Ten Authors for Your Soul
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - This week we're talking with Pastor John
00:00:06.480 | about book reading.
00:00:07.660 | On Monday we looked at the seven ways
00:00:09.840 | books have impacted your life, Pastor John.
00:00:12.200 | And there you gave us a brief theology of reading as well,
00:00:15.800 | looking at that incredible text in Ephesians 3, 4.
00:00:19.160 | And as you were talking about all the ways,
00:00:22.440 | those seven ways that books have changed your life,
00:00:24.720 | I could hear you very eager
00:00:26.040 | to give specific recommendations.
00:00:27.800 | So let's do the who today.
00:00:29.640 | Who do you read?
00:00:31.240 | That's today's question from a listener named Sam.
00:00:33.200 | Hello, Pastor John and Tony.
00:00:34.680 | In a recent Solid Joys devotional I listened to,
00:00:38.200 | Pastor John, you mentioned the practice
00:00:39.440 | of reading rich doctrinal books.
00:00:41.640 | That's the quote, rich doctrinal books.
00:00:43.620 | What would you consider to be your top 10
00:00:45.920 | rich doctrinal books that have helped you grow
00:00:48.600 | over the decades?
00:00:50.040 | - Well, I have an awful time answering top questions
00:00:54.680 | or most questions,
00:00:56.620 | but I can't answer 10 rich doctrinal books
00:01:00.000 | that have made a walloping impact on my life.
00:01:03.080 | Whether I leave one out that's in the top 10,
00:01:06.240 | my memory's not good enough to say.
00:01:08.120 | Here's what C.S. Lewis said about our longing
00:01:12.340 | for the heart, our hearts, to sing with joy
00:01:17.340 | over what we see about God in our devotions.
00:01:21.800 | He said, "For my own part,
00:01:24.320 | I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful
00:01:27.820 | in devotion than devotional books,
00:01:30.100 | and I rather suspect that the same experience
00:01:33.660 | awaits others.
00:01:35.620 | I believe that many who find, quote, nothing happens
00:01:40.620 | when they sit down or kneel down to a book of devotion
00:01:44.580 | would find that the heart sings unbidden
00:01:49.900 | when they are working their way
00:01:51.500 | through a tough bit of theology
00:01:54.020 | with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand."
00:01:57.280 | So my response to that is,
00:01:58.320 | "Well, you can leave the pipe aside."
00:02:00.180 | (laughing)
00:02:01.460 | You can get mouth cancer on your way to devotions.
00:02:04.940 | Leave the pipe aside, but do pick up the pencil
00:02:08.940 | and a doctrinally rich book and see what happens."
00:02:13.940 | So here are 10 authors who have done this for me,
00:02:18.940 | made my heart sing because of what they showed me
00:02:22.940 | of God and his ways from the Bible.
00:02:25.300 | Number one, Jonathan Edwards.
00:02:28.260 | No historic theologian has shaped me more.
00:02:31.420 | I mentioned four books,
00:02:32.820 | "The End For Which God Created the World,"
00:02:35.140 | "The Religious Affections,"
00:02:36.620 | "The Essay on the Trinity," and "Freedom of the Will."
00:02:39.700 | One of those showed me the nature of God as three in one.
00:02:43.500 | Another showed me the goal of God
00:02:45.340 | to glorify himself in all that he does.
00:02:47.620 | Another showed me that my affections are essential
00:02:50.500 | to the worship and obedience of God,
00:02:52.580 | and the fourth showed me the compatibility
00:02:56.460 | between God's absolute sovereignty
00:02:59.220 | and my human accountability before him.
00:03:02.580 | Number two, John Owen.
00:03:04.740 | "The Mortification of Sin,"
00:03:07.100 | that book, that little book, 80, 90 pages,
00:03:09.980 | takes us into the depths of how God
00:03:13.460 | overcomes sin in our lives,
00:03:15.820 | and on communion with God shows us
00:03:19.620 | what it means actually to have fellowship
00:03:22.940 | with each member of the Trinity,
00:03:26.340 | and the death of death in the death of Christ
00:03:30.020 | clarifies the glory of particular redemption,
00:03:34.220 | namely that Christ really did secure
00:03:37.500 | the new covenant blessings for God's elect.
