Today we have an email from Jonathan Edwards who lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yes, that is his real name. And your question is a good one: “Pastor John, I drive a forklift in a warehouse for Christian family businesses. We are allowed to listen to music and audiobooks in our trucks and I recently started listening to this podcast. I have been an avid listener of audiobooks in my work, and I would like to know what you think about the interaction with secular literature, including fiction, philosophy, poetry and history.
Okay, Jonathan, here’s my most recent thought on why moderate use of broad reading, including non-Christian authors, is a wise thing. I call it the reality factor. When I read the Bible, there are dozens and dozens of experiences, concepts, and words that I can live without stopping to contemplate the reality behind words, experiences, and concepts, and that’s what I mean by the reality factor. We have to stop, bring, go back the reality factor and back up more.
- Now.
- How do you contemplate a reality without any knowledge of reality.
- Not knowledge of the word.
- But of reality? and I would say: the more knowledge of reality.
- The better.
- If knowledge is true and in true proportion to its value.
- For example.
- You don’t need to learn much about the size and species of birds Jesus claims to look at in Matthew 6:26: “Watch [or consider] the birds of heaven.
- “That’s not in the heart but your goal in this text is to help you get rid of the anxiety experience.
- But what if you didn’t have any anxiety experience? That word would be empty for you.
It is really important to have a deep and comprehensive understanding of the reality of anxiety and its functioning, its roots and its fruits and the forms it can take in life and how it can spread and the devastation it can cause in history. In other words, there are many realities in the Bible that assume that, from the experience of life, we know what they mean: peace, joy, fear, anger, war, disappointment, beauty, power, hypocrisy.
Of course, the Bible offers a crucial view of these things that do not come from anywhere else, but the raw material of knowledge is largely obtained from the experience of life, so the Bible takes this common ground from the reality of human experience. that takes us to the Bible and shows how God relates to it and transforms it. Does the New Testament assume that we have not forgotten the lesson in the book of Proverbs that we should go to an ant?A little insect, the ant,its ways and be wise (Proverbs 6:6). In other words, look at the world. Learn the reality of the world, learn something about the hard work of the world, learn something about the perseverance of the world, extend your experience of experience reality to a thousand things in the world because, when the New Testament mentions these things, it assumes that we have some experimental knowledge of them.
But here’s the point, do most of us live lives so small, narrow, restricted and limited?Do we know so little about so many things? Reading is one of the forms, one, that God has commanded us to develop in our knowledge of many things, many experiences. of which we have no immediate experience. This means that if we have a broad and deep knowledge of things through reading as well as through the experience of life, then when the Bible speaks, for example, of the sadness of losing ten children, we can have a better understanding of what it does. Am I thinking about Job? If we go through that, which won’t happen to most of us. Hardly anyone loses ten children at a time. But we can read about it. We can read the different kinds of horrible things people have gone through and deepen our understanding of the human mind and our experience of how to do it.
Let me give you a little idea of how it worked for the original Jonathan Edwards, who delivered a sermon on the slavery of sin and what it’s like to have Satan as slave master. The most evil Lord that ever existed, and yet most people are always happy to serve you.
Now, how could Edwards feel that way he should?How could I know the reality of what it means to be governed by Satan, as he should?How could I put it in a way that helps others know this reality?Well, obviously, Edwards had made a reading about human sacrifice in the land of Guinea, and that’s how he helped you. Here’s what it says:
[Satan and his companions] do it with you, as I heard, in Guinea, where they eat the flesh of men at their great feasts. They put a poor ignorant girl who knows nothing about it, to make fire and while she bends down to blow the fire, someone comes back and hits her on the head, then roasts her in the same fire that she lit up, and they make a celebration of that, and the skull is used as a glass, with which they rejoice their liquor. Thus Satan has in mind what to do to rejoice with you.
Is Edwards obtained this knowledge of evil from outside the Bible and reported the biblical teachings of Satan’s horrible, evil, devastating, and murderous reign on his people?While I was making them think they were having fun.
Now, in my case, I have just heard the three volumes of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, about 1000 pages each: what education actually, what perspectives on the natural challenges of leadership, about the horrors of war, about changing nature. of public approval, of the sexual madness of upper-class flirtations, of the complexities of what justice looks like in public policy, of the value of never giving up, even if there is enormous opposition, et cetera. What an education!
I was learning reality. I wasn’t learning my morality, the books didn’t teach morality. I wasn’t learning my morality, I extract this from the Bible, I was becoming aware of the realities that come from the experience of life, otherwise I wouldn’t have the experience of being at war, the things that exist and how they are, that’s what I found, that is, I was expanding the raw material of reality that the Bible assumes and interprets for me when I talk about it for my reading.
So what is the purpose of all this reading?All our readings, Christian or non-Christian, all our readings aim to know God better, to know man better, to know better the ways of God and the ways of man, to better understand the scriptures, so that we can obey more. fully to what God says and be more useful in achieving his purposes and glorifying his name.
Amen!? All right, they represented the LISTENERs of the APJ [Ask Pastor John?Ask Pastor John], I know you want me to ask you, how long did it take you to find Churchill’s three audiobooks?
I started in the spring. So, maybe five or six months, and when it was over, I felt sad. I felt very sad because it was very rewarding to hear them for the reality to which I was being exposed: so many things I knew nothing about, it was like reading the history of World War II and, of course, it was a biography of man. He was a guide in political science. It was an extraordinary read.
Original: Can Christians benefit from secular books?© 2017 Faithful Ministérium. All rights reserved. Website: MinisterioFiel. com. br. Translation: William Teixeira. Review: Camila Rebeca Teixeira.
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