We have an email today from Jonathan Edwards, who lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. That is his real name, I checked, and his question is a good one. "Pastor John, I drive a forklift in a warehouse for Christian family businesses. We are allowed to listen in our trucks to music, books, and I recently started enjoying this podcast.

I have been an avid audiobook listener at my job, and I would like to know your thoughts about interacting with secular literature, including fiction, philosophy, poetry, and history. What would you say, Pastor John, to Jonathan Edwards?" Okay, Jonathan, here's my most recent thinking about why a measured use of wide reading, including non-Christian authors, is a wise thing.

I call it the reality factor. When I'm reading the Bible, there are dozens and dozens of experiences and concepts and words that I can fly right over without pausing to contemplate the reality behind the words and the experiences and the concepts. That's what I mean by the reality factor.

We need to stop bringing the reality factor and go deeper behind. Now, how do you contemplate a reality without some knowledge of the reality? Not knowledge of the word, but of the reality. I would say the more knowledge of the reality, the better, if the knowledge is true and in true proportion to its value.

For example, you don't need to know lots of knowledge about the size and species of the birds that Jesus says to watch in Matthew 6, "Consider the birds of the air." That's not core relevant to what he's saying, but his aim in that text is to help you be free from the experience of anxiety.

Now, what if you had no experience of anxiety? It's really important to have deep, wide knowledge of the reality of anxiety and how it works and what its roots are and what its fruits are and what forms it can take in life and how it can sneak up on you and what devastation it's had in the history of people's lives and on and on and on.

In other words, there are many realities in the Bible which assume that from life experience, we know what they're referring to—peace, joy, fear, anger, war, deception, beauty, power, hypocrisy. Of course, the Bible gives crucial insight into these things that come from nowhere else, but the raw material of knowledge is gained in large measure from life experience, and then the Bible takes that common fund of human experience, of reality that we bring to the Bible and shows how God relates to it and transforms it.

The New Testament assumes that we have not forgotten the lesson of the book of Proverbs, that we should go to the ant, the little bug, the ant, consider her ways and be wise. In other words, look at the world. Learn reality from the world. Learn something about hard work from the world.

Learn something about perseverance from the world. Grow your fund of reality experience of a thousand things that are in the world, because when the New Testament mentions those things, it assumes we have some experiential knowledge of them. But here's the catch. Most of us live lives that are so small, narrow, constricted, limited.

We know so little about so many things. One of the ways, only one, one of the ways that God has ordained for us to grow in our knowledge of many things, many experiences that we have no immediate experience of is through reading. This means that if we have a wide and deep knowledge of things through reading as well as through life experience, then when the Bible speaks, for example, of the sorrow of losing 10 children, we may have a greater understanding of what it's referring to.

I'm thinking of Job, what it's referring to if we walked through it ourselves, which most of us won't. Hardly anybody loses 10 children all at once. But we might read about it. We might read the various kinds of horrible things that people have walked through like that and deepen our grasp of the human spirit and the experience of what it's like to do that.

So let me give you just a little glimpse of how this worked for the original Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards delivered a sermon about slavery to sin and what it's like to have Satan as a slave master. Now, he knows that Satan is the most wicked, cruelest, most fiendish master that ever was.

And yet most people gladly walk in his service. How could Edwards feel this as he ought? How could he know the reality of what it means to be ruled by Satan as he ought? How could he say it in a way that would help others know the reality? Edwards had evidently done some reading about human sacrifice in the country of Guinea.

And here's what it did for him. Here's what he says, "Satan and his cohorts do by you as I have heard they do in Guinea, where at their feasts they eat men's flesh. They set the poor ignorant child who knows nothing of the matter to make a fire. And while he stoops down to blow the fire, one comes behind and strikes off his head and then is roasted by the same fire that he kindled and made a feast of.

And the skull is made use of as a cup out of which they make merry with their liquor, just so Satan, who has a mind to make merry with you." Now, that's pretty horrible, pretty powerful, pretty unforgettable. Edwards got that knowledge of evil from outside the Bible, and it informed biblical teaching about Satan's horrible, fiendish, devastating, murderous rule over his people, all the while making them think they're having fun.

Now, in my case, I just finished listening to all three volumes of William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill, about a thousand pages each. What an education in reality, insights into natural challenges of leadership, insights into the horrors of war, insights into fickle nature of public approval, insight into sexual insanity of upper-class philandering, insight into the complexities of what justice looks like in public policy, insight into the value of never giving up, though there's enormous opposition, and on and on and on.

What an education. I was learning reality. I wasn't learning my morality. Books didn't teach morality. I wasn't learning my morality. I get that from the Bible. I was gaining awareness of realities that come from life experience, except I don't have any life experience of being in war. Things that are and what they're like, that's what I found.

In other words, I was enlarging the raw material of reality, which the Bible assumes and interprets for me when I bring it to my reading. So what's the aim of all this reading? All of our reading, whether it's Christian or non-Christian, all of our reading aims to know God better, to know man better, to know the ways of God and the ways of man better, to understand the Scriptures better, that we may obey more fully what God says and be more useful in accomplishing His purposes and glorifying His name.

Amen. Okay, well, in representing APJ listeners, I know they would want me to ask you this. How long did it take for you to get through all three Churchill audiobooks? I'm trying to think when I started. Sometime in the spring, maybe six months, maybe five months, I'm not sure.

When it ended, I felt sad. I really felt sad because they were so satisfying to listen to because of the reality that they were exposing me to so many things I didn't know anything about. It was like reading the history of World War II, and of course, it was a biography of the man.

It was a primer in political science. I mean, it was the most remarkable read, probably the most amazing thing I've ever read in terms of scope. Well, there you have it, listeners, a mammoth reading goal for 2017, perhaps. It's certainly a classic. Once again, the Churchill biography is written by William Manchester.

It's titled The Last Lion. It's 3,000 pages long, divvied up into three volumes, Visions of Glory, Alone, and finally, Defender of the Realm. For those of you who listen to this podcast at work or on your commute or as just part of your daily routine, we want to thank you for making us a part of your day.

We hope you find a number of other wonderful podcasts to mix into your life. Of course, we pray that you find some great audiobooks too. We know there are a lot of listeners out there like Jonathan Edwards somewhere in Kalamazoo right now. So, thanks, Jonathan. And to you, we want to say thank you for listening to the podcast and for your prayers, which are always appreciated, and of course, for your financial generosity that supports everything that we do at DesiringGod.org.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll be back on Wednesday. We'll see you then. We'll see you then.