Grace Fellowship Church - Friday Panel

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The following recording is from our Grace Fellowship Church Conference 2025. Please visit us at graceedmonton .ca

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to learn more about us. You can also find us on Instagram, Grace Church, Y -E -G, all one word, or on Facebook.

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You can also find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever else you listen to your favorite podcasts. Please enjoy the following recording.

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We know it's getting late. It's good that you're still with us. As a way of introduction,

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I'm Sam. I'm one of the elders alongside Shane at Grace Fellowship Church, and the church that's putting on this conference.

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And what we have done, if you have not noticed yet, we love books, and we love reading.

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And what we have done is we decided to put together a panel discussion.

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And the goal is to encourage you to read and give you some tips, perhaps, or some insight, or some encouragements to pick up a book.

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Or if you don't know where to start to read, you'll like to read. You're not quite sure how to go about it. We want to answer some of those questions for you.

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And so we've tracked down some of our local friends from local churches here that are well read and have some wisdom to share.

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And I'm going to ask them some questions. And we just want to invite you guys to really join in and listen in this discussion as these men share some of their experiences with reading, and even share some of the books that have blessed them and they have benefited from.

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And yeah, we just want to invite you in. And so before we begin, perhaps, can we open in a word of prayer before we do anything?

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Heavenly Father, oh, it is so good to be together as your people.

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Oh, what a blessing it is to meet, as has been already said, so freely and so openly, and to sing your praises, and to worship you, and hear your word preached.

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We bring now this discussion before you as well. Lord, everything we do, we want to do in honor of you and see your name glorified in all things.

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And so we ask that you will bless this discussion, that you would give these men a wisdom to share, a wisdom that always would point every listener here to Christ.

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And we ask all these things in his name. Amen. So before we start, brothers, not everybody here might know who you are.

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So if you would, if we'll start over here, if you would just give us your name, your ministry, and what church you're involved with, and then we'll go around and begin our first question.

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Sure. My name is Elias McDonald, husband and father of six.

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There we go. Elias McDonald, husband and father of six, and I'm a pastor at Lighthouse Baptist Church in Edmonton.

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And so father of four, and then I'm also the president and professor at Foundation Baptist College in Southeast Edmonton.

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My name is Terry Stauffer. I guess everybody else is saying that. I'm a husband and a father of four as well, and my wife is away at a

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Bible quiz meet in Calgary, so if you want to know more, ask me about that. And I am the pastor at Gospel Grace Church in Sherwood Park.

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My name's Guy Shields, and I'm a husband and father of two sons, and I am the executive director of Village Missions of Canada.

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Oh, and I attend at Grace Fellowship Church. That's important. That's important. Thank you.

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Brothers, we're talking about reading and books. When we do that, we should start at the beginning.

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Why should Christians read? Why should we be readers? Why should the

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Christian life involve the reading of good books? Take it in whichever order, however you feel led.

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Take it away. I'll start it with a, I'll make a suggestion from, how about this is my authoritative source.

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I'll take it from the Quran. And the Quran refers to, and somewhat pejoratively, it refers pejoratively to Christians as people of the book.

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Pejorative is the intent, and I'll take it, because it is central to our faith that God has given us words.

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There's a longer discussion about all of what goes into that, but our faith is fundamentally, it's truth, it's propositional, it's a message, it's the gospel, it's the living words, the living words which

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God has given in a book. And so what that means then is we are, and fundamental to our flourishing as Christian believers, is we are text -focused, text -interested people.

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We are a people who must learn to engage with texts and handle them well.

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To be a flourishing Christian is to be able to hear a truth and engage with it, comprehend it, apply it, and live it.

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Okay, now most fundamentally and centrally, then that's the word, the scriptures, the book that God has given us.

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But from there, I'll add another idea, and that is this, I'm taking from a different book, it's a vision of, it's about the seminary, philosophy of the seminary, but the vision of the seminary as a community gathered around the text.

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And that's really stuck with me as a metaphor, what's happening in a seminary, what's happening in a classroom.

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You put the text in the center, and we gather in a circle around it, and we discuss, and we learn together, and we engage and understand that text.

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But the seminary is a text -centric community. We're focused on the text. Okay, well then

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I can stretch that out across time and just say that generations upon generations, God has given teachers and people who have engaged with this text, and I have a ton to learn from them.

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And so if you enjoy preaching, if you enjoy good teachers who are able to open the word for you, don't just settle for the living ones, but also benefit from the ones from another time and another era who bring rich richness and wealth, and they've given it to you in a text, and engage with that text.

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And in the process, then I'm engaging in a community that stretches across the ages, gathered together around this beautiful text.

