Take Care How You Read pt.2 (Supporters-only) | Behold Your God Podcast

Okay, continuing on with our discussion of reading Christian books in this behind-the-scenes, extended edition, long play, question-and-answer, whatever you want to call it, podcast for our supporters.

If you're watching this, we want to say thanks. Thanks for coming alongside of us and supporting us monthly, enabling us to do what we do at Media Gratia, and this is my favorite part of the podcast because we get to talk a little bit more.

It's unrehearsed, and not like the first one's very rehearsed either, but we get to speak a little bit more freely about these things, and you and I, John, get to talk about things that maybe we haven't talked about before, and we have an opportunity to discuss.

Why Christians Should Read More Than the Bible Alone

The first thing that comes into my mind is detractors, people who would say, we shouldn't read Christian books at all. In fact, we shouldn't read what men say. We should only read the Bible, and we shouldn't listen to the voice of men.

The first thing, I think we have an account from God's Word that completely destroys that kind of thinking. We have in Acts 8 where the Ethiopian is reading the Word of God. He's reading, I suppose, the scroll of Isaiah, and the Spirit sends Philip to him, and Philip hears the Ethiopian reading Isaiah, and he asks, do you understand what you're reading?

He said, how can I, unless someone guides me? Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with the Scripture, he told him the good news about Jesus. Clearly, God, in His sovereignty and wisdom, could have just downloaded, so to speak, exactly what the meaning of Isaiah was.

As you mentioned in the main podcast, Christ gives gifts to the church. One of those gifts is preachers and teachers. He chose to send a teacher. He chose to send someone who can guide him. Of course, Philip was a faithful guide.

He points him to Christ. What would you say? Have you encountered that argument before that we shouldn't read Christian books at all, we should only read the Bible?

Yes.

I felt that in my own heart at times. I remember soon after conversion in college, as I mentioned in the podcast, I had started to collect a lot of Christian books. Some of them weren't so good, and I didn't know better.

Some of them were good. In fact, years before I really embraced Christ and His claims, years before He opened my eyes, I was a very religious kid. I grew up in a godly home. I remember taking a large portion of my very small salary that I made from a fast food joint and taking it once a month or more to a local Christian bookshop and ordering the next volume of Spurgeon's 62-volume set.

I wasn't even a believer at that time. Of course, I thought I was. There were good books and bad books in my collection, but I remember one time just taking a piece of masking tape and stretching it across my bookshelf in my little dorm room and saying to God, I'm not reading any of those for a while.

I really just need to get to know you through the Scripture. I don't think that that's a wrong thing. I've done that since then. But if there's an attitude in the heart that really grows more out of pride than an honest approach to good books, we could say it this way, a biblical approach to learning, then I think that that's dangerous.

So here's what I mean. It sounds very biblical to say all I need is the Bible, but that is, as you mentioned, that is really not what the Bible teaches. If God has indeed given His Spirit to the church, and that includes giving some people a real ability to unfold the Bible for us, to help us, to supplement our own personal study of the Scripture.

So that could be in a small group study, that could be a Sunday school, it could be in the preaching at church and the gathered worship. If God has chosen to do that, then we have no right to say to Him, actually God, no thank you, I just need the Bible.

Spurgeon mentioned that it was an amazing confidence in the Spirit's work in yourself to say all I need is the Bible, the Spirit, and me, matched with an amazing lack of confidence in the Spirit's work in other Christians when you say all I need is my Bible.

So you're saying I have the Holy Spirit, I have the Scripture, I don't need the church at all, I don't need the help of other believers, well, why then did God choose to do things.

In that way?

So I think it really does require an act of humility that we would say to God, I need you and the way that you've provided these.

Yeah, I think what you said is pretty revealing too, because as I look, you are saying I don't need the church, and it has tended to be people who have a very low view of the local church who tend to say, well, I don't need to hear what men have to say, but in a sense, having a disdain for good Christian books is a way of kind of despising the church, the universal church and the help that God has given through the ages, through His people,.

Never really thought about that before.

