Soli Deo Gloria

Just a few days ago, someone asked if I could recommend a daily devotional. Without hesitation, I recommended For the Love of God by Dr. DA Carson. It comes in 2 volumes, Vol 1 and Vol 2, and you can download them for free from the internet! Just search for these from your browser and you should find them easily.

The ‘comments’ in these volumes (as Dr Carson calls them) have been tremendously helpful to me because they direct me toward thoughtful reading & reflection of Scripture. Many have been blessed by these writings and I’m sure you would be too. Here is an extract from the Preface:

“More seriously yet, the rising biblical illiteracy in Western culture means that the Bible is increasingly a closed book, even to many Christians. As the culture drifts away from its former rootedness in a Judeo-Christian understanding of God, history, truth, right and wrong, purpose, judgment, forgiveness, and community, so the Bible seems stranger and stranger. For precisely the same reason, it becomes all the more urgent to read it and reread it, so that at least confessing Christians preserve the heritage and outlook of a mind shaped and informed by Holy Scripture”.

For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word

This is a book to encourage that end. Devotional guides tend to offer short, personal readings from the Bible, sometimes only a verse or two, followed by several paragraphs of edifying exposition. Doubtless, they provide personal help for believers with private needs and fears, and hopes. But they do not provide the framework of what the Bible says—the “plotline” or “storyline”—the big picture that makes sense of all the little bits of the Bible. Wrongly used, such devotional guides may ultimately engender the profoundly wrong-headed view that God exists to sort out my problems; they may foster profoundly mistaken interpretations of some Scriptures, simply because the handful of passages they treat are no longer placed within the framework of the big picture, which is gradually fading from view. Only systematic and repeated reading of the whole Bible can meet these challenges.

That is what this book encourages.

Soli Deo Gloria