Quotes From Recent Reading
21 Nov 2019
I once heard someone remark that although he read lots of books, it wasn’t so much the books that had shaped him as particular sentences or paragraphs. The reading of books was worth it to come across those thoughts.
That is probably overstating the case for me, but I know what he means. Sometimes in reading I have come across sections that have been so challenging or so well expressed that I have just had to put down the book and think about what the author had written.
I want to share a few of these from my recent reading with you. They are unconnected, but hopefully they will challenge and encourage you in the way they did me. Even if they don’t, I hope they will encourage you to read good Christian books and good Christian writers. We have recently tidied up the library at the back of the church (thanks to Martyn Beardsley), so do browse the shelves and take and read. Some of the books may seem old and daunting, but we are trying to make sure that what are on the shelves are quality books. Our aim shouldn’t be to read quickly, but to read well, and grow through what we read.
The first quote comes from a book I regularly re-read by Zach Eswine called “The Imperfect Pastor”. It is a deeply humbling book, and I find I need to constantly re-read it as I very easily move away from the central call to depend on the Lord and not myself. In the book he says this (you can substitute the word “life” for “ministry” and “Christian” for “pastor” as it is just as true for all of us).
“There is nothing we can do in ministry that does not require God to act, if true fruit is to be produced….Everything pastors hope will take place in a person’s life with God remains outside the pastor’s own power.”
The second paragraph that has deeply struck me recently is from a book by Matthew Barrett called “None Greater”, on the attributes of God. It is a book which challenges our small view of God, in comparison with the way Scripture reveals God to us. He says this in one of the chapters -
“It has occurred to me that the distance between one side of the Grand Canyon and the other is but a very small picture of the crevasse between the finite and infinite, between the creature and Creator. We are bound by time, but he is the eternal God, outside of time altogether. We are constricted by space, but no space can contain his incorporeal being. We are always changing and becoming, but he is always the same; his perfection never fluctuates. The gap we are describing is one between the “All and the nothing.” “However little we know of God,” writes Herman Bavinck, “even the faintest notion implies that he is a being who infinitely exalted above every creature.” As the psalmist sings, “Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable” (Ps 145:3). If the psalmist is right, then we need this unsearchable God to make himself known to us; we need the Infinite One to accommodate himself to our very finite understanding.”
My third quote is from a book by Sinclair Ferguson called “In The Year Of Our Lord”. It is a survey of church history, but particularly drawing out applications for today from the successes and failures of the past. I will leave this quote with us without comment -
“But the only one capable of evaluating the quality of our worship of God is God Himself….If the wrong metrics are employed, the results are inevitably an illusion.
In fact, the acid test for the quality of worship in a congregation is the desire to worship the Lord more and to feed on His Word and sacraments more - and preferably soon. Historically, that has meant an afternoon or evening service. After all, the test a young woman employs for the quality of a date with a young man is not that after an hour she looks at her watch, fiddles with her smartphone, gets up to leave, and suggests it would be nice to do this again for an hour on the same day next week. No, she wants more time with this young man as soon as possible. Should the bride of Christ treat her betrothed with any less enthusiasm? Alas for our churches if we despise the wisdom of the past in the mistaken conviction that we know better and are the stronger Christians as a result. The evidence seems to point in the opposite direction.”