Yeah, and not every Christian, we're not talking about a cookie cutter Christianity where everyone needs to have the books that we have in this study. Let me give you two examples, Charles Spurgeon, widely read, not just Christian literature, science, philosophy, whatever, 12 ,000 plus volumes in his own personal library, well, that's a pretty big library, that's over six times what I've got here.

So Spurgeon read, Spurgeon was a speed reader, Spurgeon was an extraordinary intellect, and so he was able to read five or six large books per week, I can't do that, and able to retain.

What he read.

So with those spiritual gifts and that library, God used that, and that became subservient to his study of Scripture and to his living out the Christian life and ministering. It becomes a handmaid to the Christian life, and that's the right way.

But there are other people that don't have those gifts or don't have those libraries, and I think of Edward Payson that we mentioned in the second study, The Weight of Majesty. Payson was an extremely godly, earnest young pastor but did not have access to a good library, and his library was pretty small.

So most of his time he spent simply meditating on passages of Scripture, and yet he too was a godly man. The difference is, the similarity is not the size of their library, it's the attitude of their heart.

They were both humble. They both appreciated good writers and made use of what they had at hand. Let me give you an illustration from Tozer. He had to drop out of school as a young man because his father died and someone needed to help with the farm.

So from that point forward his education was self-directed, and Tozer said that most self-educated men have idiots for professors, and that's pretty true of us all. But if we come to the Scriptures and we say, I don't need any other voice other than the Spirit through the Word, and the Spirit and the Word, of course, are essential.

But if we refuse to hear the voices of other believers that God has given to the church, then in a sense we think we're only hearing the voice of God, but there is another voice. It's the voice in our own head.

It's me reading the Scriptures and saying to myself, well, John, I think this means this, and I think you should live this way, and I think that means you should do this. It's always helpful to have other godly believers come alongside of you, whether in a church setting, close friends, accountability, or even in books, and say to you, now be careful there.

Be careful, you may have gotten the wrong end of the stick. So they can be a real help.

Yeah, the voice of man is inescapable. The problem is wherever you go, there you are. I mean, the voice of man goes with us. So whether we're listening to men that have been helpful historically, or we're listening to ourselves, we're listening to the voice of man.

I do want to reiterate that clearly neither one of us are saying that the Scriptures are insufficient. God could put three men and a Bible on a desert island, and a church would be planted that has the doctrine directly from the Scriptures.

I mean, clearly, the Scriptures are not insufficient. They are completely sufficient. The insufficiency is in us, and our ability to understand, and our ability to make the connections. And so where the Lord sends us help, he sends us Phillips to come alongside to help us understand what we're reading.

And in his sovereign goodness, he chooses to work in that way. So we've talked a lot about Christian books. What about non-Christian books? I was that nerdy kid that would like go and hide and read long novels, fantasy stuff, Lord of the Rings, that kind of thing.

When you become a Christian, do you have to put away childish things? No fiction, no non-fiction? Only Christian books from this point forward?

Well, there would be different opinions on that, but I'll give you the best that I can understand it. I do think that non-Christian books can be beneficial for the Christian. They have different uses, of course.

We kind of let them in different rooms of our soul. You know, they're allowed to come in the living room and sit, and they can be a help to us in different ways. They can sharpen the mind. Sometimes they just relax the mind.

They give us a way to kind of calm down at the end of the day, especially, you know, as a pastor or as a leader of a Christian ministry when there's always something that needs to be thought about, something that needs to be figured out.

It's very difficult to turn the brain off when you get in bed. I wish it was easy. So reading a good book can be beneficial in that way, but we have to be careful. Let me give you some examples from history.

John Wesley traveled so many hours on horseback as he went from town to town preaching, but John Wesley did not only read Christian books. Wesley records in his journals that oftentimes he read scientific books as he rode from town to town.

I mentioned A .W. Tozer. Tozer read Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, others. He read the great classics and he read them to help him understand logical thinking and also how to express yourself in a way that's effective because he wanted to explain Christ to people in a way that was effective.

So he said the best way to do that is to read other people that are very good at expressing.

Things.

So the funny thing is that when he read Shakespeare, which he liked, he would read Shakespeare on his knees, not because he thought it was the Bible, but in a sense of dependence on.