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Now, I remember when I was an unsaved boy, and I helped an older lady move out of her apartment, and to reward me, she gave me a book.

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And I was so angry, and that was my unregenerate, unthankful heart just venting its own sinfulness.

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And then when I got saved, suddenly a whole world opened to me of God's truth from his word, and then

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I found out that it's not just in the Bible, but there are people that have explained the scriptures, and I can actually get to know the word of God in a much deeper and rich way from people that have studied it for longer.

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Have you had the experience of maybe get a new vehicle, and you're driving around town, and you go,

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I didn't realize there are so many gold Honda Odysseys in the city, you know, that kind of idea.

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And maybe you've had that experience reading, and you read a new phrase, and you go, oh, that's really great, that's a great quote.

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And then the next four or five books you read, or you hear it in the pod, everybody's mentioning the same quote, and you're going, what's going on?

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I had one of those a while ago, maybe a couple of years ago, and it's the opening line of a book by L .P.

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Hartley, it's called The Go -Between. And it says, the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

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Great opening line. So I got the book, I don't recommend the book. Even watched the movie, it wasn't any better.

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But the great opening line, you know, the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

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And I think just being able to see the world through someone else's eyes, whether it's an old book, or a new book, or a book outside your tribe, something that you wouldn't normally read, makes you go, huh,

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I hadn't thought of that before. And it really stretches your wisdom, it stretches your life experience, it enables you to relate to people, again, that are different than you, if you're able to get into a book, whether fiction or nonfiction, and see that it is a foreign country, and they do things differently.

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And it's a great cross -cultural experience for somebody that's been quite North America continent -bound like me.

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As I thought about this question, two texts came to my mind. The first is in Romans chapter 11.

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Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments, and how inscrutable his ways.

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And then in Ephesians chapter 3, in verse 7, or beginning of verse 8, to me, though I am very least of all the saints, this grace was given to preach to the

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Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ. And I think that for those who believe in a

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God whose wisdom and knowledge is unsearchable, and a

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Christ whose riches are unfathomable, we should, of all people, be interested in exploring, looking into the depths of God and the riches of Christ, and how do we do that.

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We do that in part by reading, right? We do that through the faithful labors of others who have searched the scriptures and understood the truth and expressed the truth in written form.

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We do that by walking with other believers who have lived faithfully for Christ, and their story has been written and recorded for our benefit.

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So just the nature of God and the nature of Christ should be reason enough to motivate us as readers.

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If we see the value in reading, and somebody here says,

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I'm on board. I can begin to see what you guys are saying. I want to give it a try.

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I want to purposefully read a book, but I've either never done this or it's been a long time since I was a kid in school.

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What would you say to someone to help them? How can a person develop the necessary habits to begin a good reading habit and start again?

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Start with the Bible. I think that should go without saying. Read the book of books that is a book filled with books, and you'll get through 66 books in just reading one book, and you depend upon it for your life.

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And then when you have questions about what the Bible says, then you can go search for answers from trusted sources, and your delight and your inquisitiveness about that topic will drive you to get into a book, deep into a book, and find answers.

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I'd say a simple thing is find a reader to help you. Find somebody that's read a lot of books to be a guide.

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If your pastor of your church is a reader, and he should be, and maybe been to seminary,

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I think the biggest benefit that I got from going to graduate school is getting rails to run on, to understand who the good authors are, how to understand an argument, that kind of idea, so that I could be a bit of a judge of books, not an expert.

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But talk to your pastor, talk to other people in your church that you know are readers, and say, where's a good place to start?

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And that's what this is about tonight, but I mean you can, you have people in your own life too to talk to.

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Don't do it alone. I was just going to say that, you know, with respect to the practice of reading, like anything else, like many things in life, it begins as a discipline.

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Right? You just simply have to make up your mind, I'm going to do this, and then you have to take yourself by the scruff of the neck and do it.

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Right? And it really doesn't get any more complicated than that. It's just a matter of saying, this is something that I believe is important.

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It needs to be done. I don't necessarily feel like doing this. Right? I don't have this massive drive.

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It really, in one sense, is a step of faith. Right? I believe, I believe, that this is going to be rewarding.

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This is going to bear fruit in my life. This is going to help me know more of Christ and walk faithfully with Him.

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So I'm going to take this step. So Lord, help me, strengthen me, strengthen my resolve, and then we simply, we discipline ourselves.

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And it really doesn't get any more complicated than that. The thing is,

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I think we live in a culture that feeds on the idea that we do things that feel good to us, or things that are, that taste good, that feel good, that we enjoy.

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And that's true with some things, but it's not true with everything. Not everything that's valuable and important is going to be pleasurable at the beginning.

