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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture, and media from a Reformed perspective. Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. Today is January the 6th, 2021, and we're going to be talking today on the program about the importance of reading in the new year.
Now you may think you're listening to a repeat of yesterday's program, but we're not. Yesterday we talked about the importance of Bible reading. But today I want to talk about the importance of extra biblical reading, meaning that we are reading books outside of the Bible.
Certainly reading the Bible should be our primary goal as believers, and we should make reading the Bible our first and main goal as believers is to read the Bible. But also we should be considering what other things that we can read as believers that would do us good in our walk with Christ.
And also books that might just stimulate our mind, stimulate our thinking, encourage us to maybe be challenged by things that we haven't thought about or ideas that we haven't considered. So today I want to talk about something that my wife and I are doing for the new year and something that I hope maybe will become a challenge for you.
As we talked about yesterday on the program, there's different ways to study the Bible. There's different ways to read the Bible, but you need to take a systematic approach to reading the Bible. Well the same goes for reading extra biblical literature, depending on what it is you're trying to accomplish.
And what our goal is for this year is to read one extra biblical book per month, which means at the end of this year we will have gone through 12 books that we have not read before. And we are going to try to divide out the books that we read, not all necessarily biblical books, but books that are useful in other areas and maybe even some that will just be for entertainment or to learn about a particular historical event or skill of some kind.
And so we are both going to try to read 12 books. Currently she is reading a book on parenting and I am actually reading Everyone's a Theologian by Dr. R .C. Sproul as I prepare to teach a class. I'm going to be teaching our Class and Sovereign Grace Academy, which is our seminary that we have at the church.
We call it a Seminary for Every Believer. It's a two year ministry training program that we have and we do courses in this program that you can go to. If you do two years worth of courses, you can earn a diploma from us, which simply says that you've had basic training for ministry.
And we do courses and right now our course is a Survey of Bible Doctrines and our textbook for that course is Dr. R .C. Sproul's book, Everyone's a Theologian. So this month, that's going to be my reading, is going to be reading through that book.
Now because it is the textbook for the course, I'm going to have to read it much quicker than just through the month. I'm going to have to make sure I get completed with it because I'm using it, obviously, for my lectures.
And I've already been through the book. I've not read it from cover to cover, but I've already, when I first purchased it a few years ago, I read through it. So this will be, for me, an opportunity to go cover to cover, making sure I've read it all because I'm going to be assigning the reading to the students.
So if I assign something to be read, I certainly want to have read it myself. And so that is going to be my goal for the month of January, of course, will be to complete that book. And then, I'm not sure what I'm going to do after that.
And again, it might be that I look at an extra biblical or rather something that doesn't necessarily have to do with the Christian faith. There have been books that have been very useful for me in times past.
I remember a few years ago, I made it my goal to go through some of the, well, the term, I think, is dystopian novels. I read 1984, read Animal Farm, read Fahrenheit, what is it, 451. So those books are all sort of about a dystopian future.
And what's interesting is having gone through those books, I didn't read them when I was in high school. A lot of people read those books in high school. I didn't read those in high school. But having gone through those books, now I look around at the world around me and I can see what George Orwell was thinking when he wrote Animal Farm, when he sees the people in power, the pigs in the book, it's Conrad Napoleon, and we can see kind of what's happening in the world around us.
And you say, wow, it's like Orwell had a mirror or rather a window into the future. It was like he had a crystal ball or something. It's so eerie. Some of the stuff that he predicted, mass surveillance, ability to see what people are doing, and no one ever has true privacy and all these things.
It's really amazing. And so books like that, again, I'm not necessarily recommending that you read those. It depends on what you want to read. But my goal is to simply say today that reading is a positive thing.
It's a valuable thing. And it's certainly something that can help you as a believer, as I said, not only understand the Word of God, which is of primary importance, but also to help you understand the world, to help you grow in your knowledge of basic skills of different things and understanding how things work and understanding history.
One of the things I want to do, I want to study the life of Winston Churchill. So I'm trying to find a good biography that's not too terribly long because I don't want to devote too much time to it, but I'm just interested in his life and what he did.