God.

He would say to God, help me to understand what Shakespeare is trying to communicate and help me to understand what truth is there in Shakespeare that I could actually apply to my life, even though Shakespeare is not a Christian author.

Another example, one of my favorite, Amy Carmichael. Amy Carmichael lived and labored in India and it was a very difficult area and Amy Carmichael, in my opinion, is one of the most militant Christians in the right way.

There was a spiritual battlefield that she was on and she was on the field of battle. She doesn't, in her writings, she doesn't hide the sorrows that come in that kind of situation, but nor is she willing to despair when she considers Christ.

But it's funny to me that Amy Carmichael, for relaxation, read military biographies. One more example of a Christian reading a book to relax, one of our personal friends who's still with us today is Richard Owen Roberts.

And I remember going through Richard Owen Roberts' bookshop and so there are hundreds of thousands of books, you know, tens of thousands, you know, I don't know, he has the number, I don't. But you just walk down those aisles, there are actually miles of shelves, you've been.

There.

And Roberts said that in the evenings, to kind of just let his mind get quiet and ready to sleep, he would often read Sherlock Holmes, which I thought was funny because I've done that as well, just read through those short stories over and over.

But now, so different books have different uses, they help us, but non-Christian books, we do have to be careful with them. Let me give you the advice that Robert Murray McShane gave to a fellow college student.

He said, we read the Christian classics and we use them, we benefit from them, but like a chemist uses his chemicals. We use them, but we don't let them get into our bloodstream. So we appreciate these books, we appreciate non-fiction or, you know, books that educate and sharpen our minds, we appreciate books that help us to relax, but they're not led into the bloodstream.

They don't capture our hearts. One example from my own life, when my family and I, when we were in Wales for those three years, all I was doing, it was just constantly reading and so that got kind of tedious.

So to relax at the end of the day, we didn't have a television, so I would read some more, but I would read a light book. So I read Lord of the Rings and I had liked Lord of the Rings since age 12. And I was reading through Tolkien's trilogy, just constantly.

And in that three-year period, I don't know how many times, maybe six times I read through this 1 ,100-page book. And what I noticed about myself though was this, I noticed that I was becoming more enamored with Tolkien's world than with God's world, with Tolkien's characters than with the Scripture.

And I would never have admitted that to myself, but I saw that creeping in. And so what I had to do, and it wasn't easy for me, but I had to say to the Lord, this is not the world you've given us. This is fiction and I don't need to escape.

You are all I need. So this book is no longer an acceptable way to relax. It's becoming an escape from life. And so I put it away and it was probably 20 years before I read anything from Tolkien.

Again.

The Purpose and Limits of Daily Devotionals

Well, we've been talking about devotional books. What about daily devotional books? I mean, there's some great ones out there, Spurgeon's Morning and Evening. There are people who have gone through and taken snippets from Lloyd-Jones, and they give you a little snippet right from the heart of a Lloyd-Jones sermon that you can read every morning.

Piper has a great app, what's it called, Solid Joys, I think. So there are some good devotional little thoughts. What do you make of devotional books?

For daily devotionals, I think they're good, but they have a very specific purpose. And I do think that we have to keep that purpose in mind, or the very nature of how good they can be can trip us up.

So I don't want to discourage anyone from reading a daily devotional, but here's what I would say about them. Their purpose is to kind of prime the pump, to turn the focus of the heart from me, from the struggles in my home, from the needs at work, which are all, I mean, before your foot hits the floor as you get out of bed in the morning, the enemy will have a hundred legitimate things for you to think about.

And so you get up, if your normal ritual is like mine, you get up, you jump in the shower, and immediately you go to your coffee pot, you grab your Bible. It's always good to have a daily devotional. And it primes the heart, it turns the focus toward the eternal, unchanging realities of God and our relationship with Him through Christ.

So that's really the benefit. The danger would be that because they are so good and so easy, it's like the Cliff Notes, you know, that you get busy and you think, I don't have time for the Scripture, so I can read what Spurgeon said about the Scripture.