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Sometimes it's just plain work. But the beauty of God and His goodness is that oftentimes what begins as a discipline becomes a delight.

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And what we initially had to work at becomes something we can't wait to do.

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And I think that, that's been something of my experience when it comes to reading, and I think it'll be yours as well.

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I like that a lot. I just add in the notion too, it's kind of like exercise working out. So I used to run regularly, and then recently

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I've been biked some, and then it was cold, so I didn't bike. So I've not run in a while, and I just don't feel like running, bluntly.

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I just don't feel like it. But then I get into the cycle, and then like you said, it kind of flows, and I enjoy it.

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I just gotta get into it. So getting over that initial, it can be like, it feels hard at the beginning.

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Get over the hump, and you'll get the point where you'll love it. And I would also say, if we get to the recommendations, we'll mention all different levels, some pretty aggressive, and stuff like that.

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Sometimes people like, okay, I'm gonna do it, and they jump straight for something really aggressive, something really tough.

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My choice for the fiction category was Chronicles of Narnia. Just do that.

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Like if you're not doing it at all, start there, and you're gonna get into it, and it's so much fun, and you can build up, right?

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But start with something that really engages you, and work your way towards eventually doing like Augustine's Confessions, or something big, right?

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But work your way there, little by little. Social, I love social. Book clubs can be really great, because you have a deadline, and six other guys are coming, and they're gonna talk about this book, and so there's pressure to get it done.

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Audiobooks count. People always wonder about that. Yes, audiobooks count. Use them. Break it up into tiny little segments, like I'm gonna do initially five pages a day.

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Like five pages just before I go to sleep. Just start there, right? And build yourself up bit by bit.

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You don't have to go straight and huge. Just little by little. Just for wisdom from somebody with like a lot of kids, is you've got, if you're younger than me, and you have less kids than I do, you have more time than I do, and you can squeeze reading into bathroom breaks, and into sometimes even driving, and different odds and ends throughout the day, and you can accomplish a lot with just a little.

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When you say driving, you mean audiobooks, right? Yes. Excellent, thank you.

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One question that someone might ask is, okay, what do I read though?

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Perhaps we'll start with genre. Is there benefit to reading widely, to read several genres, rather to narrow oneself down to one book, or one specific genre?

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Follow -up question perhaps, or with that, what is your guys' favorite genre, and how do you make sure that your reading doesn't get too narrow?

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It was interesting to read or to learn that John Stott, you know, who wrote so many books on, you know, theology, biblical exposition, he also wrote a book on birds, right?

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And it was just, you know, it was kind of surprising to me to read this, but he was an avid bird watcher, and so that was just a really good example of someone who had a wide variety of interests, you know, not only in reading, but in life, and I think that's important.

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It's really easy to funnel down and focus, you know, on those one or two genres, or subjects, or areas that you're really, really interested in.

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But again, as those who believe that this is God's world, and that it's a creation of God, and therefore it is a revelation of God, then we of all people should be interested in a wide exposure to the subjects that we encounter in the world.

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My friends in the panel can disagree with me on this one, but I think a great place to start, if you're not, you don't consider yourself a reader, is reading biography.

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And if you read some biography of the saints, you're going to get some Bible, and theology, and history, you know, and a really compelling story about what

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God's doing in the world all at the same time. So that particular aspect of reading biographies can check off a few of the boxes right away.

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I do think it's great to read widely in the genres that we're going to talk about tonight, but just a little tip and a great place to start.

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– Well, that kind of made me think it's neat how Scripture itself contains so many genres. You got a little interesting clue there, don't you?

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I liked your idea earlier that find a reader, and so building on that,

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I think invite some input into your life where you're going to be pushed to read something you otherwise wouldn't read, because we do have this problem where we can do a self -reinforcing thing.

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It's like, here's what I like to read, and so that's what I read, so that's what I read, that's what I read, and that's how people get weird.

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So don't do that, right? But be part of a book club. I'm part of two different book clubs that do more theology oriented books.

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EPL does book clubs, and I found it actually really great for evangelistic opportunities, because sometimes the books are not great, and we'll skip those, but when they're decent books and they'll connect into worldview issues,

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I'll read it, and we'll go, and we'll have a worldview discussion at the public library. It's pretty cool.

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I obviously have an interest in this, but education is a thing that pushes you to read books that you would not otherwise read.

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He said it gives you rails to run on, but in a class, the teacher makes you read that, makes you read that, makes you read that, and so you don't just read the stuff you want to read, and I've been forced to read books

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I hated, and I got to the end, and it was like that book, even though I virulently disagreed with it, that book helped me, because it solidified a truth that I now believe deeply.

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So I do think inviting some factor into your life that will push you to read things you would not otherwise read is really important.

