Now I trust you have God's Word
before you, and I would encourage you to follow as I read in your
hearing the psalm we have just been privileged to sing in God's
presence, Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall
not want. He maketh me to lie down in green
pastures He leadeth me besides the still waters. He restoreth
my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of
righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou
art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort
me. thou preparest a table before
me in the presence of my enemies, thou anointest my head with oil,
my cup runneth over. Surely, goodness and mercy shall
follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the
house of the Lord forever. Let us pray together. Holy Father, we are astounded
when we think of the privileges that are ours as those who have
been loved from eternity, given to your beloved son. We thank
you that as the shepherd who loved the sheep and laid down
his life for the sheep, he does not merely forgive us and bring
us into your family, but ever lives to make intercession with
us, takes up his residence in us by the Spirit. We thank you
this morning for all of the privileges that are ours, and as I seek
to minister to these men in a very practical area today, we pray
for the help of your Holy Spirit that the things shared will indeed
prove profitable in the days to come. as by your guidance
some of these things are implemented in their lives. So we look to
you for your blessing with thankfulness that everything we have read
in this psalm, true of David, is true of us because with David
we are united to his greater Son. Hear us then as we make
our approach to you in his worthy name. Amen. In the letter from Dr. Van Doodyward
inviting me to chapel today, he stated, and I quote him, that
chapel messages may be sermons or topical addresses for the
practical and spiritual benefit of the seminary community, end
quote. And as I reflected on how best
to invest my time with you today, I have chosen to bring a topical
address on the subject, and here's the title to my topical address,
done with the permission of the one who invited me to chapel,
The Place of a Disciplined Reading Program in the Life of a Fruitful
Man of God. the place of a disciplined reading
program in the life of a fruitful man of God. I trust that you
men sitting here have, as your great passion next to pleasing
your God and Father and your Savior, that God would eventually
lead you into a fruitful pastoral ministry, or if it's another
form of ministry, that it would be fruitful, not famous, not
necessarily astounding, not necessarily leaving a record that someone
would want to embalm in printer's ink and write your biography,
but you long that you would be a fruitful man of God. For Jesus said, herein is my
Father glorified, that you bear much fruit. And the reason for
choosing Psalm 23 as a platform of introduction is because this
time of the year and this particular year has special significance
for this old man, almost 78 in April. I'll turn 78, God willing. It was about this time, 60 years
ago, when the Lord Jesus determined
that His prophecy and promise concerning me would be fulfilled. You'll remember His words in
John 10, 16, Other sheep I have which are not of this fold, them
also I must bring. And I stand before you today
on the 60th birthday of the Lord Jesus bringing me to himself. And as I look back over those
years, I can read this 23rd Psalm and say he has been my shepherd
who has led me, who has fed me, who has comforted me, who has
protected me through all these six decades of my pilgrimage,
and no little part of that work of leading me besides waters
of quietness, restoring my soul, setting a table before me in
the midst of the enemies, has been that He led me very early
in my Christian experience to make a commitment to a disciplined
reading program that would, with the blessing of God, be His means
to restore my soul, to lead me in paths of righteousness, to
spread the table before me in the midst of my enemies, and
continually set before me that sure and steadfast hope that,
having begun a good work in me, he would complete it at the day
of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so my purpose in this half
hour this morning, should I be done a quarter after? I was told
I have not. That's it. Okay. I have the watch
in front of me, and I will make an internal covenant to respect
what it says to me. And then I've got a clock on
the wall as a double check as well. What I want to do is to
share some perspectives on this subject, perspectives that I
trust you will prayerfully seek to implement as you are convinced
that such implementation would be pleasing to God. In seeking
to address the subject with you, my first heading is simply this.
