Read Good Books
We want to challenge everyone to read this summer. Emerson spoke of the wonder of “a summer day and a good book.” “You are the same person one year from now except for the books you read and the people you meet” (Charles Jones). This year we shall be awarding the senior high students who get into reading. This is a return to the old days of our church, which was a plan to help the teens become pre-occupied with great thoughts from great books. We want to encourage them to read the great classics this year! Warren Weirsbe said classics are classic for a reason. In other words, there are human truths and character lessons that are timeless. So our goal at the end of the summer, Friday, August 22, is to present our senior high students with a special event to reward their reading accomplishments.
When the great Apostle Paul was approaching death he said to young Timothy, “The cloke that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books…” (II Timothy 4:13). Paul put “the books” in the category of necessity. Even though he was not long for this earth, he desired good reading. Earlier he said, “Till I come, give attendance to reading…” (I Timothy 4:13).
Reading has one of the most powerful influences upon a person’s life. Choose your books like you would your friends, for they will be with you for life. This morning I was looking at a list I had made of forty books that have changed my life. The list was made fifteen years ago. There are more books that I have read since then that I could put into that category. Sydney Smith said, “We should accustom the mind to keep the best company by introducing it only to the best books.”
Why should we read good books?
I. It alleviates boredom.
Montesquieu said, “The love of reading enables a man to exchange the wearisome hours of life, which come to every one, for hours of delight.” Lady M.W. Montague said, “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” Brougham said, “It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.” Thoreau said, “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
Do you need a fresh change? Allow a good book to lift your perspective.
II. You meet new friends.
In many ways I feel like I know the people I have read about. I have read enough about Billy Sunday, Charles Spurgeon, D.L. Moody, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Jonathan Jackson that I can honestly call them my friends.
Tryon Edwards said, “We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.” Colton said, “By reading, we enjoy the dead; by conversation, the living; and by contemplation ourselves. Reading enriches the memory; conversation polishes the wit; and contemplation improves the judgment. Of these, reading is the most important, as it furnishes both the others.” “By reading a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with past ages,” said Jeremy Collier.
“The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth. The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd” (Ecclesiastes 12:10, 11).
III. Reading promotes the healing process.
When we talk about healing, we are not referring only to a physical, but an emotional and mental process. In Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why, he said, “Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”
“For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope” (Romans 15:4). The promise of things written beforehand for our good and our healing is a promise of the inspired Scripture. Allow God’s Word coupled with a healthy diet of good books to provide the patience and comfort you need.
- Pastor Pope -