I can read, I don't have time for prayer, so I'm going to read the Valley of Vision, where we have a summary of a Puritan prayer. And that's where that would be the danger. One thing we could think of it, one way to think of it might be this way, Spurgeon dug a deep well throughout his life and drank what Christ gave him through Scripture.

Great.

And we can drink from that well as well. But we don't want to fail to dig our own well with the Lord, where one-on-one there is the wonderful transaction of us sitting at our Father's feet as subjects before the throne of the King.

And we say to Him, whatever you want to say, I'm listening, and the Scriptures are open, and He pours into our souls, and we can become the kind of people then that turn and give to others. So daily devotionals, helpful.

Another thing that can be helpful is, you know, with a busy schedule. We set aside our time, perhaps in the morning first thing, we get up in time to meet with.

Him.

But throughout the workday, you don't have time for a 30-minute quiet time at lunch perhaps, but you do have time to read a one-page of Spurgeon's Morning and Evening, and that can really kind of reorient the heart to God.

Yeah, yeah.

Recommended Commentaries, Devotionals, and Biographies

Well, you mentioned different categories of books. Tell us what are some of the favorites of yours? What are some of your favorite books from the different categories that you mentioned?

Yeah, well, I put some right here so that I could answer that one. Let's take commentaries first. There are commentaries that are very, they tend to be kind of dry and very precise. And there is a place for that.

We want, look, we just want them to explain how does the original language, or how does this, how do I interpret this, or how does this fit with other passages. So those are very helpful. Then there are commentaries at the other end of the scale that are really just sermons.

So commentaries like Lloyd-Jones on Romans, well, those are a collection of sermons. John MacArthur's commentaries are very sermonic. And so those are, they don't give you the nuts and bolts as much.

They give you, you know, so they're not just handing you the raw vegetables. They're bringing you a plate of cooked food. And so there's a place for both of those. But some of my favorite commentaries, let me just mention two.

One is J .C. Ryle. And the Banner has now put out a new edition of this, which is really well done. J .C. Ryle called Expository Thoughts on the Gospels. So it's just the gospels. But Ryle was a 19th century Anglican bishop, surprisingly.

And yet he has such clear views of the gospel and such a simple way to bring that. So he takes a short passage of scripture, maybe 10 or 15 verses. And he gives usually three major comments, three points, like a small devotion.

And then he might mention, especially in the Gospel of Johnny has a section where he mentions some of the older authors that we couldn't get our hands on today. And he gives the best of their comments.

So Ryle, very simple, very warm, trustworthy in doctrine.

Yeah, you'd never know that that was written when it was written. I mean, it seems like it's written in, almost like it's written in modern language without having to be adjusted. He really knew how to put the hay down low where the sheep can eat it.

Yeah.

Another one is, this is just one example of a whole set called the Geneva Series. And the Banner of Truth happens to publish this as well. And what they did was they have taken some of the very best commentaries throughout the last four centuries or so.

And they have republished them for us book by book. And so whenever I go to study for my own soul a book of the Bible, so let's say I've decided, you know, I really need to look at the book of Hebrews.

So I go online and I look at, I mentioned Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. I just see what they have on Hebrews. And generally, the Geneva Commentary Series from Banner will be one or two of those.

And I always get those. Now, they are more wordy. They are written 300 years ago. And so they're not as simple as J .C. Ryle, but they really are worth the effort.

Sure.

And then there's another, and I don't have an example of this, but the Wellwyn Commentary Series. I really like those. Those are very different than these. They're simple. They're, you know, I would say they're perfect for the young Christian.

And we often have folks in our church who'll come and say to me, I mean, your wife has many times, well, I'm going to study this book. What do you suggest? And I always say, well, let's look and see if the Wellwyn Commentary, if that series has a commentary on that.

And if it does, I think that it's very helpful. It's just a simple devotional thoughts on a chapter at a time. And it doesn't get in the way of Scripture. So I find those helpful. So those are commentaries I like.

Those are from evangelical press.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. On devotional books, all right, let me give a couple examples. This is what I mentioned in our main podcast. These are books that we call the Puritan Paperback Series, all right, the Puritan Paperbacks by the Banner of Truth.