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Yeah, I agree with Terry that biography is a really good place to start. You know, it's narrative, so it's interesting in that sense.

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It's historical, so it's kind of pulling you, you know, unless it's a contemporary biography, but typically we think of the past.

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So it pulls you out of your own contemporary moment, you know, and that's helpful, right?

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I was talking with someone earlier today that unless we are reading outside of our own time, we struggle to get a proper perspective on our own time, right?

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So if we want to kind of understand ourselves in our own present moment, read about the past, read of believers in the past, and so biography is really, really valuable.

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You know, the example of faithful lives, and even the struggles of saints from the past.

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So biography is really, really helpful. The first biography that I remember reading, it's not really a, well, it is kind of a biography, but it was

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Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secrets by Howard Taylor. I read that as a teenager, as a high school student, and that was just really encouraging, you know, in my own walk with the

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Lord. So I would recommend that. Michael mentioned earlier today the two -volume on Lloyd -Jones, and Lloyd -Jones happens to be my hero, so I read that, and again, that's really helpful.

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Dallimore's biography of Whitfield is really good. Murray, Ian Murray, and his work on Jonathan Edwards, those are just some of the biographies that have been helpful for me.

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If I could, something that I, like the era that I like to look into and stay there for a little while in church history is the

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Puritan era, the 16th and 17th century Puritan era, and sometimes

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I want to reverse engineer the Puritans and try to get to where they got, and that's going to include reading mythology and metaphysics and all those kinds of different things that stretch the imagination.

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Obviously, a lot of it is false, but I mean, they used illustrations from Greek mythology in their sermons and in their writings.

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But then as for, so the Puritans, the English Puritans, I recommended

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Thomas Watson and William Ames, the former Thomas Watson, can say a lot in just a little amount of time, and then with William Ames, you've got a systematic breakdown of a mind that is chock full of theology, driven for the heart, driven for walking with God.

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Good, you guys are already going the direction where we want to take it. We have

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C .S. Lewis, for example, said, it is a good rule after reading a new book never to allow yourself another new one until you have read an old one in between.

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Do you guys think this is a good rule? Do these authors from so many years, even centuries ago, have anything helpful and applicable for us to say in the context that is in so many ways so different?

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I'm going to go fast and do this one because I want to claim it before Terry references it.

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I think he's going to think of the same quote. C .S. Lewis in his introduction to On the Incarnation by Athanasius, did

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I do it? And by the way, On the Incarnation by Athanasius is one of my picks, and it's awesome, fabulous reading, and it's online.

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You can read it for free. It's a beautiful book, but 300s. It's one of the early church fathers.

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It is a great example of this. Lewis comments in the introduction to this, every age has its own outlook.

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It is especially good at seeing certain truths, and especially liable to make certain mistakes.

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We all therefore need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period, and that means the old books.

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All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook. You can't escape it because it's the air you breathe, right?

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It's the fish in the water. We all share the contemporary outlook, even those like myself, Lewis says, who seem most opposed to it.

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The only palliative, only answer, is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

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Last year we did a class where we did the great books of Christianity. We started in the

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New Testament era with like Philo and Josephus, and we read all the way up to the modern era, each week a different section.

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If you want that reading guide, I would gladly share it with you. The guys started out in the class, and they said,

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I don't know, this seems like it's going to be boring. They got to the end, and one of the guys came to me and said, if you offer this class again,

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I want to take it again. I already got the credit, but I learned so much, I want to do this again, and it was the experience of walking through every century or era and seeing the richness of those eras.

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There are so many treasures back there, and you've got to get them. Well, Joel actually came prepared with a quote.

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I was just going to say, read that essay, so you got me there. I think it's a great practice to read an old book for every new book.

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I am way out of sync. I haven't practiced that very well, but as time goes on,

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I do try to read more older and classic books, and C .S. Lewis prompt for that.

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That essay is available called On the Reading of Old Books as well in a lot of his essay collections, or just read

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Athanasius, and then you get the introduction thrown in, but no, it's a really wise idea.

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I read a book, and I was reminded of it when Joel was talking about being forced to read painful books, and it was by Jacques Alluol called

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The Technological Society. He spent 30 pages in the introduction defining the word technique, so it wasn't a lot of fun to read, but I think of that book often because that book was really helpful in kind of ripping me out of my age and helping me to think like a pre -modern, and some of the things we've lost in our modern era.

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It was written in 1968, so it's not a contemporary book in that sense, but in our modern era, it's very new.

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So anyway, just an example of yeah, it's very good to get ripped out of this age and live a while in another age, and then we can look at our age much more wisely, and that's what

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Guy said as well. There's also an appeal to smelling the book that is so old.

