Christians who do not read books are not much better off than people who can’t read. Both kinds of people tend to fall into the category of “low information Christians”, who are content to be spoon-fed on Sundays. As we begin the new Year, and you commit yourself to reading through the New Testament in 2014, I want to challenge you to also read a classic Christian book which I would rate as the most important book for the Christian to read besides the Bible. If I only had one book that I could recommend, it would be this one: “Knowing God” by J. I. Packer. This is a book that will inform your mind and stir your soul by providing a clear, insightful, and engaging presentation of the Gospel and what it means to know God, which is the essence of the Christian life. Jesus defines eternal life by saying, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent (John 17:3). There are twenty-two chapters in the book, so you can easily manage a chapter a week and finish it in half a year. Packer states in the preface to his book:
“Now this is a book for travelers, and it is with travelers’ questions that it deals. The conviction behind the book is that ignorance of God—ignorance both of his ways and of the practice of communion with him— lies at the root of much of the church’s weakness today.”
I agree with Packer’s assessment, and having read this book several times with great profit, would commend it to you as required reading for the Christian life. The opening chapter of Knowing God begins with a lengthy quote taken from a Sunday morning sermon by Charles Spurgeon, preached on Jan 7, 1855. At the start of a new year Spurgeon challenged his church to make it their goal to know God. I have included an excerpt from that quote here:
“It has been said by someone that “the proper study of mankind is man.” I will not oppose the idea, but I believe it is equally true that the proper study of God’s elect is God; the proper study of a Christian is the Godhead. The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy, which can ever engage the attention of a child of God, is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God whom he calls his Father.”
