Reading

It's summer...those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer...to quote Nat King Cole. It is time for summer reading. I have given up on my personal baseball team the Pirates of Pittsburgh. I think they are aptly named...the fans are being pillaged by their play and their management. They were swept in a three game series by the KC Royals, the team with the worst record in baseball. But now, not the worst team in baseball. The Buccos will not be viewed again by me until they become respectable. 2008?

Anyway, why not join me and read this summer? But not just those airy "beach books". Reading is one of the few gateways we have to serious thinking in this world. So, read to learn and apply to your life so you can better discern how to look at issues and live your life. And, of course, reading Scripture is the key to living. Don't just take it from me read what Horatius Bonar has to say about the importance of reading with a purpose:

Specially beware of light reading...The light literature of the day is working a world of harm; vitiating the tast of the young, enerverating their minds, unfitting them for life's plain work, eating out their love of the Bible, teaching them a false morality, and creating in the soul an unreal standard of truth, and beauty, and love. Don't be too fond of the newspaper. Yet read it, that you may know both what man is doing and what God is doing; and extract out of all you read matter for thought and prayer...Let your reading be always select; and whatever you read, begin by seeking God's blessing on it. But see that your relish for the Bible be above every other enjoyment, and the moment you begin to feel greater relish for any other book, lay it down till you have sought deliverance from such a snare, and obtained from the Holy Spirit and internser relish, a keener appetite for the Word of God.

Great advice. And, he was writing before TV, People and US magazines and pulp paperbacks. How much more applicable are Bonar's words today in our dumbed down society. In future posts we will look at some books every Christian should read.