(upbeat music) - Well, Pastor John, you are known for writing biographies. I think you have 27 biographies written and preached to date, and those biographies are all very popular downloads at DesiringGod.org over the years, and they've been published in what is now a series of seven volumes in a book series titled "The Swans Are Not Silent," which is being published by our friends at Crossway.

In light of that project, here's a question. Quote, "Dear Pastor John, my name is Christian Lee, "and the biographies you have done in the past "have been some of the most life-changing experiences "for me. "I was wondering how you do your research "and how you go about getting all your resources together.

"Also, will you be writing any more biographies "in the future?" - I really would like to encourage others to do what I have done in those little biographical talks that I give, namely tell the life story of some Christian in a way that inspires others to love Christ and gives them insight into perplexing aspects of the Christian life and motivates them to follow Jesus, no matter what the cost.

That's what I would like to encourage others to do, even now as I'm answering this question. One of my reasons for doing those biographies for about 26 years or so at the Bethlehem Conference for Pastors is to model for pastors how they could do the same thing for their own people, like on a Sunday evening service or on a Wednesday night or in a youth group or at a retreat setting or something like that.

So I would be eager to answer this question with the same aim. I'd like to motivate people to do it. I hope others will do these kinds of talks. It does take a lot of work. And so I think people need to be persuaded, if you're gonna be motivated to do a lot of work, you need to be persuaded it's biblical to do it, it's profitable to do it, and it's enjoyable to do it.

So let me take those one at a time. It's biblical. Hebrews 13, seven, "Remember your leaders, "those who spoke to you the word of God. "Consider the outcome of their way of life "and imitate their faith." Wow, what a mandate for reading biography, right? Christian biography. Or Hebrews 6, 12, "Don't be sluggish.

"Be imitators of those who through faith and patience "inherit the promises." You ever seen anybody live the Christian life all the way to the end and triumph over all the sins in their lives and make it to the end? Well, be like that. Study that life. Or Philippians 3, 17, I love this 'cause it's got four generations of imitation in it.

"Brothers, join in imitating me and fix your eyes "on those who walk according to the example "you have in us." Four generations, Jesus, Paul imitating Jesus, those who walk like Paul, and us watching those who walk like Paul. That's four generations of imitation. So wow, this is really biblical.

So the Bible gives us encouragement to look at the lives of believers and imitate their faith and patience. And the assumption is now that it's profitable. I don't think the Bible would encourage us to do it if it weren't profitable, and it really is profitable. Watching someone live a lifetime with Jesus is incredibly inspiring and enriching.

Biography is such an efficient way of study. It's like it's got history, it's got theology, it's got psychology, it's got counseling, it's got politics, it's got economics, it's got geography, it's got devotion and piety, all wrapped into one good book. So it's really valuable to our faith and life and thinking.

And thirdly, yes, it is enjoyable. I mean, who doesn't love real life stories? And so a good biography is enjoyable. So how do I go about it? So please know now, in the rest of what I'm saying, this all really reflects my weaknesses. Really, weaknesses? Everybody does things to compensate for their weaknesses.

It's what we do. We figure out how to live with our weaknesses. So what I'm gonna describe is what I do, you can do it differently, maybe. First, pray like crazy for help. You can't do anything without God, and so pray, pray, pray, pray while you're doing it, otherwise you will just spin your wheels, waste your time, nobody will get help, they'll just have their imaginations titillated and you won't do anybody any good if you don't pray.

Then I choose one or two biographies to read, not five or 10. That's a weakness. If I had time, I could read 10, I'd love to read 10, but I can't, so I'm gonna read one or two. I begin that reading, or I used to begin it, on vacation in July, before I was gonna give the talk in January.

And I would give the lecture then at the Pastors Conference in January, and I tried to read at least a scholarly biography, if one existed, and an inspirational biography, because frankly, neither of those has any corner on the market. The scholarly biography often misses things, 'cause they're so bent on being scholarly, and the inspirational one, while seeing some glorious things, misses other things that the scholarly biography, precisely because he's so focused on facts and cultural relationships that he spots things.

So I just think it's great if you can find a great biography of a scholarly type, and one that's more inspirational. And I read these very carefully, slowly and carefully, marking them with pencil as I go, keeping a running index with little short index thoughts in the front fly leaf of the book, with page numbers indexed to those thoughts, if you use Logos for reading your books, I know Tony, you're a big Logos fan, I love, I mean, I would do things very differently today with Logos books available.

