What we will have become in ten years' time will depend upon the closeness of our walk with God, the preaching we hear every Sunday, the company we keep, and the books that we read. And maybe the priorities are that very order. So when one thinks about the importance of Christian books one is not ignoring those other crucial influences which shape men and women of God. Some of the most godly people have been illiterate.

Books are quite extraordinary. They have withstood the advent of such technological innovations as radio, television, cinema, the Internet and satellite. They are inexpensive compared to making films or TV. They are easier on the eye than looking at a screen. Their size and format are congenial and convenient. They can be read anywhere, at any time, at one's own speed. What other form of universal communication offers so much? Over 100,000 new titles were published in Britain last year, which was 200 in the morning and 200 in the afternoon of every working day. And there are more than half a million others available from Britain's 25,000 publishers, because every aspect of life is constantly being recorded — from Arminianism to Zoroastrianism. Numbers are further swollen because English is the lingua franca of the modern world. Books looking for a world market now tend to be published in English. Even French publishers are doing so, and as Europe is the world's second-largest English language market, all important American publishers have London offices. Customers also may browse on the Internet and are offered access to hundreds of thousands of choices. But there is a happy irony in the discovery that Amazon, the big US Internet bookshop, is turning out to be one of the world's biggest sellers of old titles.

Christian Books⤒🔗

Christian publishing has shared in this expansion, and has developed its own trends, as can be seen in any Christian Booksellers' Convention. We will divide up this literature into 'cult books' and classics.

'CULT BOOKS': According to Gary VanDer Schaal, who runs the Family Book Services from Grand Rapids, three virtual cults have emerged in the 1990s:

1. 'The cult of communication.' According to these books, no matter what your problem is, as long as you can talk about it, or more exactly, as long as you can talk about how you feel about it, that difficulty will eventually work out. One gains the impression from such books that when God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, he really should have said, 'And thank you, Job, for sharing that with me. I think I hear you saying...' Instead of declaring, in effect, 'Be still, Job, and know that I am God.'

2. 'The cult of Christian sex.' These books miss the main point of marital intimacy, which is found in praying together. In 1 Peter 3:1-7 the apostle tells husbands and wives how they are to live in their attitudes to one another, and these things should be done to the end that their prayers be not hindered. Any book on Christian marriage that does not set forth the pri­macy of prayer is a sub-biblical book.

3. 'The cult of the cure.' If only God could be allowed to take complete control of your life, these books dream, then all of life's problems would disappear. It is not God's will, these authors pontificate, that any of God's children should be unhappy. If only we talk, pray, and believe hard enough then bored children, shattered marriages and besetting sins would be no more. The idea that the Christian life is basically trouble-free, or that every problem that arises will be cured, is persistent and widespread. 2 Corinthians 12:1-11 seems to be missing from their Bibles. Think of it — a thorn in the flesh given by the Lord himself, and the sufferer, crying out for it to be removed, is refused. God denied Paul an earthly deliverance, saying rather, 'My strength is made perfect in weakness.' The problem is that the literary equivalent of fast food has already taken hold. It is no accident that there is now a branch of publishing called 'packaging' — all cover, no content — nor has it just 'happened' that Christian publishing has become susceptible to commercial pressure which puts profit before truth, thinks big sales are beautiful in themselves, and that words are no longer written but processed. It is another aspect of the antithesis between God and mammon.

The readers of cult literature are simplifiers par excellence. They reject some of the tawdry values of Western materialism and believe in spirituality, and who can blame them? But they want spirituality without the Bible, and also without church history. They want to brush aside the lessons learned by twenty centuries of Christianity and countless generations of thoughtful experience. But that would be like modern medicine going back to leeches and blood-letting. Sir Herbert Butterfield, in the closing sentence of his Christianity of History, unwittingly gave those people a motto when he wrote, 'Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted.' That is neither possible nor valuable. The Holy Spirit has indwelt many better men than those of our generation. They took seriously all the ambiguities of citizenship in two kingdoms, and the lessons of their courage and wisdom are our inheritance.

CLASSIC BOOKS: Where do we begin to learn those lessons? The sheer vol­ume of excellent books for sale is daunting. One sympathises with the playwright Tom Stoppard who said recently, 'I read fewer books with each succeeding year. And with each succeeding year, it seems, there are more and more books which one ought to read. I buy them all and read very few of them. How do people do it?' There has to be some constraint of priority. There are life-enhancing books, and it would be a tragedy to go through life and miss them.

