nine Parts require nine weeks. A tenth meeting for reflection, application, and corporate use of Appendix E makes a ten-week discipleship series.

Discussion Questions by Part

Part One — The Seal of the King

  1. Before this Part, how did you understand the phrase ‘Very truly I tell you’ when you heard it in church? What changed?
  2. Which of the five Verily categories — salvation, divine identity, kingdom ethics, judgment, faith and promise — carries the most weight for you personally right now? Why?
  3. Revelation 3:14 calls Jesus ‘the Amen.’ What does it change about how you hear the Verily statements to know that He is not invoking certainty from outside Himself but speaking from His own nature?

Part Two — The Night He Prayed for You

  1. Jesus knew every failure His disciples would commit before He washed their feet and called them friends. How does that knowledge change how you receive the Upper Room Discourse?
  2. John 15’s command to abide appears ten times in seventeen verses. Where in your life are you currently trying to produce fruit by effort rather than by connection? What would returning to the vine look like practically?
  3. John 17:20 places every future believer inside the High Priestly Prayer. What does it mean to you personally that Jesus prayed for you by category the night before He went to the cross?

Part Three — The Constitution of the Kingdom

  1. Which of the six Antitheses of Matthew 5 produced the most resistance in you when you read it? What does that resistance tell you?
  2. Matthew 6 commands giving, prayer, and fasting in secret. Which of these three disciplines is most corrupted by audience in your life right now?
  3. Matthew 7:21–23 says Jesus will tell many religious people ‘I never knew you.’ What distinguishes the people He sends away from the people He receives?

Part Four — Eternal Life Begins Now

  1. Before this Part, would you have said eternal life is primarily a future destination or a present relationship? What changed?
  2. The five qualities of the knowing relationship — initiated by God, personal, deepened by obedience, tested by suffering, never completed. Which of these five is most alive in your experience right now? Which is least?
  3. The enemy’s primary strategy is to replace knowing with activity. Where has that substitution happened most noticeably in your own discipleship?