Life Discovery will give us opportunities to search the scriptures and discover for ourselves the many glories of God in home group style study pods. Each pod will fight it out for different projects to research both as a group and at home alongside our parents. There'll be prizes to be won for the best (and most unique!) presentations.

Studying 'the attributes of God' sounds scary, doesn't it? If I've never even used the word attributes in a sentence before, how am I meant to study them? - I don't know what they are!

And for another thing, since when has studying ever been fun? This is starting to sound like one of the school maths lesson conspiracies where your teacher introduces you to geometry saying; "protractors are groooooovy!".

So let's take away the fear factor. When we're talking about 'the attributes of God', we're actually asking the question What's God like? We're going to the Bible (where God speaks) and we're asking ourselves 'what has God told us about himself in this book?'

Some things that we learn about God will be familiar to us. There are some ways that God is similar to the people he made; like when we read that God is kind, we understand that because people can be kind too.

But there are other things about God that we just won't be able to relate to; like God telling Moses at the beginning of Exodus that he's always existed. He wasn't made by anyone, nobody invented him, and he hasn't got parents. That is so different to us, that all we can do is simply accept, even though we don't totally understand it.

So I hope we enjoy getting to know God more; remember it's simply asking him to tell us about himself. It's like hanging out with the cool new kid in school; asking him loads of questions about what he likes or dislikes, what he's passionate about, or what he cares about. Studying the attributes of God is asking God, 'tell me about yourself', so let's get to it.
In order to help us, here's my top 5 tips for asking God to tell us about himself.

Piper: Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die This book does exactly what it says on the tin, it gives us 50 reasons why the cross of Jesus is the most precious event in history.

Piper: Don't Waste your Life It's hard to imagine at the moment, but life is a surprisingly brief event; one minute you're filling a nappy the next you're filling in your pension book. John Piper helps us how to not make a waste of this brief gift of God.

Mahaney: Living the Cross Centered Life The main thing, is keeping the main thing the main thing. We never move on. We should never forget. We can never undervalue the glory of the cross of Christ. CJ helps us gaze again upon the wondrous cross.

Harris: Stop Dating the Church More than a building, the Church is 'the most precious place in all the earth'. Simply written, and next to Ephesians, the best book on 'why church' I've read.

Goligher: The Jesus Gospel: Recovering the Message of Jesus A page turner of a book that introduces us to idea that Jesus dying on a cross for the sins of the world was not an afterthought or a plan B, but God's design from before the beginning of time. Read this, and understand how the OT and Jesus go together perfectly.

Sach and Beynon: Dig Deeper If you're anything like me, you'll find reading the Bible very hard sometimes. It's not that you don't want to read it, it's simply that sometimes you just don't where to begin. This short book is a real help in getting to grips with the Bible. A must read for anyone interested in understanding how the Bible works.

Vincent: A Gospel Primer Short and sharp daily devotionals that will remind us of the sweetness and joy that's in the gospel. A real spur to live the gospel daily.