Reading Well I: Principles (Originally published 11.25.21)

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder, and with me this week, we have a special guest, Jeremy Walker, from just south of London. Jeremy and I are going to be talking today about some suggested reading for the year 2022 and some principles for approaching reading as a Christian.

Now, I realize that this is coming in the middle of a podcast series by Jordan Thomas, but we wanted to get that to you in a timely fashion, so that if you were going to buy some books in preparation for the new year, you would have time.

Well, Jeremy, it's really good to see you, even on the computer screen, and why don't you give us just a short introduction to who you are?

Thank you, Jon. Good to be with you. Yeah, as you've mentioned, I'm the pastor of Maiden Bower Baptist Church, and that's in a town called Crawley, which is a few miles south of London in the southeast of England.

I'm married to Alyssa. We have three delightful children, usually delightful children, and I've been a pastor in the church here for nearly 20 years now. I enjoy reading. You can probably tell some of that from behind me.

I appreciate the blessings of being able to take the cream of the past and employ it for, hopefully, the glory of Christ in my own soul and in the church and the region which I serve. So, yeah, it's a privilege to be involved in, hopefully, encouraging others to read as well.

We're really glad to have Jeremy. One reason that we asked Jeremy to join us for this topic is that, Jeremy, really, I think that of modern pastors, especially those that I would consider in the younger half, all right, so you're still in the young half?

I appreciate you calling me that.

Yeah, it's a bit gracious, but you are. I think that you have demonstrated in your ministry the benefits of continuing to pursue a pretty aggressive plan of reading and not kind of have slowed down. So I think that what you would have to add to our talk will be a help.

One reason that we want to cover a number of principles today is that it is easy to assume that if you're reading a lot of Christian literature, so if you just go to a Christian bookshop and you find a title that's interesting and you pick it up and you take it home and you do the diligence of reading, which is not so easy today when it's so easy to get on your favorite device and binge watch something.

So the thought is that if I am giving time to reading and it's Christian material, then it will benefit my soul. And that is not necessarily true.

No, there's a danger there. I think you're absolutely right in the same way as some people might say, well, just the simple fact that I'm sitting in a church building where I'm hearing good preaching, that must be doing me some good.

Well, it should be doing you some good. But the question is, how are you responding to it? What are you doing with that material? So, yeah, simply having all this stuff on the shelves around us, that doesn't actually do any good.

We have to engage with it in the right spirit.

So we do want to give some principles for reading today. And probably Jeremy and I, coming from very different backgrounds, Jeremy, you grew up under a father who was a pastor and who had good theology.

And I grew up in a church and a denomination with, I had godly parents, but our church probably lacked real clarity. You know, the one that I attended as a child. Any clarity about how to guide your reading.

So a lot of these things I've had to learn just as I go. Well, what Jeremy and I want to do is we want to give some basic principles. And then Jeremy's going to give six books that he can recommend with one bonus book.

And so the books that he'll recommend are to be read in a certain order and one per month. And then I will give six books in a certain order, one per month. And we want to demonstrate by the books that we're recommending kind of a way to balance your reading.

And we have two very different approaches today. So hopefully at least one of them will help you. Now we understand that probably many of you already have reading in your mind. You think, well, you know, in the new year, I'd like to read this or I'd like to pick up this book.

So obviously you don't have to read the books that we're recommending, but maybe the books themselves will kind of illustrate the principle we're talking about. Well, let's kind of start off with the most fundamental principle of reading.

Listening Carefully to Christ's Teaching

And that is that we are as believers, as followers of a king, we are not actually free to just read any religious material. We have to follow the pattern that the king set for us. Let me give you two verses.

Luke 8, 18. Christ turns and says, so take care how you listen. In Mark 4, 24, a similar passage translated this way. And he was saying to them, take care what you listen to. So as a believer, that's where we start.

Christ wants us to be listeners. Christ wants us to be discerning listeners, how we listen, what we listen to obviously includes who we listen to. And if we look again at Christ's own pattern, think of John 10, verse 37, when the crowds are rejecting his teaching about the father and his claims about himself, his answer to them is quite simple.

John 10, verse 37. If I do not do the works of the father, do not believe me. And I always think that that would be quite life altering for the United States if above every pulpit, there was this giant banner that said, if the man that is speaking is not perfectly, but not genuinely doing the works that the father gave him to do, following Christ, then do not listen to this man.