If you do Logos, the indexing that you're able to do in the quote gathering is enormously easier than when I used to do it. Then, let's see, what's next? I read as much as I can of what that person himself has written, so important, letters, sermons, books, essays, autobiography, journals, diaries, anything you can get your hands on because original sources are 100 times more important than secondary sources for getting the real, true deal of the person.

And I mark those up, same way. If I could get paper versions, I marked them up and put the indexes in the front. Now, by this time, usually some focus or theme or angle has arisen in my mind that I want to focus on. You can't just tell a life in general, you got to have a point or a focus.

It's just too broad, it would be pointless to try to tell somebody's story with no point. I mean, like, literally, I mean, people would go out and say, "What was the point of that?" And you would just maybe have told a few interesting anecdotes and everybody would wonder why you did that.

So I think it's, for my purposes anyway, I want a point. So I have zero pretense to being unbiased in my presentation. I am choosing a theme from their life and I make that the point of the message that I'm gonna give and it really is a message, not a lecture.

I saw myself as driving home a biblical point about God or about life with God. I was preaching a biblical truth, only 95% of my sermon was illustration. (both laughing) It's like, it's called the biography. That's really what I was doing. I'm unashamed in that. I mean, it's not the way a scholar would do it, I know that, but I'm preaching.

I'm trying to make a point about something like Luther's love for the Bible or Calvin's commitment to hard work and his view of the sovereignty of God or something like that. Now, with the biographies and some primary writings, and believe me, it was limited. I was not comprehensive. I began to assemble quotes from all that material.

Now, before Logos existed, I would dictate into my computer with drag and dictate for Mac or in the earlier days, the PC, I would dictate hundreds of quotations from the biographies and from the works and I was influenced in which ones I dictated based on my indexed, my front fly leafs, I was influenced by the point I was going to make.

And while I was doing this, ideas would come to my mind about the things I was quoting and I would dictate those ideas as well. Now, when all of that was in the computer, there would be about maybe three or 400 entries in different paragraphs. So each one was a paragraph.

And then I put that entire document, maybe 60 single pages in the cursor, that's a single space, single space pages, 60 single space pages. I would put it in the cursor of Microsoft Word and I would click at the top to tell it to number all those paragraphs. So it created a list and every paragraph now had a number.

And now I maybe have 60 pages of single space, 300 plus quotes and ideas. And then I would read through this new document that I created and I would index those 300 paragraphs according to topic. And I would be able to narrow it down to maybe, oh, I don't know, 100, 60, 60 ideas.

And for example, one of my little ideas might be Martin Luther on the authority of scripture. And beside that, I might have 10 numbers, one, 36, 210, 301, referring to those paragraphs. So now I've clustered all the quotes in all my reading relating to that issue into a new index.

And then I would do that one more time and distill my 100 topics down to a handful. And that more or less became what I started writing with. And then I wrote and I cut and pasted from those quotes into the document. I printed it out, I marked it up, I prayed like crazy and I went over and I gave my talk and I loved it.

I loved all the reading, I loved the composition, I loved the delivery. I recommend it to pastors or anybody else, school teachers or friends. Question, will I do more? Well, I still read biography for sure. I'm reading biography now. We will see whether that or any of my reading finds its way into new biographies, that remains to be seen.

Yeah, well, without making any promises here, who are the key figures that you haven't gotten around to yet? Wesley, John Wesley. I think I owe Wesley, even though he's not a Calvinist, I think I owe him one. John Knox, I never did. And I think that's worthy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, never done.

Okay, that's enough. Well, those all sound really great. Preached biography, may this tribe increase. And you can find all 27 of Pastor John's biographies right now at our site, desiringgod.org/biographies. That's desiringgod.org/biographies. Check them out. They're very popular and for good reason. You'll find out why. All seven of the Swan's books can be downloaded from the site as well.

And we can give away all of this content online free of charge because of our generous financial donors around the world who support this ministry and make it all possible to begin with. And if you support us, well, it's hard for me to briefly express my gratitude to you in this little outro, but thank you.

We appreciate it. And this is also my chance to let you know that you can subscribe to the Ask Pastor John audio feed and you can search our episode archive and even reach us by email with a difficulty you're facing in life. You can do all that through our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

Well, body image is a preoccupation for many, such as it is for a man named John who lives and works in Washington, DC, and who wonders about what's really motivating him to get to the gym. Body image and self-glory. That's the topic on Wednesday when we return. I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. We'll see you then. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)