Gary VanDer Schaal commends a book like Dr Lloyd-Jones's Spiritual De­pression to suffering people. He says, 'I am humbled by the providence of God which allows me, the parent of a handicapped child, to lead others, in their own seasons of sorrow, to such books as Calvin's Sermons on Job, H. Hoeksema's God's Eternal Good Pleasure, Thomas Boston's The Crook in the Lot, and Jerry Bridges' Trusting God. Each of these most ably applies the sweet balm of God's sovereignty to the burdened and broken heart.'

Some Literary Discoveries←⤒🔗

Here are the experiences of several men who were considerably helped by reading a classic book at one period in their lives.

1. Paul Brown, a Bedfordshire pastor, was a student at London Bible College in February 1958 when he bought a copy of the seventeenth century Puritan Thomas Watson's Body of Divinity. Paul began to read a section every day after dinner. He was both intimidated, enthralled and almost frightened to read it, for it had a spiritual depth and power that he had never come across in a book before. Yet he found its style sparkling and its matter satis­fying and nourishing to his soul. There used to be popular grumbling about the re-emergence of Calvinism in Britain in the mid-20th century that it was a cerebral movement. For Paul Brown, the discovery of Puritanism was the very reverse. He was becoming confident of his own gifts and grasp of evangelical theology when the study of Body of Divinity acted as a counter­poise, causing him to experience the sobering power of truth, humbling him before God, and showing him the greatness of a salvation of free grace.

2. Andrew Anderson had noticed for many years a copy of J. C. Ryle's Christian Leaders in his father's bookcase, but it was not until he was a student at the London School of Economics that he read it. The book intro­duced him to that galaxy of eighteenth-century preachers: Whitefield, Wesley, Grimshaw, Romaine, Rowland, etc. It was a new world to him, like breathing Alpine air for the first time — exhilarating. J. C. Ryle, an Anglican of the last century, showed Andrew Anderson something of the sheer glory of being a Christian and helped him to an assured faith. He gave him an insight into the nature of a true gospel-preaching ministry, and began to mould his thinking about the work of the pastor. For forty years Andrew has been a preacher. He believes that the narratives of those lives saved him from certain folly. He says, 'Ryle's cameos of their spirituality describes the gold of true heaven-sent revival. To read about real gold makes trinkets unappealing.'

3. John Doggett's father hung a bookshelf in the bedroom which he shared with his brother. Alongside Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson was John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Written on the flyleaf is the inscription, 'Grove Chapel Camberwell Sunday School, presented to (an aunt) for proficiency, March 9th 1887'. Increasingly gripped by Bunyan's story, John Doggett, in the decade before the Second World War, read it through once each year. One by one, the lessons Bunyan sought to teach made him realize that putting the world behind his back, repenting of his sins and putting his faith in Christ were not the easy actions they are often portrayed to be. Pilgrim's Progress made him understand, more than any other book, the ne­cessity of personal dealings with Christ, the centrality of his cross, his pardon and his robe of righteousness — in short, an experiential knowledge of truth.

4. Dr John Hall was a medical student when he stumbled across the seven­teenth-century Puritan Joseph Alleine's An Alarm to the Unconverted or, as it has now been renamed, A Sure Guide to Heaven. Forced to grapple with the unfamiliar style by a conviction of sin, his worst fears were realized as he read the book. The marks and miseries of the unconverted man were outlined, and he was that person. He continued regularly to read Alleine until late one night in a cold attic bedroom he got out of bed, knelt down and said, 'God, if you are really there, save me. I can't live without you.' Life began to change completely for John. He found the Bible to be a book that understood him. For seventeen years he was a General Practitioner and then left the sphere of medicine to become a preacher in an independent Baptist church in Westerleigh, Avon. The sovereign God he came to know has become the bedrock of his thinking, bringing love, security and sustained evangelistic concern into his life.

