And just like that we’ve come to the end of another classic. Looking back on The Bruised Reed I feel like I got the most benefit from the beginning and the end, which likely means that I allowed my attention to drift somewhere around the middle of the book. There is value in reading a book in this kind of weekly format, and yet it is also a little artificial. Those week-long gaps draw out the reading experience in such a way that it is easy to lose some of the flow of the book.

Nevertheless, The Bruised Reed has proven in my mind that its status as a classic is well-earned. I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone.

Summary

Sibbes wraps up the book which a chapter titled “Through Conflict to Victory” and in his parting words he wants the Christian to know that all of God’s work and all of his progress in the world will necessarily be opposed. And yet he wants the Christian to know and trust that in the end Christ will have the victory. Here is how he describes the battles necessary to bring Christ into the heart:

Earlier this week I read the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—the guy who wrote the infamous article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It’s a fantastic book and addresses many of the kinds of questions I’ve been asked and (hopefully) answering in my own book. Seriously, you should consider reading it.

Carr looks primarily to what the internet is doing to our brains, to the way we think and even to the way we perceive ourselves. And inevitably he spends quite a bit of time looking to the history of communication, including the book. And here are a few of his thoughts about what makes the book such an amazing invention, especially when compared to digital readers. In them he captures just a bit of my passion for books.

It’s not hard to see why books have been slow to make the leap into the digital age. There’s not a whole lot of difference between a computer monitor and a television screen, and the sounds coming from speakers hit your ears in pretty much the same way whether they’re being transmitted through a computer or a radio. But as a device for reading, the book retains some compelling advantages over the computer. You can take a book to the beach without worrying about sand getting in its works. You can take it to bed without being nervous about it falling to the floor should you nod off. You can spill coffee on it. You can sit on it. You can put it down on a table, open to the page you’re reading, and when you pick it up a few days later it will still be exactly as you left it. You never have to be concerned about plugging a book into an outlet or having its battery day.

The experience of reading tends to be better with a book too. Words stamped on a page in black ink are easier to read than words formed of pixels on a backlit screen. You can read a dozen or a hundred printed pages without suffering from the eye fatigue that often results from even a brief stretch of online reading. Navigating a book is simpler and, as software programmers say, more intuitive. You can flip through real pages much more quickly and flexibly than you can through virtual pages. And you can write notes in a book’s margins or highlight passages that move or inspire you. You can even get a book’s author to sign its title page. When you’re finished with a book, you can use it to fill an empty space on your bookshelf—or lend it to a friend.

As this round of Reading Classics Together draws near to a close (we’ve got just one more week after this) I’m already thinking ahead to the next book. But I guess I need to keep my head in the game and first finish up this one. It’s been a great read and I’ve learned a lot from Sibbes. Let me share a few of the highlights from this week’s reading.

Highlights

As I do every few weeks, I want to share some of the best quotes from these two chapters. So rather than provide a wrap-up or summary, I want to simply share some of Sibbes’ best quotes. I continue to marvel at the way he can coin a phrase and the way he can so succintly summarize great truths. Here are some examples:

“All sin is either from false principles, or ignorance, or thoughtlessness, or unbelief of what is true.”

“What the heart likes best, the mind studies most. Those that can bring their hearts to delight in Christ know most of his ways. Wisdom loves him that loves her.”

I don’t know how many Reading Classics posts I’ve written over the years, but I do know that as time goes on, as we progress through a particular book, fewer and fewer people read along. There is a lot of attrition along the way as people find that they just cannot (or perhaps are not interested in) keeping up with the reading.

Nevertheless for those who remain, let’s carry on and look to this week’s selection from Richard Sibbes’ The Bruised Reed. We’ve got just a couple of readings to go and we need to persevere!

Summary

I was surprised and quite excited to see that the first of this week’s two chapters deals with a subject near and dear to me: spiritual discernment. if I read Sibbes correctly, he is using the word judgment as a synonym for discernment. Sibbes begins by saying “Christ’s government in his church and in his children is a wise and well-ordered government and … it is called judgment, and judgment is the life and soul of wisdom.” If Christians are to be wise, if they are to live as Christ would have them live, they need sound judgment or discernment. Sibbes branches out from this statement in two different ways: first he says that Christ’s spiritual government of us is joined with discernment and wisdom and second, that wherever there is true spiritual wisdom and discernment there is the Spirit of Christ.