What a transforming principle that would be. But my question for you, Jeremy, is this. If a person walks into a Christian bookshop or if they go online and they just type in, maybe they go to Amazon, which is probably not the best place to start.

If they don't belong to a church where they have people who could guide them to good authors, how can you apply the principle of being careful who you listen to if you just walk into a shop and maybe you don't know those names?

Yeah, I think, John, you've probably actually identified one of the first steps in saying the problem that they have is that they may not be part of a church where they're getting good advice and where they have people who can advise them because that's actually, and you mentioned it in terms of your own background, that's a really helpful place to begin.

If you have mature Christian friends or faithful pastors who are able to say to you, I would recommend this. This is particularly helpful for your case. I think if you're lacking that, your first call must be the scriptures.

You've got to ask if the scriptures are the touchstone of truth, then is this book in a substantial way properly reflective of the substance, the proportion, the priorities of the word of God? Alongside of that, I think you need to look at the author and his fruit, and that ties in with just what you've said from John chapter 10, that if you look at what this man is like in his own life and what the effect of his teaching is in the church which he serves, and already if you're saying, well, he's not a part of a church or he's doing this or he's doing that, you're thinking, well, what kind of man am I actually dealing with here?

But you look at the fruit of the life, because if the teaching produces a certain thing, if that's a good scriptural thing, then I think you're on to probably more of a winner. Something else that's really important, I think hopefully this will come out in some of the recommendations that we're making, is that you can develop this kind of network of books and reading, that as you read a particular book, you might come across another name.

Maybe it's in a note, maybe it's a reference, maybe somebody talks about another author, maybe an older author, and you think, oh, now this is a good book, and he's speaking warmly and persuasively of this other author, maybe I could read them as well.

And then, as you've mentioned, the recommendations of faithful mentors and pastors and friends, the encouragement even of a podcast like this, hopefully, being able to say, look, we've done some of the filtering for you, but we want you to profit from that process that hopefully we've been going through.

Yeah, a couple of others that I've had to use in the past, especially as a young Christian. If I did not know the name of the author, I would try to look at the publisher. Is it a publisher that we trust?

In my mind, there's kind of three categories of publishers of Christian literature. One is a category where almost everything they publish, you can just so wholeheartedly recommend. I think of The Banner of Truth, and there are many others.

Then there are publishers that kind of are more of a mixed bag, and a lot that they publish are really just stellar books, and some are not as good, but not books that are terrible. And then there's a group that's so mixed that one out of ten books would be good, and you just can't trust that publisher.

So, when I was a young Christian, I would look for publishers. I also would look at websites as websites came into being, because they weren't in being when I was a young Christian. And there are a couple of websites.

My favorite over here is Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service .com. And that's kind of a discount website that only puts good books on its site, and so I can always send people to that. And if you're in the States, I mean, it's just very inexpensive, and so we've appreciated their ministry for over 20 years.

So, that's one principle. How do we know who to listen to? Well, like you said, we try to look at the author's life or the fruit of their ministry, especially if they've been dead for a long time. And we want to be careful as best we can to apply Christ's principles for his subjects.

Be careful how and what and who you listen to, and that includes your reading. Another good principle, reading being guided by a focus on the great root truths, not just the fruit truths. And what I mean by that is that to give the lion's share of our reading to those books which deal with the most fundamental objective realities behind the Christian life, so the character of God, the work of redemption, you know, the walk of the Christian with God, not primarily running to what I think of as kind of shortcut books or quick fix books.

So, how to fix your marriage, how to fix your church, you know, etc. Jeremy, how has you pursued reading with regard to kind of root matters and fruit matters?

I think that's an important distinction. I think, again, we've already talked a little bit about how the same sort of thing happens with preaching. You have people who say, well, I want how-to sermons.

Tell me how to fix this, how to do that, you know, five steps to this. But it's that principle, isn't it, of laying a foundation so that once you get the foundation laid, once you get the major building blocks in place, once you have the cornerstone and the other key elements, then you can begin to build up onto that and around that and from that guided and established.

So if you get the bedrock principles right, if you know who God is, if you understand that the nature and the character of the Almighty, if you begin to understand the person and the work of the Lord Jesus, if you're grasping something of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, then there's going to be a fundamental reorientation or calibration so that with regard to some of these other matters, they are falling more naturally into place.

I mean, you could preach or write a book or a hundred books on a particular topic. But if you're not properly in union and communion with God in Christ by his spirit, if you don't understand the nature of regeneration, the pursuit of godliness, then all of these things are going to be disconnected from the root itself and the fruit then will never truly come.

