The Difference Between Reading Books and Sermons | The Whole Counsel

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Well, my last counsel to people, looking at it like, so in a sense, kind of walking into a room and there's just a library full of books, and these names may seem a little strange, the words, like you mentioned, they may be a little hard, the paragraphs are long.

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Recently I recommended a book to a man in our church, and he mentioned that he looked at a long page and it was one sentence.

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There was just a lot of semicolons, you know? And so I said, yeah, I know. So I would say, counsel

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I generally give, one is, when reading an author you're not used to, don't give up in the first three chapters.

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Usually, even though I've read a fair amount, when I read a new author, whether it's modern or old, simple or difficult,

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I usually am a bit frustrated with my new author until about chapter three, because I just don't know how they talk.

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And so I feel like I'm having a conversation with someone, and I think, I don't understand your accent,

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I don't understand your viewpoint. So if I continue reading, I often find, if they're a good writer, and their content is good,

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I find that by chapter three, I'm glad I didn't give up. So that's one thing. But the final thing I would advise people, from my perspective, is that even reading older writers, like you mentioned, considering what topic do

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I need right now, what passage, what does my soul need? The general counsel

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I would give people is that while there are many very important secondary issues, if I have limited time,

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I would guide a person to read in their limited time those books which give them the clearest pictures of the love and loveliness of our

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God. Because if that's all they can do, other things tend to fall in place if that fuel is given to the soul.

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Read the men who are taken up with Christ, because when they are, they themselves will be plugging everything in to the right center.

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And as you say, everything else aligns around the Lord Jesus. So I remember a long time ago now, relatively speaking, at least for me, thinking,

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I just feel so dry. And I was thinking, I'm reading a lot of books about Christ, but I'm not reading many books that are full of Christ.

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And it was in fact one or two of those older authors just taken up with the person of Jesus himself, who he is and what he's done.

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And it was so refreshing to my soul. And so, yeah, I would be absolutely alongside of you in that.

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Start there and let everything else flow from there. Jeremy, you've been doing a podcast on Spurgeon's sermons, and a lot of the old writers, their books are sermon collections.

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Do you have any advice on reading a sermon, a book of sermons, as compared to reading what we would consider a regular book?

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That's another fantastic question. As you say, a lot of the older stuff are collections of sermons or sermonic material.

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Now, some of that is more edited into book form. Some of it still reads a bit like a sermon.

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So you might want to distinguish between the two, as you're suggesting. Some of those big old collections, you can almost hear it.

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You talked about getting used to the sound of someone's voice. Well, you can do that on the page as well, the rhythms of their speech.

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So you could read a treatise that's a little bit more philosophical, a little bit more in depth, but it's written to be read.

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I think it's worth remembering that sermons were typically spoken to be heard. One of the things that may be helpful, and this could be true of almost any of the older stuff, read it out loud.

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Read a sermon out loud and try and get a sense of a man of God in the presence of God speaking

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God's truth to your soul. And remember, not to try and be too highfalutin about it, but there's a difference between oral and scribal, the spoken and the written word.

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Now, people often say something like, you know, Lloyd -Jones, oh man, you know, he just spoke and it came out like writing.

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No, he didn't. He spoke speaking and then it was edited or written down.

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It became the same with Spurgeon. Spurgeon's first task on a Monday morning typically was to edit the transcript of the previous week's sermon.

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So these men understood the difference between what they spoke and what people would read.

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But I still think there's something of that, what an older mentor of mine, lovely man, used to call the orality.

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Remember the orality of this material. It sounds well read.

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So bear in mind that there are some things where you're going to be really tracing out hard connections, following streams of logic quite a long way.

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Think of someone like John Owen in some of his more technical work, and you're saying, okay,

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Owen may be the first person in the world to use the phrase 53rdly or something like that.

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And you've got to try and keep track of that. That's a different exercise to reading something that's more immediately sermonic, where it's typically simpler, clearer, more straightforward.

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You mentioned John Flavel earlier. Flavel's got a couple of treatises in his collected works that are really quite long, quite detailed.

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They're full of rich application, but you've really got to concentrate. But he's also got these wonderful series of sermons on the fountain of life, which is on the person of Christ, the method of grace, how

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God deals with us. And they're broken up. They're much more accessible. So sometimes that really sermonic material has a freshness, a vividness and accessibility that can bring it very close to home, because you get the sense of the preacher almost looking you in the eyeball and saying, no,

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I'm talking to you. Some of the more developed stuff that the treatises,

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I hesitate to use the word philosophical, but the more careful, technical, theological works, those are the ones you might just need to read with a pencil in hand, try and follow the flow of the argument, mark it out so you can work out where they're going.

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But be aware, again, of the difference between the scribal, what's written to be read, and the oral, what's spoken to be heard.