It’s Thursday again, which means we’re continuing our reading through The Bruised Reed by Richard Sibbes. We are quickly drawing near to the end of this book—something that happens quickly when reading two chapters at a time. Another two or three weeks and we will be finished.

Summary

For some reason I found both of this week’s chapters more difficult than the ones that had come before. Somehow they seemed just a little bit less clear in their purpose. I’m guessing the fault is with me more than with Sibbes. Nevertheless, I did find it quite tough to orient myself.

In the first chapter Sibbes writes about people who offend Christ by in some way thinking little of his mercy. So he points to those who have a false despair of Christ’s mercy, those who have a false hope of his mercy, those who resist Christ’s mercy, those who presume upon that mercy, those who seek another source of mercy, those who mistreat the heirs of mercy, those who cause strife among the heirs of mercy, those who take advantage of the bruised and, finally, those who despise Christ’s simple means of mercy.

Today we continue reading through Richard Sibbes’ classic work The Bruised Reed. This is, of course, part of the Reading Classics Together program in which we read some of the classic books of the Christian faith and discuss them together.

Summary

Our reading for this week comprised two chapters, as usual, with the first of these, “Duties and Discouragements” just packed with great content from beginning to end. In this chapter Sibbes seeks to address whether or not we ought to consider performing Christian duties when our hearts are completely averse to them. Not surprisingly he says that we should and offers several reasons that this is so:

Yesterday audio and today video. No one is more surprised than I am to see me branching out into media other than the written word!

Since the launch of the iPad, and the Kindle before it, I’ve received a lot of questions about how the devices work and, of course, which one is the better option for reading e-books. After a while I decided it would most helpful to shoot a video showing how the devices work and offering comparisons and contrasts. My neighbor Martin was kind enough to come by and help me out (by which I mean I did the talking and he did everything else). So in this video you’ll see me compare the Kindle and iPad and, when discussing the iPad, compare the iBooks app with the Kindle app. I hope you find it useful!

Can’t see the video? Click here: Kindle vs iPad

Last week I found myself thinking about how and why and where we all buy our Christian books. I started with the question, “Why do people shop at one e-commerce store and not another.” And from there I just found more and more questions that were begging for answers. Before I long I had put together a survey and asked if you, the readers of this site, would like to fill it out. In the end I got 2,222 responses (how’s that for a cool number?). And I thought it would be fun to share the results since, well, they are really your results.

The majority of those who filled out the survey were male (about 70%) and just over 80% were American. I asked those questions simply for sake of context.

I also asked whether respondents consider themselves Calvinist or Reformed. A couple of people criticized that question so let me explain myself briefly. I asked it simply because I wanted to know specifically where this “Young, Restless, Reformed” crowd is doing their shopping. We all know that the new Calvinism is both generating and consuming vast amounts of books and I was interested in knowing which stores were the beneficiaries. 89% of those who responded defined themselves as Reformed and 83% as baptistic.

In a question I asked kind of on a whim (since it’s not entirely relevant to the topic at-hand), I found that 64% use the ESV as their preferred Bible translation. I suppose this solidifies my assumption that the ESV is the Bible translation of choice for all of these new Calvinists.

(NOTE: Click on any chart to see a larger version of it)

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is a book by Pierre Bayard, a professor of French literature at the University of Paris. In what is a bit of a provocative book and one that relies on more than a small measure of wit, Bayard argues that not having read a book does not need to serve as an impediment in having an interesting and intelligent discussion about it. He goes so far as to argue that in some cases the worst thing you can do, the thing that would most dishonor a book, is to read it.

“Reading is first and foremost non-reading,” he says. “Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.” Therefore even the most prolific reader does far more non-reading than he does reading and makes far more decisions not to read than to read. Non-reading is a genuine activity as much as reading is a genuine activity. It is not just the mere absence of reading; it is a choice not to read particular works. And yet, he argues, non-reading should not prohibit us from having intelligent and guilt-free discussion about books we have chosen not to read.

So tell me. What do you think of his book?

Yesterday I spent some time thinking about how and why and where we all buy our Christian books. I started with the question, “Why do people shop at one e-commerce store and not another.” And from there I just found more and more questions that were asking for answers.

I started writing out such questions and before I knew it I had put together a survey suitable for Christian readers. And I’d love it if you’d take 2 minutes to complete the survey. It asks for no identifying information and really shouldn’t take you more than a couple of minutes. After we’ve gotten a good quantity of responses, I’ll let you in on the results.

Click here to take the survey