So I'd agree with you and we're not saying don't worry about the fruit. You have to cultivate the fruit, but that fruit grows on a plant that is established in good ground. That root has to be right if the fruit is going to be healthy.

Choosing the Best Books, Not Just Good Ones

Another principle is guarding against good books, which can become the enemy of the best books. Particularly today, I think even in the last 20 years, we've seen certainly a growth in the Christian literature industry with the Internet and everything.

So we're not just talking about books in print, but you could be reading blogs or listening to podcasts. There are just so many ways to take in information. You must be very diligent to discern between things that are pretty good, helpful, and things that are just the best.

Obviously, these are not easy things to always discern, but I think if this is our goal that we're aiming at, the Lord will help us. So choosing to read books, not only that are primarily, as you mentioned, without neglecting the fruit issues, but starting more with the fundamentals, the great realities, that if you get those right, 95 of the rest of life falls into place.

But then not only that category, but choosing the very best writers in that category. And as you mentioned, sometimes we can read men that we admire, and they mention men that greatly helped them with that doctrine, with that area.

And that's a great way of kind of discerning. So which of the books that are on the shelf in front of me or on the website, which of them are really the best of the best?

Yes, it's that desert island principle almost, isn't it? If I could only take five with me, which of these five would I take that would really feed my soul, establish my communion with God, and lead me in the way everlasting?

One of my privileges slash burdens is sometimes I'm involved in looking at manuscripts for publishers. So you see the range of the things that are coming across. And then I'm a book review editor for the Banner of Truth magazine.

And I get sent these books and I have to start filtering them before I even start reviewing them. And then this almost endorsement factory, even amongst good Christian writers and good Christian publishers, where every book has five people who we respect saying this is the greatest book you're ever going to read on this topic.

And the chances are that that's simply not true. And so it really is difficult sometimes, especially if you've got, as we do in our own time, maybe an emphasis on what is new, what is current to to lose sight of the deposit of proven truth that we've got from the best of writing, Christian writing over the centuries and to to fall into the trap of dipping in here and there on things that are short or shallow or light or easy or accessible and not to put in the hard yards.

The reading is is hard work. And as you said already, the the accessibility of other media that provides a much lighter or apparently more accessible route without necessarily demanding the kind of engagement that real reading does and therefore doesn't actually always produce the deep benefits of real reading.

That's that challenge of discerning what is best and then sticking to that. None of us have time to read everything that we think we probably would or could or should. So we have to make a selection. And it's why why read the copper when you can read the gold?

Yeah, and that and that is kind of behind sometimes the fact that we recommend older writers so often. It's not that one century is more godly than another century in the history of the church. It's not that old is better than new.

But if a man wrote 300 years ago, so let's say, you know, John Owen or John Flavel or Richard Sibbes, not everything they wrote is is being published right now. Maybe with Owen it is. But, you know, it's really the best of their works that have been republished through the centuries.

So time has a way of filtering the pretty good books out and leaving only their best works.

And even even with those guys were saying, hey, someone's done the collected works of of Owen or Sibbes or Brooks or whoever it may be. If you sit down with someone who's actually read those, they're going to say, oh, you've got to get volume six and you've got to get volume two.

And you really need to read this part of volume 217, because even there, as you say, there can be an unevenness. Some things date more quickly. Not not all that they write shows these men at their very best.

And then there are those elements, those volumes, those particular investments. And the wise judges are saying now that that's worth reading. That's standing the test of time.

Reading in the Right Order: Root Truths, Experience, and Practice

In light of those previous two principles, let me give a fourth. The principle of order in the Christian life. And let me I kind of put this together. So I'm not sure that this is very clear, but let me try to make it clear.

Moving from the objective to the practical. In other words, something that we put into practice from truths that we're learning to those truths moving down into the heart and out through every area of the life.

I think of three categories. There is reading that focuses on the objective truths. And we mentioned this already. Truths which really form the foundation and the fuel of all Christian living. And then there is another category, experiential writing.

So these are authors that have taken those objective truths and they are presenting them to us in a way that we would consider more devotional. So, you know, you might say in category number one is a book more kind of strictly doctrinal.

Maybe a systematic theology or a book on one aspect of doctrine. And there are many great truths there and they may be presented in a warm way. But that's a little different than a devotional book on the same topic where the author is helping you take these truths and to bring them down into the soul so that the heart is captivated.