Above all other things, be a regular, disciplined reader of your whole
Bible. Now, you might say, well, surely,
Pastor Martin, you're talking to seminary students. Why in
the world are you daring to stand and say, read your Bible? Because,
my brethren, for decades it's been my privilege to preach at
pastors' conferences in many countries and in many settings
to men representing many theological disciplines and frameworks of
reference, and I have found again and again one of the crowning
sins of ministers is they don't read their whole Bibles regularly. I don't say that off the cuff
as a 25-year-old young buck who's just graduated from Bible college
or seminary. I say that based on first-hand
interaction and observation with men of God over decades. And so if you would be one who
can say, I know what it is to have my soul refreshed, to be
led in paths of righteousness, to be fed in the presence of
my enemies above all other things. Be determined from the outset
of your ministry, even while here in the seminary with all
the reading load that is upon you, all of the pressures upon
you, be determined to be a regular, disciplined reader of your whole
Bible. And why do I put such emphasis
upon this? Well, for a number of reasons,
not the least of which is three or four texts of Scripture that
have held me in their grip over the decades. The first, very
familiar to us, 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17. Having underscored for Timothy
how Scripture was instrumental in bringing him to faith in Christ,
he says, But all Scripture is literally God-breathed and is
also profitable for teaching, for correction, for reproof,
for training in righteousness to what end? Not that the people
of God generically, but that the man of God particularly might
be complete, thoroughly furnished unto every good work. Timothy,
if you are to be furnished unto every good work, you need the
whole of God-breathed Scripture to make you such a man. And then
those well-known words of Deuteronomy 8, in verse 3, quoted by our
Lord Himself, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every
word, or all the words that proceed from the mouth of God. God has
deposited in the whole corpus of Scripture, from Genesis 1-1
to the last verse of Revelation, those spiritual minerals and
those spiritual nourishments that we might behold, man, made
fit to every good work by a whole exposure to the Word of God. And then, of course, there's
Psalm 1, the blessed man. That fruitful man is not only
the one who resolutely determines that he will not walk in the
way of sinners, stand in the way, and sit with scoffers, but
his meditation is upon the law of God, and he meditates upon
it, his delight is upon that law, and he meditates in it day
and night. And then that wonderful statement
concerning Apollos in Acts 18.24, He was mighty, dunitas in the
Scriptures. How did he get that way? By the
constant acquisition of heart acquaintance with the Scriptures. And so I urge upon you men, if
you do not have right now a commitment to a regular, disciplined reading
of the whole of your Bible, following your own program or McShane's. I have used one for years, in
which reading two chapters of the Old every day, a chapter
in the New, barring Lord's Days, it gets me through my Bible,
the whole of my Bible, once every two years. It gets me the Old
Testament, gets me through my New Testament once a year, and
for the most part, over the decades. I've had the practice of reading
a psalm every morning, And this gets me through the Psalms in
the course of seven, eight months, sometimes a little longer. But
there is no substitute for that constant exposure. Your primary
focus in coming to your Bible is not to gather food for others,
but to have your own soul fed by the Word of God, to be able
to say, as is written of our blessed Lord in Isaiah 54, the
Lord God has given me the tongue of the learned, that I should
know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary. And where
did our Lord get that tongue? He wakens morning by morning. He wakens mine ear to hear as
the learned." So my first word of exhortation in following through
on this matter of trying to set before you the place of a disciplined