And so if you have a recommendation, listener, for a life of Winston Churchill, I'd be interested in you sending me that recommendation. And remember, you can always interact with the program at calvinistpodcast at gmail .com.
Just go to calvinistpodcast at gmail .com. You send a email if you have a recommendation or if you have a question or if you would like for me to interact with something else on an upcoming program. I would love to deal with it.
But again, my recommendation to you, you don't have to read 12 books this year. You don't have to read six books this year. But my recommendation to you would be to consider reading more than maybe you have in the past, especially if you're not a reader, if you're not a person who gives yourself to reading, you know, give yourself to 10 to 15 minutes of reading a day and you'll find amazingly your ability to go through a book will be surprising how much you can go through.
And don't start with something that's terribly hard. Start with, you know, take baby steps. Start with a short book. One of my favorite books to recommend to people and I am going to start doing book reviews again.
I don't know if you remember last year I used to do book reviews and I'm going to start doing that again very soon. And in fact, we're going to have a calcinated Calvinist roundtable hopefully very soon where we will all review a book together.
Me and Sam and Richard come together and review a book where we're talking. We're in the we're in talks right now on doing that. But just thinking about it, one of the one of my favorite books and this might even be one of the books that we review.
One of my favorite books to recommend to you since this is the caffeinated or rather since this is Coffee with a Calvinist, I would love to recommend to you Chosen by God by R .C. Sproul. I don't think I've reviewed that book before.
I'd have to go back and look at my notes from last year. I do a lot of programs, do a program every day. So if I have if I have previously reviewed it, then then I won't do it again, obviously. But I don't think I've reviewed it.
So I'll probably review it in the future. But for now, let me just say this. If you are new to Reformed theology, if you are a person who is a what you might call a new Calvinist or maybe you're not a Calvinist, maybe you don't quite understand what we mean when we say Calvinism.
My recommendation to you would go find be to go find Chosen by God by R .C. Sproul. And it comes in various formats. You can get the hard copy. You can get the paperback. I used to I bought cases of the paperback copy just to give to folks who are new to Reformed theology to help them understand it.
So I would encourage you to read Chosen by God. And one of the one of the I just remember this in the book going through Chosen by God. And Dr. R .C. Sproul gives a little chart in the book distinguishing between those theologians that were reformed in their theology versus those theologians that were opposed to Reformed theology.
And I remember seeing that list and seeing the weight of the men that were on the the side of Reformed theology and thinking, wow, this is this is tremendous. This is powerful to think that the men of God and the things that God did through these men and how they stood for truth and they were all on this side.
Because at the time that I read Chosen by God originally, I was on the fence. I was debating in my mind, you know, what I really thought of Reformed theology. And at that point in time, reading that book was very helpful to me because it showed that not only is this a biblical truth, but it is a biblical truth that has been affirmed and proclaimed by godly men throughout history, you know, all the way back to, you know, obviously St. Paul and even Christ, we could say.
But but looking back in history at like Augustine and many others. And again, if you get the book, you can see that chart that I'm talking about. And it's a very interesting thing to see. So, again, today, my recommendation, something for you to think about is along with your Bible reading, perhaps add an extra biblical reading and maybe Chosen by God might be the book that you choose or maybe something else.
But again, make it a discipline. One of the things I heard years ago, and I still think it's true, is the statement was leaders are readers and readers are leaders. I know that sounds cheesy and I don't usually give myself to cheesy statements like that, but I do think there is some reality to that.
If you want to grow as an individual, reading is an important part of that growth. So I'm going to end the program on that note, but I want to let you know what I'm going to talk about tomorrow, because one of the things that I have questioned in the past and debated is whether or not listening to a book is the same as reading it.
Perhaps you have an opinion about that. Perhaps you want to send a note sharing your opinion. Well, tomorrow I'm going to share my opinion and let you hear what I think on the subject. Having obviously done both, I want to share what I think are the pros and cons of listening to a book versus reading it.
So that will be tomorrow's program. I hope you tune in. Thank you for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Fostey and I've been your Calvinist. May God bless you.
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As you go about your day, remember this. Jesus Christ came to save sinners. All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior. He is the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
May God be with you.