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It smells so beautiful, and so you just, you pop it open, and sometimes you can even feel the print of the book, and so for that reason, yes, read old books.

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All right, we eventually want to get in some of your guys' book recommendations, but before we do that, one last question.

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So with the vast amount of books being written, good as well as very, very bad, can we read books by authors that we disagree with, that may be slightly wrong or very wrong, or should we completely stay away from that and focus only on the good ones?

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Just a quick thought that comes to mind. I think you need to tread carefully there. Life's too short to read bad books, and especially if you don't have a lot of time to read, but if you're reading a lot of books, like one in a dozen or something like that, that'll stretch you, but generally speaking, yeah, be really careful on that.

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Just a little thought here. Joel would have more to say on this because this is his world, but it's really striking to me that if you go to an evangelical seminary for pastoral training, you're going to learn a lot about the development of liberal theology and the decline of theology.

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If you go to a liberal seminary, they don't study conservatives. So it's just a little bit of a reminder that it's good to know what we're up against.

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It's good to know what's out there in the world, what Bart Ehrman is saying or what

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N .T. Wright is saying about Paul or things like that. For the most part, you can talk to your pastor about that, make him read the bad books, but if you're a voracious reader, yeah, you can dip into that, but just tread carefully.

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I think obviously part of it is why are we reading?

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What's our purpose, right? If we're reading for personal enrichment and growth, then obviously we're going to want to read what we understand the

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Bible to teach, what accords with that. But if we're teaching or if we have responsibilities that are broader than that, then we may find ourselves having to go further afield in terms of our understanding of things just so that we can be informed and give guidance.

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So it kind of depends on why we're reading what we're reading.

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I know I've said a lot, but just a quick little thing here. If you hear of a book that's really popular like John Michael Comer or that kind of thing that a lot of your

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Christian friends around the city are reading, you can go to a place like TGC, like the

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Thimelios. You can read reviews. Tim Challies is a great source for reviewing popular books.

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You don't have to read the book, read the review, and you might even want to pass the review on to a friend if they've gotten into some dangerous territory with bad books.

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It's my head that it's probably an area of discretion. I mean, so I read a book,

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Occurs to Me, and it was on gender and how to analyze that whole space. Well, it was from a

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Catholic author, and so she would cite scripture, and next to it something from a pope, and next to it something from some other tradition.

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It was all mixed in there together, and it was a very helpful book, but I really do think it very much depends on your level of ability to sort through that, and so, you know,

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I would catch the insight from scripture right after that from the pope, not so much. You keep on going.

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It really does depend on where you're at, and I think what helps with that is some of what Terry just said, reading not in isolation.

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So again, I've got a view on this, but I do think an educational framework can help with that, where you're part of a reading community, and you might read a work, and then a teacher or fellow students engage, and they keep you out of the weeds.

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I think a book club can help you with that. I think your church can help you with that, and so if you do get into one of those, tread with prudence, and different people probably have different levels of tolerance or different levels of discretion with what they can engage with and be okay, but don't do it in isolation, and then book reviews are another.

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If you can't get any of those other structures, a book review would at least help you there. Very quickly, the writers of the

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New Testament, they engage with outside sources. Very minutely though, just a quick quote here and a quick quote there, mostly to audiences that are unacquainted with the gospel.

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This is the one quote, I think, in Titus, quoting Epimenides of Crete, and 1

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Corinthians 15, quoting a comedian, but most of what you get from an apostle is quotation or allusion to the

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Old Testament. That was their book. So we have about 10 -15 minutes left, and we want to get practical.

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If you haven't already, take a pen, take a piece of paper, try to write some of these suggestions down maybe.

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Brothers, give us suggestions on what we should read. Give us some books that have been very helpful to you guys, that have been a blessing to you, that have had an impact on your

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Christian life and your Christian walk. Feel free to give us some background to the book and how specifically it has impacted your life.

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We'll go through some of the genres that we addressed earlier. Why don't we begin with Christian living?

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What are some books in the Christian living that have really impacted you guys? Some of us have brought along our stacks of books, and a great way to remember a book is just to come and take a photo of it.

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So if you want to take a photo of any of these books that we have, you can do that. This Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges, well -known fellow, he wrote a book back in 1978 called

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The Pursuit of Holiness, and then about nine years later, he thought, that was a bit moralistic.

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It needs more gospel. So he wrote a book called Transforming Grace that was really gospel -centered, and it was as he was growing in his appreciation and application of the gospel.

