Special Episode: Chapel Library | The Whole Counsel

Chapel Library as a Trusted Source of Christian Literature

Welcome back to the Whole Council podcast. I'm Jon Snyder, and today we have kind of an unusual podcast because we want to talk about a particular ministry that distributes really good Christian literature.

And the name of the ministry is Chapel Library, a ministry of Mount Zion Bible Church, and this is in Pensacola, Florida. So there's a reason that we want to bring this up to you at this time, but let me get to that in a moment.

Years ago, when I was in college and I became a believer, I remember seeing some gospel tracts. So these were just short little pamphlets, and I picked one up, and I was surprised to see that it wasn't a modern writer, and it wasn't just kind of a, you know, the Romans wrote, you know, three or four easy points to becoming a Christian.

It was actually a sermon by J .C. Ryle or Andrew Bonnard or Charles Spurgeon or others. And these little pamphlets, these Puritan sermons put down in a small form were published by a company called the Chapel Library and distributed freely.

And so it really was quite exciting to see that somebody was putting out pamphlets that were worth reading, and you didn't want to just toss them down. Now, they are in the original language, many of them, and so while some updating has been done, very little has.

And so as a college student, it took me a little time to work through them, but they were well worth the time. Then fast forward a few years to when I was pastoring here in the early days in New Albany with Christ Church.

Free Grace Broadcaster and the Value of Puritan Excerpts

And someone gave me a subscription to a small booklet that would come out every quarter, and it was called the Free Grace Broadcaster. Now, the Free Grace Broadcaster was also by Chapel Library. It was a more substantial thing.

It wasn't just a little it wasn't a little tract. It was a proper booklet, and it would take one great theme from the Scripture like providence, God's rule, holiness, salvation through grace, you know, the doctrine of repentance, family, different key topics.

And it would then have, you know, a number of old writers whose sermons or excerpts from their sermons would be laid out in a very orderly fashion. And you would look at the biblical doctrine from that and moving on to the application.

It really was a worthwhile thing to read. It was a lot of good stuff in a form that came, you know, very inexpensively or free. After that, a few years further in the future, I met a man named Jeff Pollard.

And Jeff Pollard is an elder now and was a pastor at the church that is behind this ministry. And it was really interesting to meet Jeff because, you know, I had been acquainted with the ministry of his church long before I had met the man that was behind much of it at that point.

And I heard Jeff preach at a conference that I was going to be speaking at as well. I was so encouraged. In fact, I think the first time I heard him was at a ministerial luncheon where all the preachers of the conference were given ten minutes to say something that—it was called like the burning heart, something that was burning on your heart, something you really felt needed to be said.

So that's pretty revealing. What would each man say? You know, so Dr. Joel Beakey was there and other men, you know, like Paul Washer. And Jeff got up. And I had not heard Jeff before. And Jeff talked about the loveliness of Christ.

And I was so encouraged. Another thing about Jeff that just really impressed me was wherever he went, he had a small group of young ministerial candidates or young men with him. And after the conference and all the hours and all the work, and they can be pretty tiring, Jeff would gather the young men around him in the evening and continue to talk to them about Christ and help train them.

From that point forward, every time I went to that conference, Jeff was the guy I wanted to see. And so each year we would always try to at least sit down and catch up. Now that brings us to the present.

Chapel Library’s Free Digital Books and Christ-Centered Publishing

A couple of months ago, as Media Gratia has been looking at putting together a small set of our favorite books on the person and work of Jesus Christ and publishing those as a nice set, I looked on Chapel Library's website.

And I found that they had one of the books that we wanted to publish. And so they had already done all the work of putting it onto their website digitally, which made it a lot easier for us. And the book is called The True Christian's Love to the Unseen Christ by Thomas Vincent, a Puritan.

Really wonderful book and kind of hard to find now. And so I contacted Chapel Library. And I asked them, would they be willing to allow us to use their digital copy? That would save us a lot of work. Would they let us buy that from them or whatever the requirement would be?

And I didn't know how they would respond. Immediately they responded by email and said, we would be glad for you to do that and you can just have it for free. And it just made me stop and think about the way that that ministry has operated through the many years, really since the late 1970s.

