Paul's request to Timothy

“Bring the books …”

The Pastor's Letter (April 1973)

Dear Friends,

Let me bring a concern to your attention. The mass media, television, radio; the popular press has developed an insatiable appetite for material. Almost anything, or any subject, can be taken and either blown up or whittled down into media fodder: anything to fill up the allocated programme time, or columns' space. Now, religious – even Christian – things have not escaped this devouring animal, and the great danger for the people of God lies in this direction – that many of the impressions which they gain on certain Christian subjects will be gained only in this way. In other words, the only knowledge – or main source of knowledge – on some aspect of Christian things will come from the productions of carnal minds absolutely unable and unwilling to form a right estimation of the subject that they have taken in hand to deal with. We shudder to think of some of the warped impressions that will be left in some Christian's mind.

The whole thing, of course, stands related to a far more serious aspect of modern-day Christianity, and that is the sad decline in the reading of Christian books among the Lord's people. Where some prior knowledge of a subject has been obtained from a sympathetic and truly Christian source, the person is buttressed to one degree or another against the assessments and conclusions of unregenerate minds. But, the heart and mind with no prior knowledge whatsoever is like a well-ploughed field just ready to receive the seeds of doubt and misrepresentation.

Without a doubt, the greatest gift that our Lord ever deigned to give to His church, humanly speaking, was the gift of books. It was no accident, but absolutely in the providential will of a sovereign God, that the greatest turning of the church of God from the days of the apostles should come when the Lord in His mercy had granted the printing press to men. We must never lose sight of the fact that God Himself through the Holy Spirit deigned to be an Author and grant us the word of life. And time would not permit to tell of how He has, again and again, been pleased to use the written word for the glory of His name in the earth.

When Christ gave “gifts” to His church, we are told, He gave some “pastors and teachers.” In His abundant goodness, we today have the fruits of the labours of many of these mighty teachers of a past day in the writings that came from their hands and have been given down to us. To neglect or despise these is, surely, to neglect and despise the “gifts” that Christ obtained for His church at the Ascension. They were not only given for their own day, but for the proof of this has been seen time and time again throughout the history of the church, “they being dead, yet speak.”

The great Richard Baxter buys Richard Sibbes' Bruised Reed from an old peddler who called at his home one day when he was just a young boy of fifteen, and through the reading of it, he tells us, he got “a livelier apprehension of the mystery of redemption.” There then followed, in later years, Baxter's own famous “Call to the Unconverted” which was used of the Lord to bring a legion of souls into the place of salvation. George Whitefield could call Henry Scougal's Life of God in the Soul of Man, “that excellent treatise;” “I never knew what true religion was,” he tells us, “until God sent me that excellent treatise.” Scougal died in his twenty-eighty year and produced little more than that one work, but we see how the Lord gave him a multitude of spiritual “grandchildren” through his son in the faith who became one of the mightiest preachers that the church has ever seen.

George Muller of Bristol – the father of the fatherless – traces the three distinct developments in his Christian life to the reading of three biographies of the saints of the past: Franke's account of his life that led to the beginning of the orphan work; Newton's life that led him to produce his Narratives; and Whitefield's life that taught him how to read the Word of God on his knees – to this practice he attributed his continuance in intercession.

The account is endless, but the principal is clear. That desire of Paul's should belong to us all – “Bring the books …”