What Book Have You Read?

What Book Have You Read?

I recently heard an interview of a professor that stated he had read 200 hundred books on the topic of climate change. The interviewer quickly challenged him “Really? Two-hundred books?” His answer was a quick, unassuming “Yes, but that was over the span of two years”. He gave his response as if two years was quite a length of time for someone to consume that much written material! I realized this man had, in two years, read more books on a singular topic that was not his specialty than I had consumed in the last decade (if not my entire life).

I don’t want to give you the wrong impression, that I think we ought to read 100 books every year; but the number shouldn’t be zero, and the books shouldn’t only be entertaining. I believe due to the design of our technology and social media we have become functionally illiterate. People don’t consume information in the form of reading any longer and it is making us drastically susceptible to (the new word of the year) “misinformation”.  People aren’t reading books or journals; many people aren’t even reading the articles they’re linking and sharing on social media. We outsource all of our information validation to a Television broadcaster, youtuber, or Twitter accounts we follow, and we have reduced our ability to evaluate information at a critical level.

At the most critical area, many people neglect to feed on God’s word. It has become commonplace for the only Bible reading to take place on Sundays. This is a travesty. God intends for his people to consume His Word like food; necessary to make it through a single day (Heb. 5:12-14).  We should desire it as much as a baby desires its mothers life-giving milk (1 Pet. 2:2). When we quit pursuing truth in God’s word, it is because we have, in some way, quit pursuing God. We want God, but we aren’t willing to pursue him. We will rely on someone else to develop our relationship with Him through the knowledge of his word; if this is the case we really have no relationship with him. When we quit pursuing knowledge of God through His word we are rejecting an intimate relationship with him for a reliance on myself and what I already know.

What book have you read lately? What are you pursuing? Who are you pursuing?

I Love You,

Jonathan Long