00:03:40.900 | Number three, Stephen Charnock,
00:03:44.140 | "The Existence and Attributes of God."
00:03:46.380 | Of course, we just put out a brand new
00:03:48.340 | double-volume edition of this.
00:03:50.540 | That book, that giant 1500-page in two volumes
00:03:55.540 | sat on my bedside table for, my guess is,
00:03:59.300 | I can't remember exactly, a couple of years?
00:04:01.180 | It sat on my bedside table,
00:04:03.020 | and I soaked with just two or three pages
00:04:05.980 | at night before I went to bed.
00:04:07.860 | I soaked in God's holiness, his eternity,
00:04:11.340 | his immutability, his patience, his goodness.
00:04:14.580 | Someone asked Bernard of Clairvaux in the Middle Ages,
00:04:17.580 | "Why don't people love God more?"
00:04:20.260 | And he said, "Because they don't know him."
00:04:23.100 | Charnock is a great remedy for that ailment.
00:04:27.940 | Number four, if you don't want to start
00:04:30.780 | with a two-volume, 1500-page book,
00:04:34.180 | then start with J.I. Packer, "Knowing God."
00:04:38.500 | 250 pages instead of 1500,
00:04:41.740 | and the first sentence goes like this,
00:04:43.980 | "As clowns yearn to play Hamlet,
00:04:48.500 | so I have wanted to write a treatise on God."
00:04:52.100 | (laughs)
00:04:54.420 | Packer knows God is infinite and he's finite.
00:04:59.060 | The chasm between him and God is wider than the universe.
00:05:03.300 | So Packer is a good, humble guide.
00:05:07.940 | He's not presumptuous, but he is profound
00:05:11.380 | in his own special, accessible way.
00:05:14.060 | So start with Packer if Charnock sounds daunting.
00:05:18.180 | John Murray, "Redemption Accomplished and Applied."
00:05:23.300 | I learned my Calvinism not from Calvin,
00:05:26.620 | but mainly from Romans and Ephesians and Philippians
00:05:30.260 | and the Gospel of John.
00:05:31.980 | But at certain points along the way
00:05:34.540 | in my theological pilgrimage,
00:05:37.860 | a book would come along that put so many pieces together
00:05:42.580 | in a beautiful, coherent way
00:05:45.180 | that I found them extremely helpful.
00:05:48.340 | The very title, "Redemption," colon,
00:05:51.660 | "Accomplished and Applied,"
00:05:54.820 | still functions for me like a bright light.
00:05:58.060 | God accomplished my redemption on the cross,
00:06:01.460 | once for all, decisively.
00:06:03.180 | It's over, it's done, it's finished, it's accomplished.
00:06:05.420 | Propitiation, redemption, and then He sovereignly,
00:06:10.420 | at age six, He applies that to my life.
00:06:15.140 | Justification, adoption, sanctification, glorification,
00:06:18.500 | by giving me faith, bringing me to Himself.
00:06:22.460 | So after Packer, go to Murray.
00:06:25.880 | Number six, John Bunyan, "Pilgrim's Progress."
00:06:30.060 | You might not think that this interesting story
00:06:32.900 | that children can enjoy, a fascinating allegory,
00:06:37.820 | is doctrinally rich, but it is.
00:06:40.460 | One of the things about an allegory
00:06:42.740 | is that you can read it at different levels.
00:06:45.820 | It's just an interesting story with monsters and dangers,
00:06:49.540 | or at the profound level of how the Christian life
00:06:52.980 | really works under the sovereignty of God.
00:06:56.900 | Number seven, J.C. Ryle, "Holiness."
00:07:01.260 | One of the great strengths of this book
00:07:03.540 | that makes it so doctrinally rich
00:07:06.540 | is that he keeps in clear view the difference
00:07:09.240 | between justification and sanctification,
00:07:13.540 | and how they relate to each other
00:07:15.180 | in the quest for holiness.
00:07:18.500 | It also has the hidden benefit of being 150 years old,
00:07:22.440 | so that we can see,
00:07:23.940 | I was just glancing at my notes yesterday,
00:07:27.740 | we can see how some of the challenges
00:07:30.860 | to holiness that we face, we think are new,
00:07:35.820 | really not new or peculiar to our age.