In a sense, this category of writing, this devotional category, the author has done a lot of the work for you. You could just start with objective truths and you do the hard work and you meditate and chew on these things and you labor before the Lord in prayer until they are digested and hold the heart captive, you know, fill the mind and move the will.

But the devotional writer does some of that work for you. And then a third category, what we might call more practical, that is moving from the knowledge in the head, the enjoyment of the heart of any particular biblical truth to practical areas that need to be changed because of this truth.

One way that I see this in Scripture would be the book of Ephesians. We tend to think doctrine leads to right practice. So Ephesians 1, 2, and 3, good doctrine. Ephesians 4, 5, and 6, right practice. But if we stop there, I think we would miss that essential middle element.

So Paul gives good doctrine in chapter 1, but the chapter ends with a prayer that they might enter into that experiential knowledge of these things. Chapter 2 and 3, another great portion of doctrine.

And then at the end of chapter 3, another prayer that God might enable them to really taste, to be filled with the experience of these truths and the love of God in these truths. So great doctrine, real, warm, experiential appreciation, and then actual changes in the life.

And that takes us back to that root and fruit distinction. So that if anybody should think we're saying, hey, we want the root, forget about the fruit. We've said already, no, the fruit follows. And that's the wonder of that sequence.

That's the beauty of that sequence that you've just described. That when you understand the truth and when the truth, sometimes we talk, did you grasp the truth? Well, actually, you want to get to the point where the truth grasps you.

And then that principle again, do not be merely hearers, but doers of the word. That the great doctrinal realities, the great fundaments of our faith, that those things should move us deeply and spur us to action.

And if they neither move us to devotion inwardly nor move us to action outwardly, then we haven't, if you like, joined up the dots. So what we're saying is, look at the fruit that grows on the root and that root always bears those kinds of fruits.

So to be able to see that kind of progress. And as you said, to begin to discern those different kinds of material and then to try and weave them together, because you'd really want at some point somebody to say, hey, I've been reading this wonderful book on the doctrine of God.

Now, it's not just a mental exercise. It's stirred my soul deeply. And it's making a difference to the way I worship on the Lord's Day, so that we're beginning to plug those things together for ourselves.

Yeah, two writers that speak about this. One, John Flavel in his little book, Keeping the Heart. I remember Flavel saying, and he just uses this simple picture, that there's a great distance between the mind and the heart.

When we come to grabbing truth, you can grab the truth in the mind fairly easily. But to get it to the heart, sometimes it feels there's a mile between them. But Flavel said, if it gets in the mind and is moved into the soul, into the heart, then it's a very short distance from heart to action.

It's just the way that we're wired, you know, we do what we delight in.

And that's where meditation is key, isn't it, John? Simply to have our eyes pass over the pages. And there are some kinds of reading where we're just saying, look, I'm just going through this. I'm getting from the beginning to the end.

I just want to pick up a general sense. But the kind of reading we're talking about is meditative reading. And I think it was Watson who said that meditation is to reading what digestion is to eating.

We want this stuff to get into the system and to truly nourish our souls. And when it does, that's when it produces a real change in our hearts. And it makes us better husbands and better fathers, better church men and women, better wives, better sons and daughters.

It alters the entire perspective we have and the way that we engage with God and with one another in the world that he's made.

Scripture First: Reading the Bible Before Other Christian Books

A fifth principle, the need to guard reading as we read good books, even the best books that men write. They must not interfere with the book for the Christian, the scriptures. Let me give you a historical example.

John Wesley put together a set of Christian, what he felt was the greatest collection of the great Christian classics for his day, about 40 plus volumes. And he edited them down, sometimes theologically, because strangely, the great majority of those books were Puritan writers.

But he felt that the Puritans were really good pastors. So he edited out some of the Puritan doctrine that he found offensive and kept what he agreed with. Well, so let's leave that aside. He also made them smaller and so they could be printed in small volumes so they could be less expensive.

Average Christians could afford these. And these were really meant for the young converts during the evangelical revival. He encouraged all of his preachers to take, you know, sets of these with them in their saddlebags and to distribute them or to sell them.

And it really wasn't a money making venture. He wanted it to get into the hands of the people. I remember one man that he encouraged to do this was a man named John Berridge, who was actually more. He was on the Calvinistic side of the revival, but they were friends.

And Berridge was encouraged to get his people in the north of England reading these great Christian classics. And Berridge refused. And I read a letter by John Wesley to a mutual friend that he and Berridge had saying, good reading is important for Christian life.