And so this is one by John Owen. So what they've done is they've really helped us in that they've gone back and got some of the better of the classic devotional works. And they've edited them in a trustworthy way.

And they've reduced them to a more manageable size if you feel that your time is pretty restricted. So here's John Owen on the glory of Christ. And the language is somewhat updated. It's shorter. So it's really helpful.

We use these sometimes, you know, as we go through books as a church. Here's another one in the same series on prayer by John Bunyan. So these are all thematic. And, you know, I don't know how many are in.

There's over 40 now. I don't know how many.

Oh, yeah, there's a lot.

Yeah, they keep adding them. And so I keep having to go back and add to my collection. So a long list of various topics that are helpful.

Yeah, and it's crazy because every time I go and read one of those, because I have that, I have the library, the Puritan Paperbacks library. It's a whole shelf. And every time I think, you know, I'm going to pick this one up.

Haven't read it yet.

I think, why do I read anything else? These are so good, you know. But that's just true. That's generally true of the Puritans.

Yeah, and if you think, well, look, these old writers, that's fine for preachers or people that are used to old books. But look, I just don't do that. I never read much before as a Christian. I don't think I can handle that.

A good introduction to some of the older writers, the best of the older writers, is a series by Reformation Heritage Books called Profiles in Reformed Spirituality. Now, that may be a title that you feel a bit daunting.

Don't be scared off. It's just a short paperback book that takes the life and major teachings of one of the great Christians in the past. And it just makes it really accessible. So you get a short summary of their life and then just things, you know.

This is called An Honest, Well-Experienced Heart. It's called The Piety or the Holiness of John Flable. So John Flable, back in the 1600s. Short introduction to his life. And then what did he say, for instance, about distraction during religious duties?

Well, we say, well, I didn't even know that Puritans felt distracted. Well, they did. So what did he write about that? What did he write about how to respond to others who abuse us or are unkind to us?

What about temptation? And so those books are very good introductions to those writers. Let me give you one final category that we mentioned, and that was our biographies. Now, I have a pretty good biography section.

And because as a younger Christian, especially, I've always found these so helpful. One of my all time favorites is a lady that we mentioned in their first Behold Your God study, Amy Carmichael. And this is a little book by Frank Houghton.

And it's just called Amy Carmichael of Donover. And this is my favorite biography of Amy Carmichael. My second favorite is kind of an autobiography she wrote called Gold Cord. And both of those are still in print.

This is just a bit of an older copy, but a very good balanced treatment of her life. And then finally, and certainly not least, is my all time favorite biography. And that's the two volume by Hudson Taylor.

You see that I'm kind of torn this apart. This this set was given to me by a Christian friend. When I first came to the Lord, and I was headed off to the West Coast in college to do BSU summer missions.

And so as I traveled around 10 cities for 10 weeks preaching, I took these with me. And it was such an encouragement. You may look at these two volumes and think, look, that's too much. But they're an easy read, written by Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor.

So his son and his son's wife. And they're just a very warm portrait and a very honest portrait of the struggles and triumphs of a Christian that we know that the Lord used in an extraordinary way.

And once you get started on that one, it's just fascinating. You know, it may take you two years, depending on how long, you know, how much you want to read a day. But you can read a little a day and really be edified by it.

OK, so you've you've commended two great biographies, Amy Carmichael and Hudson Taylor. What about when you have a biography? The life is wonderful. It's so encouraging. And yet the theology, by and large, that the people held would be aberrant in places.

It wouldn't be something that you would commend to someone to say, follow this person doctrinally all the way down. We've mentioned John Wesley. We've mentioned, you know, several people that theologically we would have some major differences from.

So how do you balance that when you're reading someone's life and yet to say, but don't follow them down necessarily some of these theological paths that they went down?

I think one help with that is to remember what's the use of the biography. We're not reading a biography to to clarify all of our theology. We have the scriptures and we have books that help us connect the teaching of scriptures in a way that is that helps us see the big picture and how things weave together.

And those are the books we come to those for that purpose. You know, I don't read a systematic theology. I don't read a book on Christology or on the atonement in the same way I read a biography. So, yeah.