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This book is putting those together, and he calls it like two wings of an airplane, and I would say as a pastor for 34 years now, the number one counseling thing that I deal with with people is, as we heard in the message tonight,

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I keep doing the same sin. Am I even a Christian? So it's that struggle of sanctification, and am

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I even getting grace because I'm not changing? So if that's a struggle with you or somebody you're counseling, this is a fantastic book for that.

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The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges. God's role and our role in the pursuit of holiness, and it's really about preaching the gospel to yourself all the time.

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The Reformed Pastor by Richard Baxter. So it sounds like it's addressed to pastor types.

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It's an incredibly convicting book, very deeply convicting. If you just read the section, chapter 3, section 1,

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The Use of Humility, that could get you pretty far. And a nice thing about this book is it's free, so you can pull it, just search for it, and it'll come up.

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I'll read you a paragraph. The very design of the gospel is to abase us, and the work of grace is begun and carried on in humiliation.

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Humility is not a mere ornament of a Christian, but an essential part of the new creature. It's a contradiction in terms to be a

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Christian and not humble. All who will be Christians must be Christ's disciples and come to him to learn, and the lesson which he teaches them is being meek and lowly.

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And he just builds out from there that the gospel both gives you joy and confidence and freedom, while also giving you none of the credit for any of it.

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Jesus won all of this on your behalf, and it creates a delightful, joyful confident humility that is the right expression of humility.

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So that chapter always floors me, incredibly convicting every time I go back to it.

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I have two books here. My first book, this is a second copy that I have because the first copy was stolen from my backpack at Hope Mission when

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I worked there. I went and bought this again because it was very good.

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E .M. Bounds, A Treasury of Prayer. It's compiled and condensed by Leonard Ravenhill. He says some things in here about how

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God, upon prayer, rescinds his decrees and things like that. That's nuts.

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However, if you want to know the power of prayer and really buckling down,

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A Treasury of Prayer is very good. And then also The Law of Christ. There'd be some disagreement maybe among brothers about the application of the moral law to the

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Christian, but The Law of Christ by Charles Leiter is very good for understanding the whole counsel of God and our relation to the scriptures, the

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Old Testament and the New, and how we are to dutifully obey

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God as free sons. Probably next to scripture, obviously.

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The one book that has impacted me the most is

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Jonathan Edwards' dissertation on the end for which God created the world. The book is, the dissertation is divided into two sections.

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He establishes this, he unpacks this idea that God does everything for his glory, and he does it from reason, and then he does it from revelation, right?

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He reasons out the ends of things, and then he goes to revelation.

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And in the process of establishing or supporting this conclusion that God does everything for his glory, he introduces the idea that the glory of God and the happiness of the creature are not opposite pursuits but one, and that it's in pursuing the glory of God that we find our greatest and fullest joy.

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And so I would highly recommend that. It took me months to read it. It's only like, you know, in the works of Jonathan Edwards, it's only maybe,

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I don't know, 30, 40 pages. I don't know. It's not very long. But I'd read a paragraph, and then

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I'd say, what in the world did he just say? And I'd go back and read it again, and then I'd put the action on a different part of the sentence trying to figure out.

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You'll have to work at it, you know, although you're probably smarter than I am, so, but it's worth the effort.

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And it just, what it did for me is it just opened up the reality that all of reality is about the glory of God, the display of his glory, the recognition of that glory, the response to that glory, to the glory of God.

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And so that was really helpful. Then, of course, you read

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Jonathan Edwards, then you know where John Piper gets his theology. So then you follow that up with Desiring God, which takes this idea of the

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God -centeredness and the glory of God in all things, and applies it to so many different areas of life.

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That was really very helpful. And then Don Carson's book on prayer, originally called

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Spiritual Reformation, now called Praying with Paul. Just a really, really helpful book on prayer.

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He walks through the prayers of Paul and expounds them and then applies them and how we learn to pray by listening and learning from the prayers of Paul.

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And I found that revolutionary for my own prayer life. And so those would be three books, you know, related to Christian living that I would highly recommend.

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Anything really by Don Carson is valuable. He has just a tremendous capacity for biblical exposition and pastoral application.

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I mean, he just floors you sometimes with his insights. And I found myself saying,

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Lord, just a little bit of that would be wonderful, just to have that capacity.

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But anyway, those would be books that I would highly recommend. Guy, you had already hinted at it earlier in one of your answers.

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How about church history and slash biography? There's a lot of talk these days about, you know, sticking with Canadian, right?

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You know, for obvious reasons in the media. This is a fantastic Canadian story.

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It's called Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor by Don Carson, who we mentioned before, who is a

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Canadian, even though he's lived near Chicago for many years now. Don Carson's father was a pioneer church planter in Quebec before the

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Quiet Revolution of the 60s, if you're familiar with that. And he plodded away in little churches, mostly in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

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Was from Ontario, learned French, just out of a heart for the lost in Quebec. Never pastored a church more than 25 people.

