 If you see me at a yard sale, chances are good I’ll be looking through the stack of books. I have always been a reader; put some reading material in my field of vision (from cereal boxes to bumper stickers) and I’ll probably read it. I love reading so much that I married a reading teacher!
I once read only non-fiction, pooh-poohing fiction as a lower form of writing. But I learned to treasure fiction, discovering that the novelist can often portray truth more deeply than the non-fiction writer. Right now I am involved in a long-term project to read the world’s 50 most recommended works of fiction (unabridged, of course!)
I don’t remember where I found the list and make no claims for it being “the” list for such an endeavor. But I read four or five of these novels each year, interspersing them among my other reading. Currently I am on page 600 of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 800-page novel Vanity Fair.
I mention this because of a thought from John Wesley that I read (I am also working my way through John Wesley’s 53 Standard Sermons, part of the doctrinal canon of Methodism). Wesley wrote (Sermon 51, The Good Steward, The Standard Sermons in Modern English by Kenneth Cain Kinghorn) these words:
I will speak for myself. After having sought for truth with some diligence for half a century, I am now hardly sure of anything except what I learn from the Bible. I absolutely affirm that I know nothing else so certainly that I would dare to stake my salvation upon it.
Those words of Wesley burn my heart this Friday. Wesley was a diligent reader, though I doubt that he would have read cereal boxes, considering such to be a huge waste of time. Though he read books in many different languages, both current tracts and ancient classics, Wesley accurately identified himself as a “man of one book” (the Bible).
You can be a person of one book, too. Make it happen little by little, day by day, week by week, month by month. Read whatever else you will, but every single day, read the Bible. Read it slowly, prayerfully, devotionally. But read it. It will shape who you are, how you think, how you pray, how you understand Father, Son and Holy Ghost, how you love God and neighbor. Gradually, imperceptibly, but momentously, you will become a person of one book.
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