reading program is, above all other things, be determined to
be a regular, disciplined reader of your whole Bible. My second
word of counsel is this, acquaint yourself with those authors who
will warm your heart, search out your sin, and set Christ
before you in his beauty and his glory. Acquaint yourself
personally, not taking someone else's word about it, with those
authors who will warm your heart, Search out your sin and set Christ
before you in His beauty and in His glory. There's a wonderful
little statement in Alexander's Thoughts on Preaching, a marvelous
little book. I urge it upon all of you. And here he writes, these are
just miscellaneous paragraphs to ministerial students on page
93. I hope you will let no kind of
reading keep you from looking daily, if only for five minutes,
into a class of writers who are not attractive in regard to letters,
but who unite great talents, great Bible knowledge, and great
unction. At the head of these stands Owen. My father used to say one should
read Owen's Spiritual Mindedness once a year. I have found it
to be tremendously profitable. I've never read it once a year,
but I believe I've gone through six or seven times over the course
of decades. I add to his father's words,
Forgiveness of Sin and Indwelling Sin and Mortification, that's
Volume 6, Here we have philosophical analysis applied to the phenomena
of experience, yet more Platonic and Seraphic are housed delight
in God and the blessedness of the righteous. Flavals keeping
the heart is less deep, but more clear, pearling, and delicious. That's what I want you men to
know. Pick up Flaval and read that marvelous treatise based
on the text Proverbs 423, Above all that you guard, guard your
heart, for out of it are the issues of life, and you will
find it, if you have real spiritual life, you'll find it delicious. And each one of us is put together
in such a way, and our lives are ordered in such a way by
divine providence, that we will not have the same favorite authors
who have that capacity to warm the heart, to search out our
sin, and to set Christ before us in His beauty and glory. As I was a very young man at
the time and began to acquire some of the sets of the Puritans'
work, I looked at them sitting on my shelves and said, no way,
no way I'm ever going to get through all that. But I said,
yes, there is a way. And I came up with the concept,
some of you don't even remember what you had to do to the old
way of getting water, when you had a pump and you had to prime
it, you had to pour some water in and pump, pump, pump, and
then it took hold and then the water would begin to come out
the spout. I call them my pump primers.
And in that way, over the course of years, there are whole sets,
almost everything of flavor, Brooks, some of the other Puritan
works that got reprinted by the Banner of Truth, taking 10-15
minutes in the morning to prime the pump of my affections and
to get my mind focused upon heart issues. It's this kind of reading
that I'm suggesting would, perhaps with God's blessing, be a means
of grace to put you in a praying frame. to put you in a frame
where the other elements of your reading of the Scriptures and
seeking the face of God will be more warm, more passionate,
more earnest as you seek to meet with God. I have to say this
was my experience. In fact, I'm a little bit sad
this morning because when I complete my reading years ago, Ian Murray
saw some of my books and I had underlined them with uh... ballpoint
pens and he almost went to my fellow elders suggesting i'd
be excommunicated with Ian's love of books the thought that
anyone who would get my books twenty years after I'm gone would
see the ink of a ballpoint pen bleeding through poor Ian he
just almost had a hairy fit and uh... so he solemnly charged
me from here on to use a mechanical pencil and I do that and whenever
I've read the chapter or section of it I put the date and just
yesterday I finished for the fifth or sixth time Owen volume
one and I felt a sadness. He has set Christ before me in
ways I've never seen him before. I've wondered that I could have
read that stuff four and five times, some of it's underlined.
