I saw that another SBTS faculty member posted a list of spiritual classics. I have been often asked by students and church members about the books that have most influenced my life. I am going to do a Top Ten with some annotations, and then I will list some “honorable mention” books. Except for the first one, they are in no necessary order, and if I wrote this a year from now the list might change a little, but not much. So, here goes . . .
The Bible. I say this not to be “spiritual,” or as a necessary and perfunctory comment, but because it is true. Literally true. I learned from my mentor early on, “Read the Bible every day to find God’s will for your life and do it every time you find it.” I have tried to do that. My early reading was from the KJV, so many passages are etched in my memory from that “most influential book in the world,” as it has been called. But I have also read it through in many other translations. A friend once said in a sermon, “We ought to know the Bible so well that our blood runs bibline.” I agree with that, and with Schaeffer’s famous dictum that nothing can so change a person’s life like reading the Bible every day for fifty years.
Augustus Strong, Systematic Theology. This may come as a surprise, what with all the newer theologies out there: Garrett, Grudem, Erickson, and with some of the great older ones now available to us like Bavinck. But they say you always remember your first kiss, and this was my first Systematic. I read it through in a one-semester theology class I took when I was nineteen. I though I was going t die in the first hundred pages, but by the time I was in the last hundred I heard the voice of the Spirit whispering (no, it was not a revelation, DB), “This is for you.” I do not use it as a textbook–I get enough complaints about Erickson and the fine print in Strong is a little daunting. But it was the book that sank in the hook. It still rests within arm reach of my desk.
D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Spiritual Depression. Some of my friends reading this are probably saying, “That makes sense.” I read this when I was twenty (a theme?), and it began a revolution in my understanding of sanctification. I spent my teen years immersed in Keswick Higher-Life teaching. I had read every book with titles like “Keys to the Deeper Life,” “Life on the Highest Plane,” and with key words in their titles life “victory,” “secret,” “path,” “overcoming,” and so on. Now those books are often helpful, and now in my later years I see how some of them were actually close to the mark–some of them. But Lloyd-Jones introduced me to the Puritans and to a Reformed spirituality that was closer to a biblical model than that of Watchman Nee or Hannah Whitall Smith. I will always be grateful to him for that and plan to tell him one day.
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