And how they have constantly depended upon the faithfulness of God to provide all the funding. How they have not begged for money. How they have not charged for things. And what an encouraging thing that was.

So I thought that today we would just look at that and maybe I could introduce you to something you've never heard of before. Chapel Library. Now, they have a good website called chapellibrary .org. And if you go to the website, what you find is that they have a number of main sections.

There's literature, and this comes both in printed form and then in digital. There's a section called prison for the prison ministries. There's the audio books, and then there are theological courses.

So maybe I could just run through a lot of that with you and kind of give you an idea of what's there. Now, I want to be very clear. I have two purposes for this. One is I would love to introduce you, if you don't know about Chapel Library, to this very helpful resource.

Everything they print is trustworthy. It's all from the basic approach to Scripture, which we feel is most honoring to God. A sense in which God is big and majestic. Man is absolutely needy, and Christ is all-sufficient.

If you want to nickname that Reformed, that's fine. But I think really it's just biblical. And so they use the writers from the past, the best writers. And they give us the best of the best writers. Maybe just excerpts of sermons or just some of their best sermons in this literature.

Now, if you go to literature, you can look it up by topic. You can look it up by title. Also, these are published in multiple languages. English, of course, is the main language, but they have a very large Spanish selection.

But that's not all. I was surprised when I hit languages. I thought it would just say English and Spanish. Amharic, Arabic, some that I can't pronounce. Chinese, Czech, French, other languages as well.

And they put all of this out for free. If you sort by authors, it's amazing. I don't have time to read you the authors. I don't know how many are here. But when I look just at the A's, we have Thomas Adams, the Puritan, or James W. Alexander, the late 18th century minister and theologian.

His father, Archibald Alexander, a leader in the Second Great Awakening, as well as a great theologian. The Puritan, Isaac Ambrose, John Arndt. If we get into the B's, we have Richard Barcellas, a modern Reformed Baptist.

Peter Barnes, Bodhi Backham. So Richard Baxter, Joel Beakey. There are just so many. And that's the authors. So if you go to that page under literature, and you can see that it has a tab for authors you can see for yourself.

So as you look at this, you realize they have about 900 different works that they publish and offer to you. Now if you go to one of them, you find that like a book, like the true Christian's love for the unseen Christ.

If you go to that book and hit it, you'll see that it will come up and it will give you some information about the book. It's 122 pages. It comes in a paperback form, and it says under this, value $3 .52.

And that's kind of a strange number. You know, you think, well, is this free? Does it cost $3 .52? That's a very cheap paperback book. I don't mind paying that, but what is it? And right beside that, it has a little tab, what's this?

And so if you hit that, you find this. It says each household can request one order of up to $20 value of printed Christ-centered literature per month free of charge. And then if you go over $20 a month per household, then they ask that if you can, they would ask you to go ahead and pay for that.

So in other words, the true Christian's love to the unseen Christ is $3 .52. So you've got, you know, $16 .48 left. And you can get up to $20 a month of their price, and this book costs $3 .52, without paying anything.

And that really is quite gracious of them. They do that. They offer that to anyone. You get on their website, and you can see where you can subscribe and become a household that can receive the material.

Prison Ministry, Audio Resources, and Theological Courses

On top of their literature, they also have a prison ministry. And if you go to their tab that says prison, what you find is that in 2018, they did a survey and found that 2 .3 million Americans are behind bars.

So they began to provide free of charge Christian literature, tracts, booklets, paperbacks, audio tapes, theological study courses for chaplains and workers in the prison and inmates in the prison to be given away.

So these were offered, and they are presently supplying over 4 ,000 different institutions in the United States and Canada. Now there's another tab, and that is the audio ministry. And this includes sermons at Mount Zion Bible Church with Pastor Clarence Simmons, also with Jeff Pollard's sermons, as well as other visiting pastors.

And then they have a number of sermons by Al Martin, Reformed Baptist. And not only that, but his lectures in pastoral theology, which have been turned into a three-volume set of books. And then there are conferences and sermons by Lee Roy Shelton Jr. available as well.