So we kind of let's say we keep books in the right category. And it's very tempting for books to kind of, you know, start jumping the fence. But you just have to be a little disciplined and say, OK, the real benefit here is this.

And we don't let that one go over here and teach me here. So let's take the two people I mentioned. They happen to be two Christians that I've really been helped by. But there are also two Christians that I wouldn't say I agreed with everything they said.

There are some things in Hudson Taylor's life. You can see there's the early Hudson Taylor and then there's a later Hudson Taylor. He meets a man named William Burns and Burns is a Scottish Presbyterian.

And that's pretty different than Taylor's theology. But Burns' life was so stellar. And his love for Taylor was legitimate. And so when they labored together for a while in China, Taylor learned a lot from Burns.

So we can see some growth in his theology. But I don't read Hudson Taylor's two volumes to write down a systematic theology. OK, I read many people that aren't Baptist. But I don't read them to understand why a Presbyterian would baptize a child and why a Baptist wouldn't, you know.

So what are we reading the biography for? We're reading to see the core truths of Christianity imprinted on a life. And when we come across parts where we would say, I don't think I agree with that teaching.

Sometimes we have to say this about our heroes, about our favorite authors. Take A .W. Tozer, he's another one.

Yeah, sure.

I would say this about Tozer, that his life outpaced some of his theology.

Yeah.

And so when I read Tozer, I benefit from the testimony of how he lived before a sovereign God. But I don't read A .W. Tozer's biography to figure out the sovereignty of God, because I would have to disagree with Tozer in some of those parts, especially when he talked about the sovereignty of God.

But I see A .W. Tozer's life to be a better sermon on the sovereignty of God than his chapter in the attributes of God, the knowledge of the holy, on the sovereignty of God. So sometimes we have authors who live better than they teach.

Now, look, I can forgive them that much easier than I can forgive myself for having for areas where my theology so far outpaces my life.

Yeah.

You know, that breaks my heart. It doesn't break my heart that Tozer didn't get as clear in some areas as I wish he would have been.

Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. I mean, the far greater danger, I think, is to have it all fit together on paper and be very clearly confessional, etc., and only have a mental acquiescence to these truths and they don't actually affect the way that you live.

Yeah, and when we're dealing with these biographies, we are watching this arc of life, this transition. They only live 60, 70, maybe some of them live 80 years, some of them like McShane, 29 years. Some of them start off in homes with great, clear biblical theology.

Their parents teach them from the beginning. They teach them the confession or they teach them a catechism that's a great summary of biblical truths. So, a McShane starts off really far ahead of where a Tozer started off, far ahead of where a John Bunyan started off.

So, some of them, like Bunyan, it's like once they're converted, it's not until they're an adult, but once they're converted, it's like a rocket ship, you know, and it's quite shocking. Others, there's a steady, wonderful growth.

Some of them, they start way behind and you see that progress of God teaching them. None of them ever reach perfection. So, we have to be willing to say they hadn't yet learned this aspect, you know, and if we, if someone wrote a biography about our lives, there would be a lot of areas where people would say, well, they got these areas clear, we see God teaching them here, but they didn't quite make the same progress in these other areas.

So, you know, we just understand that about humanity.

Yeah. Yeah, hopefully we see that same arc in our lives where we grow in our understanding of these things and hopefully it's not outpaced. If we're going to be outpaced, hopefully it will be by the godliness of our lives.

Hopefully we see that in your lives as well. We certainly are not a local church. We are a para-church ministry. We certainly don't want to be your pastors. We'd encourage you to go and talk with them with questions that you may have.

But if you have questions for us as you find yourself on this theological journey and as your view of God is growing and your view of the gospel is ever expanding, if we can be of help in this, especially in this part of the podcast for our supporters, we'd love to deal with questions that you may have.

So, there's a place for you to submit those, whether that's in the comments below or whether there's an email address that we'll put up on the screen for you to send that in. We'd love to see those, deal with those in these and hopefully be a help to you.

I want to thank you again for being a supporter, for taking time to watch this and we'll see you next time.