Reading

I recently read of one man’s experience as a student in the classroom of a famous professor. One student asked the professor, “What one trait separates the great scholar from all the rest?” The students sat in anticipation. Would it be pedigree, proclivity for languages, resilience, intelligence,...
Words hardly do justice to the experience of preaching and teaching God’s word. Irony is the blanket from which the preacher cannot free himself. After all, the hope of glory is Christ in you (Col. 1:27), but those in whom Christ resides are, by themselves, corrupt, polluted, wayward, deaf and...
You shall teach them to your sons, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up. Deuteronomy 11:19, NASB It's somewhat ironic for me to be writing an article on helping children love church history. I love church history, and...
I recently read an article that offered a disturbing statistic. The author claimed that 40% of students who enter college will not complete their degree. He also claimed that over 60% of this group would not drop out due to financial reasons but a good number would stop because they simply don’t...
If you’ve been attending church, you have probably been encouraged to read your Bible devotionally, that is, privately, on a regular, daily basis. In your experience of the Bible, you’ve encountered statements like, “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day ,” and, “Blessed is the...
One of the most important things you can do with your family is read the Bible together with them. Children are never to young nor too old for you to engage them in Bible reading, study, and devotions as a family together. Honestly, if your family is anything like my family, it can be difficult to...
Exuberant over an experience, an oh-so-sweet manifestation of divine providence, you delightedly seek to give God praise in telling your story. “It was such a ‘God thing’,” you proclaim. As you see it, God wove together an otherwise inexplicable combination of events to deliver a wonderful—even...
"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it." - Bertrand Russell I've noted, with some degree of envy, the lists of pastors and others who speak of their top ten favorite books they've read this year. To be honest, I don't think I could...
Guest blogger
Most Christians inwardly, if not outwardly, groan when they arrive at a genealogy in their Bible reading. This is a shame. The genealogies are wonderful and I love studying (not just reading) and preaching them. They are compressed histories of God's faithful and loving dealings with his children,...
Carrying biblical overtones and set in the rural Iowa town of Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's second novel is the winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction--and with good reason. In a spare prose that rings with psychological realism and moral depth, Marilynne Robinson depicts what William...