For example, he said, you know the main reason God's giving
us real eyes in the resurrection body? You know what his primary
reason is? So we can actually see Christ. I almost fell off my chair and
had what the old Pentecostals called a glory fit when I read
that. To think, these two eyes that
need this help to see clearly, God didn't give me glorified
eyes actually to see my Savior in His glorified body. Well,
I urge you, my brothers, find those authors, read them wisely,
judiciously, that they might be an aid to your communion with
the Lord Jesus, with the Father, and with the Holy Spirit. My
third heading is this. Learn to appreciate the judicious
use of good, pastorally sensitive commentaries in conjunction with
your personal Bible reading. Learn to appreciate the judicious
use of good, pastorally sensitive commentaries in conjunction with
your personal Bible reading. And the text that has riveted
my conscience to this discipline is Ephesians 4, 11, where the
apostle says the ascended Christ has given gifts to his church. And among those gifts are pastors
slash teachers for the perfecting of the saints unto the work of
service. And although the promise in the
new covenant is they shall all be taught of God, that very God
has in Christ given gifts to his church that the church might
grow up into the fullness of the stature of Christ. And not
all of those teachers are such that we can sit beneath them,
Lord's day by Lord's day. Many of them are dead. But the
fruit of their God-given insight into the Scriptures and into
the ways of God and the works of God and the Christian life
and Christian responsibility, God led them. On a given day,
those men got up and pleaded that their day might be blessed
by God, that what they do would be under the superintendence
of the guidance of God. And they spent hours at their
desks writing, They are God's gift to us for our maturation
and our perfection in Christian growth. been a great help to
me in trying to see this thing in the right perspective. It's
1 Corinthians 3, 21 and 22. All things are yours and among
the things that are yours are Paul and Apollos and Cephas. They are all yours and you are
Christ and Christ is God's. And so if God has given them
to His church, and I am part of His church, and they are there
to profit me, woe be to me if I have the opportunity and do
not avail myself of that profit. So a number of years ago, I came
to the conviction, based primarily on those two passages, that I
was not dishonoring the Lord when studying, say, the book
of Deuteronomy as my regular Old Testament reading. I would
find it good, and when I say good, one that's based on sound
exposition, sound principles of opening up the Word, but pastorally
sensitive. where the applicatory note is
woven through and constantly attendant upon the explanatory
elements of those commentaries, the ones that I have found particularly
helpful over the years. If you've never read through
your Gospels with old Bishop Ryle at your elbow, his expository
thoughts on the Gospels, This will enrich your soul. Ryle had
the ability to go into a text, extract the major principles,
articulate them in a very clean, unmistakably structured, homiletical
way, and make very practical, often searching applications
to the heart, and to read through the Gospels with Ryle at your
elbow. I have found the Bible Speaks
Today series by the Banner of Truth. Some of them I've gone
through three, four times, using them both in family worship and
in my own devotional exercises. Though they are spotty, some
of the Bible Speaks Today, the IVP series, are excellent. Some of them are not so. I can't
give the same almost unqualified endorsement that I can with the
Banner of Truth series And then Jeffrey Wilson's very helpful
commentary on the corpus of Paul's epistles, now embodied in two
paperback volumes, very helpful to take us deeper into our understanding
of the Word of God. The Holy Spirit is given to me.
I'm a member of the New Covenant community. I can plead with God
that I shall be taught of Him. But that God has given to His
Church, pastors and teachers. And He's given the Pauls and
the Apolloses and the Cephases for my good and for my progress
in grace. But then Standing head and shoulders
above all of these, I must mention John Calvin. One of my dearest
friends a few years ago said, an interesting subject for the
next pastor's conference, Pastor Martin, would be if you spoke
on what I would do if I could do it over again. Well, as I
reflected on that, there's one thing I would do. that I didn't
do if I could do it all over again. As a young man, I would
set it as part of my structured reading program in conjunction
with my own devotional reading of the Bible to read the entirety
of Calvin's commentaries. If you have any question about
the worth of those commentaries, read Steve Lawson's article in
that lovely book that Mr. Parsons edited on Calvin, and
he has ten things that are the dominant characteristics of Calvin's
expositions as found in those written commentaries, and it's
masterful stuff. The one area that I don't encourage
people to follow Calvin's homiletical method, if you've got Calvin's
mind and Calvin's grace and Calvin's stature, you may hold a people
with sermons that are not patently structured. They are always well-structured,
and there is tight connection in the unfolding of thought.
