Book lover, podcast aficionado, audiobook devotee, let me ask you: With all the options in front of you, how do you decide what to read or listen to?
You could order or download almost any book on demand. You could listen, right now, to a classic like David Copperfield or a novel released yesterday. You could subscribe to any one of a million podcasts. So, in this orchard of endless oranges, how do you decide to pause, pluck, and eat this one?
The question becomes weightier when we consider what’s at stake. Books — or, better, paragraphs and sentences — change lives. Words shape worlds. We read, John Piper writes, because “we want to discover something we do not even know is there, some dimension of reality that might change us . . . for the better — even very much better.”
Every chapter we read has the potential to shape our own next chapter. A fictional world might bust through the pages to change our world. Good books (and even some podcasts) run like rivers through the soul, carving valleys, shaping landscapes.
But for as many books that hold such power, a hundred others (probably many more) would pass through us as barely a breeze.
Why Read?
Somewhere along the way, I got the sense that there was a list (a long one) of Important Books to Read. I also adopted several unwritten but inviolable rules, such as Everything Begun Must Be Finished and The Faster You Read the Better. I took the mountains of unread material as a challenge, an Everest to summit by sprinting. The result was that I often read books I found uninteresting at a pace I couldn’t profit from. I became a slave to the page.
Maybe you can relate. As those who cannot swim thrash in the sea, some of us, finding ourselves in a sea of information we cannot possibly consume, flail accordingly. Read more — faster. Listen to this — regardless of personal interest. Be in the know — now. The books and content meant to serve our lives end up ruling over us.
I have no perfect reading plan to offer. As with many parts of life, the best approach will vary from person to person and season to season. But I do have a modest proposal. Perhaps the question “What should I read or listen to?” would come into sharper focus if we had a better sense of why we read at all.
“Why read?” has more than one right answer. We read to learn, to rest, to deepen friendship with fellow readers, to enjoy the craft of skilled wordsmiths. But alongside these good reasons, consider three others that put our reading into the service of greater loves: Read to love God. Read to love others. Read to find loveliness.
1. Read to love God.
We need not wonder what primary calling rests over our lives:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. (Matthew 22:37–38)
We exist to glorify God by enjoying him — by loving him with this threefold all. The more our heart, soul, and mind become realms of Godward love, the more we fulfill the reason for which God said, “Let there be you.” And if this love is our life’s main reason, then we have found one very good reason for our reading.
Of course, one Book above all serves this love. Despite the claims of many dust jackets, the Bible is the world’s only must-read book. Scripture is, indeed, the only book we know our Lord Jesus read. At the same time, the Bible assures us that God has given teachers to help his church understand this Book, apply this Book, and see more clearly the triune God of this Book (Ephesians 4:11–12). And many of those teachers have written books.
I’m not suggesting that all of our reading and listening needs to relate directly to Scripture or the God we meet there. But surely something is wrong if none of it does. Something is even more wrong if what we read disinclines us from God’s word, stealing our taste for the Book sweeter than honey (Psalm 19:10).
Make it a habit, then, to regularly read something that helps you “press on to know the Lord” (Hosea 6:3), something that unfolds more of “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:8), something that takes you from milk to meat and makes you more skilled “in the word of righteousness” (Hebrews 5:13).
Practically, consider moving slowly through expositions of Bible passages you want to shape you. Or read something that focuses your attention squarely on God — his attributes, his triunity, the person and work of Jesus, the mission of the Holy Spirit. Or ask your pastors which books have helped them love God most. Or invite a daring friend to read Calvin’s Institutes or a volume of John Owen’s Works, keeping in mind the wisdom of C.S. Lewis:
I believe that many who find “nothing happens” when they sit down or kneel down to a book of [shallow] devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden when they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. (God in the Dock, 223)
However you do it, read to enjoy and delight in God more than you do right now.