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And Don Carson wrote a tribute to his dad. And it's a little bit of history at the beginning of the church in Quebec.

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If you don't know that, you really need to know about evangelicalism in Quebec. God did send a revival after Tom Carson retired.

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You know, so it's one of those seed planting stories of missionaries. But it's Canadian, and it's a great, inspiring

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Canadian story. My big takeaway from reading it is, I need to pray more. And that's a great motivation to read a book like that.

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Some Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor, Life and Reflections of Tom Carson. My wife should be up here for this, because she loves

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Christian biographies. And I will say, especially when it's a biography, or sorry, when it's an autobiography, because they are humbler about their own estimation of themselves than when somebody else is writing about them.

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And it's like they're floating above the earth. But Evidence Not Seen by Darlene Dibler -Rose,

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POW, during World War II, she was a missionary. This is an amazing story.

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You can hear her testimony from her own 70, 80 -year -old voice on YouTube.

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And it's beautiful. And you will see how God provides through strenuous circumstances and imitate her faith.

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I went for Augustine's Confessions. It's free.

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Go for book eight, chapters 11 and 12. And that's his conversion section.

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And it's just beautiful. You could read this, just 11 and 12, chapter eight, 11 and 12, or book eight, 11 and 12, you could read it, and you could read it tonight when you go home before you go to bed.

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But it's a beautiful testimony. He gets philosophical as you move out from that. So you can get into some stuff where he's just exploring some topics kind of like for the fun of it and noodling around.

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But I mean, if you picked up like this, the whole book, if you wanted to do just all of book eight, and even then you could go backwards and do book seven, that's what

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I found. Like start with book eight, 11, and 12, and then move out. And it stays enjoyable.

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And it's a beautiful testimony of coming to faith. At book one, he says, our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

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Read book one. You've got the best line. Yeah, I think, you know, obviously biography, we've talked about biography.

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I mentioned some of the biographies that have, you know, been impactful for me. Just to add to that,

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Ian Murray did a biography of Jonathan Edwards, but then George Marston did a biography, oh,

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I don't know, probably 15, 20 years ago. And it's a good companion to Murray.

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Marston gives you more of an insight of what it was like to live in that era.

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It's not some, you know, the thing that you hear about biographies is the whole thing of, how do they say it?

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You know, where these people are kind of glorified, right? All of their hagiography, yeah.

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You know, where it's, and Marston doesn't, you know, he doesn't do that. So, that's just another good suggestion.

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John Newton, his life is very interesting. The Lord's work to convert him and use him.

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But then, reading church history, right? You know, and there's lots of sources out there for that.

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I think that's really important. In an age that devalues history, that doesn't appreciate, and even in a church that doesn't appreciate the connection that goes all the way back to the book of Acts, it's helpful for us to read church history, to understand major events and track with the development of the church so that we can understand where we are in our present moment, how we got here, why the church looks the way it does, right?

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So, it's not only about understanding the past, but it's also about understanding the present. We're getting close.

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We don't want to keep folks too long, but I think it'd be worth to mention at least one theology book.

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We want to know the scriptures. We want to study theology. We want to know the Lord. So, if you guys could give us briefly one suggestion for theology, and perhaps to close it out, if you have one fiction recommendation for some light, enjoyable reading, just to enjoy good writing as well, that'd be great, and then we'll close with that.

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Very quickly, Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity, for your theology. Very good.

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And then fiction, I mean, I watch more fiction than I read, so 20 ,000

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Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne, but I've been in a nautical mood lately, so Moby Dick.

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Watch the 1956 version of that. It's very good, and read the book.

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I picked a commentary, because I wish more people knew about it. There's a huge set called the

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Expositors Bible Commentary. It's like, I think, 13 volumes to cover the whole Bible, and it costs a lot of money.

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You can get this abridged version in two volumes, and I think it's like maybe $60.

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So, look for the Expositors Bible Commentary, two -volume abridged, and what's nice is when my kids wonder, what does that verse mean?

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Or at times, when I read it, I'm like, I wonder, what does that verse mean? It's short, and it's not going to overwhelm you.

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It's eminently readable. It's consistently conservative. It would, I think, fit most of our hermeneutic, like our way of interpreting pretty well.

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It's just good, and it's like kind of gives you more beefier than a study Bible, but it'll help you read your

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Bible better when you get to those passages, and you can't figure out what on earth is going on. And I already gave my fiction that was

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Chronicles of Narnia, so I'll Cheat and Do Missions, which is another category we had, and it was William Carey, An Inquiry into the

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Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. It was a long title, but it's free, and it's online, and it's like 30 pages, and I had only read it this last year, or I guess

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I'd read it. Anyway, re -read it, and it is so rich and convicting, and it makes you want to like liquidate your assets and go move somewhere and serve on the mission field, which is a great instinct to have, even if you don't.

