We have an email today from Jonathan Edwards who lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

That is his real name, I checked, and his question is a good one.

Pastor John, I drive a forklift in a warehouse for Christian family businesses.

We are allowed to listen in our trucks to music books, and I recently started enjoying this podcast.

I have been an avid audiobook listener and my job, and I would like to know your thoughts about interacting with secular literature,

including fiction, philosophy, poetry, and history.

What would you say, Pastor John, to Jonathan Edwards?

Okay, Jonathan, here's my most recent thinking about why a measured use of wide reading, including non-Christian authors, is a wise thing.

I call it the reality factor.

When I'm reading the Bible, there are dozens and dozens of experiences and concepts and words that I can fly right over without pausing to contemplate the reality behind the words and the experiences and the concepts.

And that's what I mean by the reality factor.

We need to stop bringing the reality factor and go deeper behind.

Now, how do you contemplate a reality without some knowledge of the reality?

Not knowledge of the word, but of the reality.

And I would say the more knowledge of the reality, the better if the knowledge is true and in true proportion to its value.

For example, you don't need to know lots of knowledge about the size and species of the birds that Jesus says to watch in Matthew 6, consider the birds of the air.

That's not core relevant to what he's saying, but his aim in that text is to help you be free from the experience of anxiety.

Now, what if you had no experience of anxiety, that word would be empty to you.

It's really important to have deep wide knowledge of the reality of anxiety and how it works and what its roots are and what its fruits are and what forms it can take in life and how it can sneak up on you and what devastation it's had in the history of people's lives.

And on and on and on. In other words, there are many realities in the Bible, which assume that from life experience, we know what they're referring to, peace, joy, fear, anger, war, deception, beauty, power, hypocrisy.

Of course, the Bible gives crucial insight into these things that come from nowhere else, but the raw material of knowledge is gained in large measure from life experience.

And then the Bible takes that common fund of human experience of reality that we bring to the Bible and shows how God relates to it and transforms it.

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