Next Steps

Assuming you have finished reading Three Books, my recommended next steps in your reading follow:

1. Read Three Books again!  The books of the Bible have this amazing quality of being so simple that a child can “get it,” yet so deep and wonderful (literally “wonder-full”) that you will not cease to be enriched even having read and re-read them many times over even a long lifetime of reading.  Each time you read through any Bible book, and these three books in particular, you see new categories, associations, connections, depth of meaning, application.  So, I suggest you read through Three books at least twice.
2. Next, I would suggest reading three additional New Testament books:
   1. The Gospel of Luke.  This gospel begins with the famous Christmas story of Jesus’ birth, and follows many of the details of Jesus’ life, more so than does the Gospel of John.  Luke was a Greek physician.  As such he was trained to be a careful observer, and diagnostician.  God use that ability to record the many human touch moments in the ministry of Jesus.  The Gospel of Luke can be found at the NET Bible site here, and at Bible Gateway in your choice of dozens of translations, here.  An alternative would be the Gospel of Mark.  Mark’s gospel is the shortest in word length (Luke’s is the longest), and Mark is much more action laced, with, for example, frequent occurrences of the word “immediately” to designate a subsequent event.
   2. The two Epistles to the Corinthians.  The Epistle to the Romans proclaims very clearly that we are forgiven, and rescued from ourselves, solely by the grace of God through faith.  It is not of ourselves.  What faith we have comes from God, as does the mercy we need, without any merit on our part.  What then?  The letters to the wild and fleshy group of believers living in the Greek “sailor’s” town of Corinth makes clear that the free grace of God is not our license to live after the flesh.  For some of us living after the impulses of the flesh are embedded from our youth, but all of us have its influence from our fallen nature.
   3. The two Epistles to Timothy.  Timothy was the Apostle Paul’s missionary assistant.  These two letters contain the Godly counsel of an old (Paul) follower of Christ to a young disciple (Timothy) on whose shoulders the work of proclaiming, and passing on the responsibility of proclaiming, the gospel has been assigned.  The letters give us a perspective of personal responsibility in the context of whatever gift and calling each of us may have from God Himself.
3. Along with the books of Luke (or Mark), the Corinthian and Timothy letters, I would encourage regularly reading in two beautiful Old Testament books:
   1. Psalms.  The 150 chapters of the book of Psalms contains the lyrics, but not the music, hymns.  As such, they are beautiful poetry, using the Hebrew structure for poetry which is based upon parallelism of ideas, as opposed to vowel rhyming or consonant emphasis.  These poems encompass the full range of human experience as a child of God, from great joy to despair, from righteous anger against the sorrows of sin to the deepest sorrow of having been subject to it. A recurring theme is God’s work in us of growing a love for God and His word; for wonderful examples of this see the very first Psalm (Ps 1) and the long acrostic Psalm 119. One practice highly recommended practice is to read five Psalms a day such that you can compete the entire hymnal in a month (but plan ahead for Ps 119, which is long).  Another is to listen, and if musically talented to sing or play, the music that talented Christian artists have composed to express any or all of the Psalms.
   2. Proverbs.  The 31 chapters of Proverbs deal with the full range of spiritual challenges, temptations, and dilemmas of a Christian’s walk.  Like the Psalms, it is written in the literary form of Hebrew poetry, so it uses parallelism.  One common parallel form is contrast the “wise man” with the “fool.”  (And, all of us, in our natural selves are precisely such “fools,” and which foolishness does not automatically diffuse away even in our new walk with Christ).  Other contrasting parallels include the lazy man (“sluggard”) vs the diligent or faithful man.
4. The Book of Genesis, as its name suggests, provides the story of our beginnings from creation itself to God’s dealing with one particular family line, that of Abraham, through which He shows His sovereignty, faithfulness, and grace, all of which attributes flow throughout the Old and New Testaments.
5. The Book of Job, like Psalms and Proverbs, is another Old Testament book of (mostly) poetic narrative.  There are seven big themes developed in this book through the dialogue between a man named Job and his three friends who encounter the most extreme and unexplained adversity that has entered Job’s life.  The three friends think, falsely as it turns out, that they have “the answer,” namely:  the great life formula, as they see it, faithfully following  God’s (1) knowledge, (2) justice, and (3) goodness is used on a balance scale of (4) dealmaking with man such that prosperity is experienced when man (i.e. Job) has been sinless and adversity (as in the case of Job) when he has sinned.  Although the book makes clear to us that Job did not sin nor was he the cause of the adversity, Job who cannot explain the “why” of his adversity, comes to understand three important aspects of the character of God:  (5) sovereignty, (6) grace, and (7) faithfulness.  These seven themes are explained in detail in a website that works through the entire Book of Job using some 400 charts:  www.idealmaking.org
6. Finally, I would recommend simply a day by day reading of the entire Bible, New Testament and Old.  There are some excellent resources that provide a daily reading grouping of passages from the Old Testament, the New Testament, Proverbs, and Psalms.  (Just starting in the Old Testament at the beginning, Genesis, would likely keep you in the Old Testament for six months to a year unless you are a super diligent reader; further the “reading mortality” is high of people giving up when they reach the details of the Mosaic Law especially in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and the long stretches of the prophetic warnings to israel of the reality of its having turned away from their Redeemer).  In the navigation link of Resources are several recommended reading guides.

There are many hymns for the journey, including the Bible’s book of hymns, the Book of Psalms.