This was a good reminder for me. Jon Bloom shares how he’s adapted his reading goals year over year. What really got my attention was the section titled “We are pursuing transformation, not information.”
God’s purpose in our learning is that we become Christlike (Romans 8:29), not that we become information databases.
Amen. And ouch — that hits home for me. I find it easy to get into the intellectual aspects of theology and study, but personal relationship? That’s another matter. I’ve been quickly working my way through A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God and it has also hits home in a similar manner.
Men of the breaking hearts had a quality about them not known to or understood by common men. They had been in the Presence of God and they reported what they saw there. They were prophets, not scribes, for the scribe tells us what he has read, and the prophet tells us what he has seen.
Oof. Lord, let me be transformed, not merely knowledgable.
Back to Jon Bloom, his reading goal for 2017:
That’s why this year I’ve decided to set my reading goal by hours spent, rather than pages read. I want to stop aiming at volume so I’m freer to linger, meditate, memorize, and record what I need to press deeper into my soul.
It’s so easy to read in order to check off another notch in our reading belt. But we read in order to be changed and that does take time. For myself, my own reading goal was 18 books (up from 12 last year), but also to read better.
