“Let me be a man of one book.”

John Piper’s marvelous book, The Supremacy of God in Preaching, is good reading for any Bible teacher. I highly recommend it.

Let me give you an example passage, so you get a good lesson:

“I urge you to be like John Wesley in this matter of relying on the Spirit in His Word, the Bible. He said, “O give me that book! At any price give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be a man of one book!”

It is not that reading other books or knowing the contemporary world is unimportant, but the greater danger is to neglect the study of the Bible. When you finish seminary and are in the church ministry, there are no courses, no assignments, no teachers to make you study. Just you and your Bible and your books. And the vast majority of preachers fall far short of the resolution that Jonathan Edwards made when he was in his twenties: “Resolved, to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly, and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive, myself to grow in the knowledge of the same.”

The really effective preachers have been ever-growing in the Word of God. Their delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law they meditate day and night (Psalm 1:1). Spurgeon said of John Bunyan, “Prick him anywhere; and you will find that his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his soul is full of the Word of God.” And ours should be, too. That’s what it means to rely on the gift of the Spirit’s Word.”

This slim volume is loaded with this kind of writing. Get a copy, read it, and plan to reread it periodically.