00:07:40.820 | Number eight, D.A. Carson,
00:07:44.100 | "The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God."
00:07:46.720 | This is only 84 pages, but it goes a long way
00:07:51.180 | to keep us from talking in sentimental nonsense
00:07:55.980 | about the love of God.
00:07:57.640 | Almost everybody in the post-Christian West
00:08:00.460 | thinks of God as more or less lenient and kind.
00:08:04.020 | They bring their conceptions to the Bible,
00:08:06.340 | and when the Bible says, "God is love,"
00:08:08.900 | they fill it up with meaning
00:08:11.180 | that they already had in their head,
00:08:13.880 | which may be completely wrong.
00:08:16.900 | And Don Carson helps us see what God is really like
00:08:21.900 | in what he revealed about his love.
00:08:26.140 | Number nine, Martin Lloyd-Jones, "The Sermon on the Mount."
00:08:30.560 | This two-volume collection of sermons
00:08:33.520 | on Jesus' most famous sermon opened my eyes
00:08:36.900 | in the summer of 1968 to how doctrinal preaching
00:08:41.900 | could set the heart on fire.
00:08:44.560 | When I read it, I was 22 years old,
00:08:46.840 | and I thought, "That's how I'd like to pray someday."
00:08:53.760 | Number 10, George Ladd, "A Theology of the New Testament
00:08:58.760 | and the Presence of the Future."
00:09:02.120 | Dr. Ladd was my New Testament prof in seminary
00:09:06.260 | and introduced a whole generation of American evangelicals
00:09:10.180 | to the fact that the New Testament
00:09:12.160 | is eschatological cover to cover,
00:09:15.420 | meaning that Israel's long-awaited kingdom of God
00:09:20.760 | has already arrived and yet is not entirely here.
00:09:25.760 | He showed us that the, quote, "mystery of the kingdom,"
00:09:29.500 | that you read about in the gospels,
00:09:30.700 | the mystery of the kingdom
00:09:32.140 | is fulfillment without consummation.
00:09:37.540 | That's the mystery.
00:09:38.740 | The kingdom of God is already here in some senses,
00:09:42.860 | and it is not yet here in other senses.
00:09:46.580 | And the tension between the already of the kingdom
00:09:50.880 | and the not yet of the kingdom
00:09:52.960 | affects everything in the Bible, everything in life.
00:09:57.460 | So eschatology is not just a final chapter about end times
00:10:02.460 | in the systematic theology textbook,
00:10:05.440 | but a pervasive reality touching everything
00:10:08.840 | in the New Testament and in life.
00:10:11.520 | Those are my 10 suggested authors
00:10:13.400 | and some of their doctrinally rich books.
00:10:18.080 | Remember, as you read, to be like B.B. Warfield.
00:10:22.920 | When he was criticized that 10 minutes on your knees
00:10:28.920 | would give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge
00:10:32.080 | of God than 10 hours over your books, he replied, "What?
00:10:36.920 | Then 10 hours over your books on your knees?"
00:10:43.040 | Even if you read these books in your chair,
00:10:47.280 | not on your knees, even if you're sitting in your chair,
00:10:52.280 | be kneeling in your heart,
00:10:55.640 | and then the rich doctrine will make the heart sing.
00:10:59.020 | - Great list of book ideas, perfectly timed.
00:11:02.720 | Pastor John, because for those of us in the States,
00:11:05.400 | we're coming up on a long weekend.
00:11:07.160 | Monday is Labor Day for us, a long weekend,
00:11:09.400 | perfect for a little bit more extra book reading.
00:11:13.000 | Monday is a holiday, a holiday for doing just about anything
00:11:17.160 | but thinking about work, really, to be honest,
00:11:20.320 | but not for us.
00:11:21.140 | We're back on Monday to talk about work
00:11:23.000 | and to ask if there is work in eternity in the new creation.
00:11:27.120 | And if so, what vocations will there be in the new creation
00:11:31.440 | and will we be employed in something
00:11:33.640 | that corresponds to our interests in this life?
00:11:38.160 | Interesting set of questions we'll ask Pastor John on Monday.
00:11:42.840 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:11:44.160 | We'll see you then.
00:11:45.120 | (upbeat music)
00:11:47.700 | (upbeat music)
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