2. Read to love others.
Jesus, after clarifying “the great and first commandment,” gives us a second like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:38–39)
Genuine love for God bends outward. It spreads from our prayer closet to the kitchen to the neighbors next door and beyond. We exist to glorify God by enjoying him, and true joy expands, swells, and welcomes others in. Such joy loves neighbor as self.
In his providence, God has put certain neighbors closer to us, people who call for more of our attention. We love not as generic people but as fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, managers and employees, pastors and church members, friends and next-door neighbors. And God will hold us accountable for how well we conduct ourselves in these posts, how well we love the people within the sphere of our callings (Ephesians 5:22–6:9; Luke 3:12–14; 1 Corinthians 7:24).
And here’s the thing: We really can grow in these callings. We can get better. We can please God and love others more than we do right now. Paul said that Timothy would make progress if he immersed himself in his pastoral calling (1 Timothy 4:15). So will we in our own callings. And part of immersing ourselves involves learning and studying — from others in our community first, but also from good books and other resources.
I don’t have in mind only practical how-to resources. Reading about Chauntecleer the rooster in The Book of the Dun Cow shaped my leadership at home. Lewis’s Perelandra made me want to be a better husband. Hearing portions of John Paton’s autobiography gave me a vision of fatherhood to yearn for and chase after. Fiction and biographies can serve our callings wonderfully.
But don’t discount the practical books either. Not all books about marriage or parenting or work yield abundant insight, but some do. Some may hand you a method for more effective family devotions. Some may inspire you to do your job more skillfully. Some may transform one of your friendships.
More than that, simply reading or listening to resources related to your callings will keep these crucial parts of your life before you, reminding you that the path of your discipleship runs right through your home, church, neighborhood, and workplace. You please God by serving him in those places. So, read to love others there.
3. Read to find loveliness.
Jesus doesn’t give us a third great commandment to behold beauty in God’s world, but several passages invite us to turn our eyes often and attentively to creation and the best of human culture.
Psalms like 8, 19, 104, and 148 model the outward, upward gaze. “Go to the ant” and “Consider the lilies” urge us to stop and stare (Proverbs 6:6; Matthew 6:28). “The way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock,” and other animal habits may be “too wonderful” to understand, but they are also too wonderful to miss (Proverbs 30:18–19). And the fruitful mind finds and enjoys “whatever is lovely” not only in nature but also in human arts.
As with loving God and loving others, books are not strictly necessary to find loveliness. Many an illiterate man or woman has marveled far better than I. Yet books can become tremendous servants in this pursuit.
Good books are windows that let the light in, glasses that make a fuzzy world sharp, eyes not our own that show us glory in plain sight. Like teleporters and time machines, they take us to places and times we could never visit otherwise. Like bards of old, they spin tales of lives and nations within the space of a sitting (or a few), sweeping over us the drama of our own story. So, if we want to hear creation’s deeper melody or behold the best of human creativity, we would do well to step not only outside but also into a well-picked book.
No one genre has the corner on loveliness. Much nonfiction unveils beauty brilliantly. But fiction and poetry are particularly well-suited to capture our wonder. Both kinds of writing have a way of knocking us out of normal ruts. Good fiction transports us from our typical reality, at least for a time, in order to send us back saner. And good poetry slows down our harried speed to usher us into normal life with slowness in our souls. Fiction changes our place, and poetry our pace, to show us loveliness we might have missed otherwise.
Many of the best books, of course, have much unloveliness in them — as does Scripture, as does life. But such books still live among “whatever is lovely” if the telling helps us grieve whatever is unlovely in the world and in ourselves. So, find those authors and worlds, those poets and lyrics, that put loveliness right under your nose.
Our Greater Loves
What might happen if we book lovers and podcast listeners treated these resources as servants of God-love, neighbor-love, and loveliness? We might lose the anxious pressure to read more, listen more, catch up and keep up. We might find fresh freedom to neglect the books many are reading but seem to contribute little to our greater loves. We might feel new focus as we walk through the wisdom orchard of life and calmly bypass a hundred thousand oranges.
And we might find more often that our reading is changing us in the ways that matter most.