but the average person sitting in the pew with no text in front
of them needs to know when you're moving from head one to head
two and when you're moving to head three where you came by
head one and head two. And though I know it is not popular,
if you want to have people who relish your preaching because
it's retainable and patently clear as you preach. But apart
from that, I cannot say enough about the use of Calvin in this
area and also, though this will bring sneers in many circles
of contemporary academia, is old Matthew Henry. Let me read a tribute I got in
my inbox this morning. There's a dear friend, one of
my Timothys, that I've been privileged to be close to for a number of
years. He just turned 50, and I thought
he had told me that three years ago, or several years ago, he
set out a three-year program to do what Whitfield did. Whitfield
read through Matthew Henry on his knees, I forgot how many
times. and says it's there that he learned
his theology as well as his Bible. And so I wanted to make sure,
if I were going to quote my friend, so I called him, left the message,
he sent an email back early this morning, and this is what he
said to me in his email. I just turned on my cell phone
at 11.39 p.m. This was last night, he ought
to have been in bed. I'm sorry I didn't receive your message
sooner, but hopefully you'll receive this in time for your
message tomorrow. That's a real friend who's staying
up till midnight to answer my query. Yes, you are right in
your recollection. In January 2011, I began reading
Matthew Henry's unabridged commentary according to a three-year schedule,
and I have kept up with it, if sometimes lagging by a couple
days now and then, So I'm about one-third of the way through
it, two of six volumes. It takes me at least 45 minutes
daily, longer if I'm distracted or less focused mentally. Currently
I'm finishing Job and on the threshold of the Psalms. My testimony
is that this commentary is singularly unappreciated by many pastors,
even among those who are Reformed. It is exceptionally excellent
in many respects. I understand Mr. Whitfield used
to recommend a read-through to young ministers. I'm now 50 and
in the pastorate 22 years, and it is proving an immense help
to me. And then he goes on to speak
of Calvin and the place that he now has in his affection and
his appreciation. He said, since your topic is
reading habits, I would mention that last year I finished Calvin's
Institutes, also according to a systematic reading schedule. I was already familiar with much
of the contents, but only certain I had read completely through
book one. So from January to December,
I read through books two through four, and this, too, was a truly
profitable investment of my time. In 2009, I read about 20 books,
either by or about Calvin, and wrote a short piece as an appreciation
of him, as you know. I cannot overestimate how indebted
I am in my doctrine and practice to John Calvin, and I did not
fully appreciate this until I read so much of him. And he's a modern
techie. He's got this stuff all on his
Kindle and everything else, and he uses all the various technologies
to have it at hand if he's somewhere where he's got to sit in an office,
picks up his iPod or whatever other technological devices at
his fingertips. So I urge you, my brothers, not
only, above all things, to be a reader of your whole Bible,
acquaint yourself with the authors who will warm your heart, search
out your sin, and set Christ before you, but learn to appreciate
the judicious use of good, pastorally sensitive commentaries in conjunction
with your regular Bible reading. And then point number four this
morning is this. Once you are settled, and I've
chosen these words carefully, once you are settled into the
basic rhythms of your responsibilities and labors as a pastor, as soon
as possible, establish a comprehensive, realistic, and balanced general
reading program. It would be unrealistic to urge
you to do that here. Your reading is dictated by your
professors, and rightly so. But once you settle in to the
rhythms of your responsibilities as a pastor, as soon as possible,
establish a comprehensive, realistic, balanced, general reading program. The reason I underscore this
is because there are many principles in the Word of God that point
to the fact that if we are to be fruitful servants of Christ,
we must not only grow in our knowledge of the Scriptures themselves,
but we must be growing theologically, we must be stretching our minds
intellectually in the whole range of the theological disciplines
to which you are now subjected by the structure of the curriculum
in the seminary. But that's going to drop off.
There's not going to be a schedule of the classes you are required
to attend, the books you're required to read, the papers you're required
to prepare. And if you do not discipline
yourself to continue to have a comprehensive realistic reading
program, there are going to be holes in various aspects of your
ministry. I can remember with jealousy
those early days in my ministry when I didn't have a course to
put together in pastoral theology, and I was preaching just twice
a week on the Lord's Day, and had two to three days a week
where my mornings were blocked out for general reading. I only
had a four-year Bible college theological education, which
left much to be desired. And when I came home and my understanding
of the basic contours of the Reformed faith in the late 50s
and early 60s, I said, Albert, you've got a lot of catch-up
to do, and there's no way to catch up but to catch up. And
I look back upon those days with great gratitude to God that the
Lord gave me the sense I didn't have a mentor at my shoulder
to help. For some reason, God was gracious. Psalm 23. He wanted to lead me
by waters of quietness, and He wanted to restore my soul as
well as teach me how better to love Him with all my mind. And
it was in those years that God helped me to do much catch-up.