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It's just very rich. Go. Move out. There are needs. It's a big world.

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Go spread the gospel. Great commission. It's a great read. If I was up on this platform for one minute, and I had one book to recommend, it would absolutely be this one.

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Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves. Has anybody read it? Just curious. Put your hand up if you've read it.

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One or two. Read it. Get it. It's very worthwhile. It's such a neglected doctrine.

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I think if you ask the average Christian in a really conservative church to talk about the Trinity, we go, God is three, and he's one, but this gets into the roots, and the hows, and the why it matters, and it's beautifully written.

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You'll even laugh sometimes. There's charts and graphs, historical call -outs. It's an easy read, relatively, considering the depth of the subject, but my most highly recommended book tonight.

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Fiction. I read C .S. Lewis's Great Divorce when I was about 18. It's about 100 pages long.

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I read it and went, that was weird, set it aside, and said, I'll never read that again, and I've probably read it 30 times since then, and every time

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I read it, I get to meet... I get to know more and more of the people in that book and my life experience.

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It's a weird book in a lot of ways, but if you think about it in terms of describing people and their idols, and maybe how deadly some of those idols people have, read that fiction book,

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The Great Divorce by C .S. Lewis. Again, 100 pages, easy to read. I'm going to cheat and throw in my missions one.

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It's a bright orange book I have up here, and if you're considering the mission field at all or any way, you need to read this book.

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It's a different take and a little bit controversial, or if you're supporting missionaries and you read letters that say things like, we led a guy to Christ, and next weekend he planted a church, and last we heard there were 3 ,000 churches and 100 ,000 converts somewhere in India, and you're getting missionary letters like that, read this book.

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No shortcut to success, a manifesto for modern missions, and it just gets you back into the old ways of, you know, the hard work of preparing and doing missions.

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So anyway, I cheated and threw a few in there. One of the areas of focus that I've really benefited from in probably the last 10, 12 years is the whole biblical theology, right?

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So you have New Studies in Biblical Theology, Don Carson's series, and then you have specific works.

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So a couple of recommendations, and speaking about Canadians, Stephen Dempster's book,

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Dominion and Dynasty, is in that series on New Testament, New Studies in Biblical Theology, and he traces, he develops an

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Old Testament theology using the themes of dynasty and dominion, so realm and rule, and he traces them through the

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Old Testament, and uses the Hebrew order of the books, right?

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So you get narrative, commentary, narrative, and he traces the theme, and then in like three pages at the end of the book, he carries it over into the

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New Testament, just enough to whet your appetite, but very helpful, really helpful book for just providing this idea of that in Scripture we have a single narrative plot line, unfolding

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God's plan and creation and redemption, and to see these themes, these threads of these themes that are threaded throughout the

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Old Testament that all converge in the person of Jesus Christ, right? And when you get to the

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Gospel of Matthew, it just opens up, I mean it's just, you know, it's almost like the fireworks on the

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Fourth of July kind of thing. So I would recommend that, and then in that same line,

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Jim Hamilton's book, God's Glory and Salvation and Judgment, and it's a more comprehensive work, it deals with every book in the

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Bible, and traces this theme that God pursues His glory in salvation through judgment, and that's just a really good resource.

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If you're reading through the Bible in a year, or however, whatever your reading pattern is, either read this section in Hamilton's book on the book of Genesis.

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It will prime you for what to look for, then as you read, and then you just kind of, you know, work, or read

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Genesis first, and then read Hamilton and recall, oh yeah, I remember that,

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I remember that, I remember that. So it's just really helpful for helping us get a sense of the unity of Scripture, which is something that has, you know, been lost in many respects.

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We treat the Scripture so fragmentedly, if that's a word.

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So I would recommend that, and then that series, New Studies in Biblical Theology, any of those books, any books in that series are worth the read.

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So, and then, because when it comes to reading,

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I am not a great reader, right? I'm a lip reader, you know, I can only read as quickly as I can talk.

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So I don't, you know, I have to be very judicious in the reading that I do. So I don't read a lot of fiction.

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I read the Hardy Boy books when I was a teenager. Thoroughly enjoyed them.

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No shame there. But I would recommend

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Treasure Island, or Robert Louis Stevenson, you know, his stories, very, very fascinating studies.

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So anyway, that's my fiction. A slow reader too. So you and me and John Piper, are slow readers.

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So if you didn't know that, that's encouraging to me. It's good to end on a note of encouragement.