5. Irfon Hughes is a P.C.A. pastor in Grove City, Pennsylvania. Attending some meetings in the Rhondda Valley in 1963 he saw on the book table Arthur Pink's The Sovereignty of God. That night he read it hungrily, and completed it the next night. The Bible at last made sense to him. Irfon went through the letter to the Romans marking in his Bible every verse that taught sovereignty by inscribing the letters 'S.V.' He understood God's providence as never before, even why God had allowed diabetes to erupt in his life the previous year. The book was a foundation for his future years as a preacher. Pink says, 'The pulpit needs to thunder out that God lives, that God still observes, that God still reigns.' Irfon's thinking became theocentric — he had been a Calvinist before he read the book, but now he knew why he was a Calvinist. The Sovereignty of God taught him that all doctrine is practical. It liberates and constructs our Christian lives.

6. Billy Morrison was in prison in Ulster when a fellow prisoner gave him a book of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's sermons and asked him to read one on the text, 'And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both' (Luke 7:42). It was the last day of April 1985 and he had been in prison for two years. At that point he had no interest in religion, but before that day was over God was to change all that. His life was radically transformed by that sermon (see The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 1883, p. 491ff). Billy saw himself as the great debtor who owed God much because of his wicked­ness, yet who could be forgiven much through repentance and submission to Christ. Within an hour of reading Spurgeon he was on his knees asking the Lord Jesus to forgive him his sins. Today released from prison he experiences that true freedom which only those can know whose debts have been cancelled by divine grace. 'I can only understand my change of life in terms of sheer, vertical, sovereign grace.'

7. The evangelist and author John Blanchard came across the autobiography of C. H. Spurgeon, The Early Years, in the early 1960's. He found the book in turns racy, witty, warm, riotously amusing — and real. He enjoyed every­thing about it, the drawings, photographs, letters, diary extracts and even the chapter by Mrs. Spurgeon on 'Love, courtship and marriage,' But woven through all the book was the irresistible truth of God's sovereignty in the salvation of sinners, often stated in the simplest and most delightful of phrases. John had had nagging questions: if he told someone, 'Christ atoned for your sins', how then could he add, 'And if you trust him, your sins will be atoned for'? It was through that biography that he learned the free grace and the sovereignty of God, and that gave him a greater concern than ever before to preach the gospel to the lost.

8. John M. Brentnall, the pastor and author of 'Just a Talker': Sayings of John ('Rabbi') Duncan, was a student at Durham University when he began to read his first Christian book, John Owen's treatises on Indwelling Sin, Temptation and Sin, and Mortification of Sin. He had overheard someone say­ing that John Owen was a good author and so bought the volume from the Christian Union bookstall. As he read it, prayerless and Christless, God took what Owen elsewhere compared to a Billingsgate fish-knife and slit him open. Then he showed John what John Brentnall was really like. For nine months he wept himself to sleep each night fully expecting to wake up in hell, a punishment he knew he deserved. How he continued his studies, only God knows; he was distracted beyond words. At last, crying for mercy, he found gospel relief, Guthrie's The Christian's Great Interest helping him to come to Jesus Christ for rest.

9. When Andrew Davies of Sydney, Australia, read Romans 6: The New Man by Dr D. Martyn Lloyd Jones for the first time, it felt as though he had been converted all over again. That preaching transformed his thinking about the process of sanctification. Andrew saw that he was indeed a new man with a new nature. The old man was dead and buried, and he had to learn to think of himself and every Christian in an entirely different way. He saw that he was no longer under the tyrannical rule of sin but under the reign of right­eousness through the Lord Jesus Christ. He began to see the Christian life in positive, not negative terms, as a life of victory not defeat. 'It is impossible to be moderate about Romans 6,' says Dr Lloyd-Jones. Exactly! For Andrew Davies those sermons are the best thing that Dr Lloyd-Jones ever did.

None of the above books was written by a living author. They could easily have been forgotten if it were not for the endeavours of a Christian publisher. Thomas Jefferson once said,

The lost cannot be recovered; but let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use, in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.

The Christian must never read books in the place of the Book. When he reads a book, then his Bible, as it were, is open alongside it, and he searches the Scriptures to see whether what that book says is true. When he judges a book to be less than scriptural, to be actually harmful to Christians, he does not hesitate to tell others, 'Beware of the book'. But when he finds a book that increases his knowledge and love for God, he commends it to all, that they might grow in the fellowship of the Lord Jesus.