He said, although Mr. Berridge does not agree with me. Now, the problem was this. It wasn't that Berridge didn't like Wesley's books because they had edited out the reform doctrines. Berridge wrote back to the friend and he clarified the issue.

It was that he had people who struggled with reading. They weren't very educated. He had poor people who could not afford the candles or the oil to read late into the night for very long. So with limited resources, mentally, perhaps time, certainly money, Berridge wanted them to devote what little time they had to reading the great book that God had written.

And he was afraid if he recommended too many good books that men have written, that it would draw them off reading of scripture. So let me ask you this, Jeremy, as a pastor, where, as we mentioned, there are many, many avenues for getting information now.

How do you guide your folks that you shepherd in reading so as to guard against scripture being neglected?

One of the first things that we do is is to simply encourage and exhort with regard to reading of the Bible. Now, you might say, why do you need to do that with God's people? Because it's often hard because we can be distracted and discouraged.

We we produce a simple sheet with the ability to tick off every chapter in the Bible. And I particularly encourage people often at the beginning of a year to take that sheet and to try and make their way through the whole scripture so that we're not cherry picking from one part or another.

When I go on a pastoral visit, I sit down. I'll often ask people, how are you getting on with your devotions, your private devotions or family worship? How are you engaging with the word of God? Is it feeding you?

Is it feeding you when it's preached publicly? Is it feeding your soul as you read it and dwell upon it and delight in it for yourself? Are you having any particular questions or problems with it? So I think just that that general encouragement.

I want to preach the Bible in such a way that when people then read again, they say, oh, now, now I've got more of this. Now I understand this better. Now I'm beginning to see this more clearly. So as well as my, if you like, immediate pastoral investment in encouraging people to read.

I want my my general example and the the impact of my ministry to be that the word of God truly becomes precious in the eyes of God's people. Public reading of the scriptures as well in our church services can be a real help in this regard.

We read Old and New Testament morning and evening, the new and the old. We read through the Psalms together. We're just coming to the end of of working away through Psalm 119 over a course of weeks. You look at the delight that that man takes in the written word of God, more precious to me than thousands of pieces of gold and silver.

So working through that and trying to encourage and to pray that that kind of example would get a hold upon our souls and fill us with the same kind of appetite for divine truth.

As you mentioned, good preaching drives people back to scripture in a way that they benefit even more from it. And I think that that's also a good guide for books. Does a book become a substitute for scripture, a substitute for the hard work that you mentioned of meditation, of really honest dealing between your soul and the Lord, of really finding room for those words on the page in the shoe leather of your life, you know, even if you have to take a pickaxe to your life to make room for it.

And I find that to become more difficult as I grow older, not easier. As a baby Christian, every passage I read, you know, I would automatically think, what has to change? And everything needed to change.

You know, I had just come to the Lord. So but after being a believer for 30 years and especially, you know, being in a profession where you're handling the word of God professionally, it is very tempting to forget that these words have to find a place in the life.

Yeah, I have to read my Bible as a man before I read it as a minister. And I have to prioritize it. And sometimes, but John Bunyan somewhere talks about finding the Bible dry as a stick. And you think, what?

Bunyan? You're struggling with the word of God? Yeah, I'm trying to read it, but it just doesn't. It's there's just no juice here. And on the one hand, we don't want to turn it into a merely formal exercise.

So we must pray that God would speak to us by his word, that his spirit would illuminate us as we read. On the other hand, simply making it a priority. I will have a time every day where, regardless of what I feel as if I'm getting out of it, I will go to the word of God and I will hear what he has to say.

So, yeah, there's a there's a real challenge. And you've mentioned that the passage of time as well, when you're when you're a teenager in your 20s, life may seem busy. But then as responsibilities and opportunities accumulate, ensuring that the word of God remains our priority will perhaps become more of a battle than otherwise.

And again, it's love for God that will help us to overcome those obstacles.

Well, we're glad you were able to spend the time with us as we looked at some of the principles for reading good Christian literature. We haven't actually completed what we want to say about Christian reading.

If you can join us next week, we're going to look at a sixth principle. How do you balance your spiritual diet in light of the five principles that we've already covered today? And then what are the book recommendations that Jeremy and I would give for 2022?

It's not the only books you could read, and you may already have a set of books in your mind that you're wanting to get to. But if you don't have plans, this might help guide your reading. And at least we want to show you by the books we recommend how we apply the principles we just talked about.