And I've sought, even when in the midst of many pressures,
the kind some of your professors have, preaching at this conference
and that conference, preparing class lectures. There was a period
where I could only husband one morning a week, but I cherished
that morning that I might continue to have some kind of a structured,
realistic comprehensive reading program. Now, by those words,
comprehensive, I mean reading in the areas of theology, systematics,
biblical theology, practical and pastoral issues, biography,
historical, polemical issues. I outline those things in much
greater detail in my pastoral theology lectures. But in the
course of doing that, conscious again of the pressures of time,
I do want to make this very simple point. Seek to select your readings
so that in the course of your more serious theological reading,
for a period of weeks if not months, you draw close to one
great mind. until something of the way they
approach the Scriptures, approach truth, is absorbed into the texture
of your own soul and of your own mind. And I used to say to
my wife, she'd seen me going around with a volume of Warfield's
selected shorter or greater writings, longer writings, or some of his
other works, And she'd say, you're on your Warfield kick. And I
would. And I found that to be a tremendous benefit to get inside
a theological writer and try to understand how he handles
the Word of God. That's when I came to the conviction
that Warfield was not just this Princetonian theologian floating
by up here. read for the first time his essay
on the emotional life of our Lord, it just blew me to pieces
as exegetically he took me into the soul of my blessed Savior. And I saw him in the full range
of his humanity in a way I had never seen him before. I've done
that with Professor Murray. I've sought to do that with a
number of others over the years. It was somewhere, I think, in
one of these rooms or at a restaurant nearby, that Sinclair Ferguson
said, before I die, I want to master my three Johns. You know
who they are? John Calvin, John Owen, and John
Murray. He said, I have less and less
appetite for much that is being cranked off the presses today.
So brethren, in a kind of ragged way, let me bring this to a close
to keep my commitment to the time frame. Say one other thing. Try to have a time when you have
some reading that relaxes your mind and yet enriches your understanding
of humanity, of God's common grace, special grace. That's
what I personally have found very helpful at night. to do
my biographical reading when we were celebrating the 200th
anniversary of Wilberforce's birth, I believe it was, several
years ago. Someone gave me four biographies
of Wilberforce, so for night after night for several months,
My wife would come by, see me propped up in bed reading, say,
huh, you're with your boyfriend again. Well, Wilberforce became my boyfriend,
and I feel I've been enriched by it. I would say the same of
that marvelous biography of Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas. He takes an
approach that only a man who had no evangelical background
could take, and I believe be much more objective about Bonhoeffer
without whitewashing some of his deficiencies. And personally,
I like, because I lived through the Second World War, I like
World War II stories. I've just completed reading through
them. My stepson and my stepdaughter
know my love for that, so for Christmas I got two World War
II books. And I devoured them, and I find
them helpful to just relax the mind while at the same time having
insight to men and things and the real world in which we're
called to labor. Well, there's so much more could
be said, but I hope these thoughts will prove fruitful in your lives
in the days to come. Let's pray to that end, shall
we? Father, we are so thankful for
the rich legacy that lies spread before us in the many, many that
are accessible to us. We think of those in other places
that have virtually nothing, and we ask you to look in pity
upon them and raise up people with the gifts and the heart
to get these things translated into other tongues, into other
languages, that the Church of Christ worldwide might be enriched. We thank you for this time together
this morning and pray that whatever's had the mixture of the clay of
mere human thought, blow upon it, bring it to naught. Whatever
has been an expression of biblical principles and biblical wisdom,
seal it and make it profitable to us, we pray in the name of
our Lord Jesus. Amen.