And finally, there is a tab called courses. And these are theological courses that are available. And now these courses can be taken kind of in a more intensive way where you have to supply you're given homework and reading, and you supply through writing the answers.

And then you have a grader who will respond to that, or you can just read it and kind of go along on your own. The courses cover a number of general topics. Salvation, or the doctrine of soteriology, the Christian's practical walk, general studies, and doctrine.

Now, under each of these, what we find is that there are three levels available. So if you go under doctrine, you find basic, intermediate, and advanced. So there are a number of courses for studying doctrine at a basic level.

And then there are the intermediate level courses, and then there are the advanced courses. So all of that under their theological course ministry. And another ministry they have, linked with Mount Zion Bible Church, is the SpurgeonGyms .org website.

Spurgeon Resources and the Five Major Doctrines of the Gospel

And this is where you can go, and you can find the largest collection of Spurgeon resources online. And this includes the complete 63-volume set of sermons, some audio sermons, books, and quotes of Spurgeon.

And if you go through their list of books I was looking here, there's just too many to read. Words of warning for daily life. Words of counsel for Christian workers. I mean, half of these, I've read a lot of Spurgeon, and half of these I've never heard of.

God Always Cares, another small book that he wrote. The Saint and His Savior. Sermons on Sovereignty. Able to the Uttermost. The Clue of the Maze. Farm Sermons. The Gospel of the Kingdom. All of Grace, etc.

On top of Spurgeon's books, and sermons, and audio recordings of many of his sermons, you can find his prayers in print. There are 26 prayers in print, with then a sermon on prayer by Spurgeon. So, so many things available.

Let me just, I want to show you one book that they published. So, they put this together in a nice heritage edition. It's Free Grace Broadcasters on Five Major Doctrines of the Gospel. So, the first part of the book is the gospel itself, basic sermons.

So, sermons like A Report from Heaven by Thomas Boston. What is the Gospel Message by J .I. Packer. God's Unspeakable Love by Thomas Manton. A Right Understanding of Sin by J .C. Ryle. And then there's more by Spurgeon and Jonathan Edwards.

The second part is on Christ's Substitutionary Death. And so, there are sermons by men like A .W. Pink. Christ's Federal Work. Or Spurgeon's The Great Exchange Explained. Or Octavius Winslow, An Entire Pardon.

The Puritan John Owen, Satisfaction and Substitution Outlined. Jonathan Edwards, God's Wisdom in Christ's Substitution. The third major section of the book is on the Doctrine of Justification. And again, it contains sermons by men like Spurgeon.

Justification Made Plain. Or the Presbyterian theologian, Charles Hodge. The Meaning of Justification. Or James Buchanan, The Immediate Ground of Justification. Or Horatius Bonnard, Not Faith, But Christ.

Robert Trail, Puritan, The Abuse of Justification. J .C. Ryle, Peace Through Justification, to give you just some. The fourth part of the book, Imputed Righteousness. And again, we find sermons by Spurgeon, Bonnard, Calvin, Hodge, Ebenezer Erskine.

Thomas Brooks, J .C. Ryle. And the final section is on the Doctrine of Repentance. And by another host of names from Puritans and post-Puritans, Great Awakening men. So, they put this together in a nice book.

And it's really just a great book to have. A resource on sermons by some of the greatest preachers in the history of Christendom. And all of them on the topics of these five great doctrines dealing with the Gospel.

Why Chapel Library Is Worth Supporting

Now, I mentioned that I wanted to introduce you to this ministry, Chapel Library. Not only because it would do you good to be able to read their materials. And it's a way to get them, you know, inexpensively or for free.

Depending on which way you want to approach it. But I also want to tell you about this ministry to encourage you. That if you're looking for a place where you can invest money. And you know that the money that's given will go to producing things that really honor the Lord.

And do lasting good to souls. Chapel Library is a place you ought to consider. You can go online and you can see that if you would like to donate, you can. So, give the website a look. And you can subscribe there and get monthly materials.

You know, five or six books, pamphlets for free each month. Puritans, 18th century Great Awakening men. And the modern men who are in the same vein. As well as supporting work to prisons. Getting into some theological courses or listening to audio books.

Really wonderful ministry.