How To Get Through The Resolution For Men Bible Study Without Losing Your Mind
I've run through The Resolution For Men curriculum at least three times now in different group settings. The short version is this: it's a 12-session program designed for men to commit to specific areas of growth, structured around the Apostle Paul's letter to Titus. Each session focuses on a particular theme—identity in Christ, spiritual disciplines, relationships, work, and so on. It's not particularly deep theologically, which is both its strength and its weakness. The standard workflow is straightforward. You pick up the participant's guide, which breaks each session into roughly three parts: a video teaching (about 15 to 20 minutes), discussion questions, and a personal commitment exercise. Most churches and small groups schedule these for Wednesday nights or Sunday mornings. The whole thing wraps up in about three months if you're doing it weekly.
The Resolution For Men Bible Study: What You Actually Need to Know Before Starting
Here's what nobody in the marketing materials tells you. The program works best when you go in with one concrete area of life you actually want to change, not five. I learned this the hard way during my second run through it. I went in trying to fix my sleep schedule, my finances, and my marriage simultaneously. The curriculum isn't built for that kind of parallel processing. Each session asks you to pick a single "resolution" and dig into it. When you have three competing priorities, you end up doing none of them well. My workaround was simple but not obvious from the guide. I skipped ahead to the session on identity in Christ and relational integrity, committed to those two, and just let the other sessions pass through without full engagement. That's not ideal, but it's better than burning out in week four like I did the first time. The download situation is a bit messy. The official curriculum is produced by Groups.org and Lifeway, and the participant guide is available through most Christian bookstores. You can find digital PDF versions floating around Google Drive links and ministry resource sites, but those aren't exactly above board copyright-wise. The official route runs about $15 to $20 per participant's guide. If you're running a group, buying in bulk gets you a discount, usually around 40 percent off at full retail. I've seen churches pay as little as $9 per copy when they order 25 or more.
There's also a leader's guide if you're facilitating this. It's worth getting if your group has more than six people. The discussion questions in the participant guide are fine, but the leader's guide gives you talking points that actually move the conversation forward instead of everyone just sitting there nodding. I spent two sessions watching my group stall out because the questions were too open-ended and nobody wanted to be the first one to speak. The leader's guide has scaffolding for those moments—specific prompts that get people past the surface-level answers. One thing that comes up a lot and probably should not: this program assumes a baseline of Christian literacy that a lot of men don't actually have. The language around justifications, sanctification, and adoption is treated as common knowledge. If your group has men who are new to faith or coming from a cultural church background without real theological grounding, you will hit friction within the first three sessions. I had a guy in my group who kept asking what "putting off the old self" actually meant in practical terms. The curriculum answered that abstractly, which didn't help him. What ended up working was taking those sessions and mapping every theological concept to a specific behavior. "Put off the old self" became "here's what that looks like when you're angry at your wife." It took extra time but it made the whole thing usable. The biggest bottleneck I've seen is the commitment exercise at the end of each session. These are supposed to be actionable, measurable goals. In practice, most guys write something vague like "spend more time in prayer" and then do nothing about it. The program designers know this, but they don't give you a template for making commitments that actually stick. I started having each guy write his resolution in this format: "I will [specific action] by [specific time] for the next seven days." It sounds rigid but it cuts the failure rate on commitments by roughly half compared to the default approach. A guy who writes "I'll read my Bible more" will forget about it by Thursday. A guy who writes "I will read one chapter of Proverbs before breakfast every morning for the next seven days" has a fighting chance.
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Another thing worth noting: the video content is produced fairly well but it's aimed at a fairly conservative evangelical audience. If your group includes men from different denominational backgrounds, you will get some quiet resistance during the sessions on authority structures and headship. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it's something to be aware of. I had one guy in particular who was deeply uncomfortable with some of the language around male leadership and spent most of three sessions simmering quietly. He didn't leave, but he also didn't engage meaningfully until we got to the session on grace, which shifted his perspective enough to stay. Had I known this coming in, I might have addressed the potential friction points earlier rather than hoping they'd resolve themselves. If you're trying this solo instead of in a group, it's doable but you lose about 60 percent of the effectiveness. The design assumes accountability to other men. Doing it alone means you're responsible for showing up when you don't feel like it, and that's a lot harder than it sounds. I tried running through it solo once and lasted six sessions before I just admitted I needed a group. If you're in that position, finding even one other guy to go through it with changes everything. Just one. There are alternatives if this doesn't fit your situation. The Navigators' "M1" discipleship curriculum covers similar ground with more theological depth. Then there's Prison Fellowship's "Foundations" program, which is shorter but more structured for absolute beginners. And if you just want something free and self-directed, the Gospel Coalition has a bunch of reading plans that touch on the same themes without the group dynamic.
The Resolution For Men works if you treat it like a tool, not a magic wand. It won't transform your life on its own. But if you go in with a clear understanding of what you're actually committing to, keep your resolution narrow, and do it with other men who will call you out when you slip, it'll give you more structure than you probably realize you needed.
