Well, the Cross Conference continues today in Louisville and ends tomorrow on Saturday and over 7,000 young men and women are registered for the conference in Kentucky, which should prompt all of us to pray about what God might do with how many young men and women who are considering giving their lives to the nations as missionaries.

But even as you travel, the questions keep arriving from listeners facing a year of Bible reading ahead and this email is from Jeff. "Hi, Pastor John, through various seasons of my life, I've been ministered through the Bible and through other books and especially through your own books. In 2019, how can I best balance Bible reading with reading other books specifically?

If I have only an hour a day to read, how would you suggest I allocate my time between the Bible and other books?" That's a nice specific way to ask it, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Like you got one hour, you got your Bible and you got some other books, tell me what to do.

Wow. That's a little bit risky to tell somebody how to apportion their time between the Bible, the very Word of God and other books. But I will give a very specific suggestion in just a moment. But first, a couple of thoughts. When I read this question, I wasn't sure what kind of books Jeff had in mind.

Is he asking about Bible reading versus reading Pilgrim's Progress, Packer's Knowing God, Calvin's Institutes, or is he asking about reading the Bible versus reading Sports Illustrated or National Geographic or a novel, a manual on how to be a mechanic or science school texts? What is he asking? Well, let me say a word about Bible reading versus the quest for knowledge in general outside the Bible, because I can imagine a person saying, "Well, if the Bible is the very Word of the Creator of the universe, why would you not just stay with your Bible all day and listen to God, for goodness sake?

He's God." And the answer to that question is because the Bible tells you not to. Go to the ant, oh sluggard, consider her ways and be wise. In other words, close your Bible and go out and look at an anthill. Learn something from the world. Consider the lilies of the field.

Close your Bible and go look at some lilies. Consider the birds of the air. Close your Bible and go look at the birds of the air. Don't just read the Bible, read God's world as well as God's Word. And of course, the Bible tells us to work with our hands, to provide a living, but you learn how to be a tent maker like Paul, or a doctor like Luke, or a carpenter like Jesus Father, or a professional fisherman like Peter.

You learn how to do those skills, not by reading your Bible. The Bible doesn't tell you which stitches hold tents together when the leather gets wet. It doesn't do that. It's not designed for that. You go out and look at the world and listen to wise people and study nature and figure things out.

So all that just to say that the Bible itself instructs us to learn about the world and learn about people and learn about vocations and learn about society and social processes that God made by looking at them. We don't stop seeing the hand of God just because we're not reading the Bible.

Now that's probably not what Jeff was asking. I just wanted to say it, right? I think what Jeff is asking is if I have a good book about God and His ways to read by a godly author, and I have one hour and I have to divvy up reading that book from reading the Bible, what should my proportion be?

Like Calvin's Institute, J.I. Packard, "Knowing God." If you want to read some of that, you want to read your Bible, how do you do it? So here goes. And remember, I have no biblical authority for saying this, this proportion that I'm going to suggest. I'm going to remind all of our listeners something I've said before a long time ago.

Suppose you read slowly like I do, about 200 words a minute, which may be this pace I'm talking right now. I don't know. If you read 15 minutes a day for one year, you'll read 5,475 minutes in a year. Multiply that by 200 words a minute, and you get 1,095,000 words that you would have read in a year.

Now an average serious book might have, what, 360 words on a page. I counted a bunch of them. So you would read 3,041 pages in one year during that 15-minute slot a day. A serious book would average maybe, what, 250 pages? Lots of books are just 150 pages, but let's just say a good, solid, serious theology book would have 250 pages.

I just flopped one open yesterday that I just got in the mail. There it was, 250 pages. That's 12 very substantial books all in 15 minutes a day for the average slow reader. So I'm going to suggest to Jeff that he reads 45 minutes in the Bible slowly, thoughtfully, meditating, praying, which would get him through the Bible in a year, and that he spend 15 minutes of that hour reading a great, God-centered, Bible-saturated book that will serve his Bible reading.

And I'm assuming that Jeff then sets aside another chunk of time for prayer, by the way. That's another conversation we should have. Someone might say, "How could you even dare to suggest that any book intrude itself on an hour that he could spend reading the Bible?" And my answer is, my experience, and the Bible itself, tells me that other people's vision of what they have seen in the Bible can be a great means of seeing more in the Bible.

I know this is true. If I take 10 minutes in the morning to read John Owen or Jonathan Edwards, I see more in my Bible. So I think if Jeff chooses his books wisely, they will not diminish what Jeff sees in God's Word in that hour. Looking through the eyes of others will increase Jeff's grasp of the greatest things in the world when he reads his Bible.

Amen. This is some really wise counsel here, Pastor John. Thank you. And, you know, we have surpassed now 1,300 total episodes in the life of this podcast, and that's because of your support, your prayers, your interest, and your questions. And you can search all six years' worth of episodes, read transcripts, even send us a question that you might have at our online home, DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

Well there are seasons of life when we are especially weary and when it seems like we're simply too busy and tired for meaningful Bible reading. In those seasons, how do we push back the fatigue and the many chores of life in order to engage with God's Word each day?

That's the question from a perplexed listener who needs life advice on Monday when we return. I'm your host Tony Reinke, your host. Have a great weekend. We'll see you back here on the other side of the weekend. 1 DesiringGod.org Page 1 of 2 1. DesiringGod.org Page 2 of 3 1.

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