The Holiness of God
Isaiah in the temple, and what happens to a man when he sees the Lord high and lifted up. Read this before you read anything about yourself.
Reading and Study
Where to Start
Good books are a gift. They are not the gift. The Lord feeds his people by his Word, read and preached, and everything below is a servant of that.
If you are new to the faith, or coming back after years away, the pile can feel heavy. There are a thousand titles and a hundred voices, and it is hard to know what to pick up first. What is below is short on purpose, and it is set in the order a man should read it.
A little read often does more than much read seldom. Read the Bible before you read about the Bible. Get under faithful preaching. Learn the confession your church holds, because it will keep you from a hundred detours. And read with the aim of knowing Christ, not the aim of winning arguments. Knowledge that does not end in worship has gone wrong somewhere.
Here is an order that has served many people well.
- Open the Bible first. Begin with the Gospel of John, then Genesis, then Romans. Read a chapter a day. If you miss a day, pick up where you left off. There is no penance owed for it.
- Find a faithful local church and join it. One that preaches the whole counsel of God, guards the Lord’s Table, baptizes, disciplines in love, and sings the truth. Sit under that ministry week after week. No reading list can replace it.
- Learn the catechism. The Westminster Shorter Catechism gives you the shape of the whole faith in short answers you can carry in your head. One question a week is not too slow.
- Read one book about the God you are meeting. Sproul will do. You want your thoughts of God enlarged before you read much of anything else.
- Then read one book about the gospel and one about holiness. Justification first, then the life that follows it. What you stand on is Christ’s righteousness credited to you, and your own growing obedience never becomes that ground. The gospel page says why.
- Pray what you read. Turn the page into asking. This is the step most often skipped, and it is the step that turns study into communion.
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 (KJV)
The Standards
A confession is not a rival to Scripture. It is the church saying out loud, carefully and publicly, what she understands the Scriptures to teach. That is a mercy. It means you do not have to build your theology from scratch, alone, in your kitchen, and it means the church can be held to something.
This site holds to the Westminster Standards.
- Westminster Confession of Faith
- Thirty-three chapters covering Scripture, God, the covenants, Christ, justification, adoption, sanctification, the church, the sacraments, and the last things. Cited here as WCF 7.3, chapter and section.
- Westminster Shorter Catechism
- One hundred and seven questions, written for children and useful for everyone. Cited as WSC Q&A 33. Start here if you have never read a catechism.
- Westminster Larger Catechism
- Fuller and slower, and especially rich on the law and on the work of Christ. Cited as WLC Q&A 39.
Man by his fall having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace; wherein He freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing, and able to believe.
Westminster Confession of Faith 7.3
Life and salvation are offered freely in that sentence, and the offer is to anyone who hears it. And the same God who offers also gives his Spirit to make dead sinners willing. You are not asked to make yourself alive before you come. Come, and you will find that he was at work in you first.
You should also know the sister documents of the Reformation and the century after it. The Heidelberg Catechism is warm and pastoral and begins with the question of your only comfort in life and in death. The Belgic Confession is an older and sturdy summary of the same faith. The Canons of Dort answer the Remonstrants point by point and give us the doctrines of grace in their clearest confessional form. The 1689 London Baptist Confession follows Westminster closely and differs chiefly on baptism and the church, and our Baptist brothers who hold it are reading the same gospel we are.
The Confession is not printed on this page. The button below opens the full text, free, at The Westminster Standard.
Books for Your First Year
Nine books. You do not need all of them, and you certainly do not need them at once. Pick one, finish it, then pick another.
Chosen by God
A short introduction to election and the sovereignty of God in salvation. Patient with objections, and unwilling to trim the text.
Holiness
Searching, honest, full of Christ. Ryle will show you your sin and then show you your Savior, and he never reverses the order.
The Christian Life
A doctrinal introduction written for ordinary Christians, walking from calling and faith through to glory. If you want one book that lays the whole shape of the Christian life out in order, this is it.
The Pilgrim’s Progress
The Christian life pictured as a hard road out of the City of Destruction. Read it aloud with your family. It has carried plain believers for centuries.
All of Grace
Short, tender, aimed straight at the anxious sinner who wants to know whether Christ will have him. He will.
The Doctrine of Repentance
A Puritan on what real turning from sin looks like and what counterfeits look like. Small book, long shadow.
When You Are Ready for Weight
These are slower. Some of them use older English, and you will want a modernized edition for a few. The slow pace is the point. A page of Owen thought through is worth a chapter of almost anything else skimmed.
The Mortification of Sin
On killing remaining sin by the Spirit. Owen is exact and relentless, and he keeps your eye on Christ while he works.
Communion with God
Fellowship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, considered distinctly. One God in three persons, and Owen shows you how to draw near to each. It will change how you pray.
The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment
Contentment as something learned, not something felt. Written for people with real losses, not comfortable people with small complaints.
Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices
The enemy’s tactics laid out, with the Scriptural answer to each. Practical in a way few modern books manage.
A Body of Divinity
The Shorter Catechism expounded, question by question, with more warmth than you expect from the title.
The Bruised Reed
For the weak and the failing. Sibbes opens the promise that our King will not break a bruised reed, and the book is balm for a wounded conscience.
The Christian in Complete Armour
Ephesians 6 opened at great length. A lifetime of daily reading rather than a book you finish in a month.
Institutes of the Christian Religion
Far more devotional than its reputation. Read Book One and Book Three first if the whole thing looks like too much.
The Whole Christ
Legalism, antinomianism, and assurance, worked out through an old Scottish controversy. It will help you hold the law and the gospel together the way the confession does.
You do not receive the benefits of Christ apart from Christ himself. Every one of these books is only useful as it hands you to him.
Tools You Can Use Today
All of these are free to use, and they will carry you a long way when the book budget is thin.
ESV Online
The full ESV with cross references and reading plans. esv.org
Blue Letter Bible
Interlinears, lexicons, and concordance work for readers without Greek or Hebrew. blueletterbible.org
Monergism
A deep collection of Reformed articles and free books, sorted by doctrine and by author. monergism.com
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
Calvin, Owen, Bunyan, Edwards, and much more, in full text. ccel.org
Project Gutenberg
Clean ebook files of older works for reading offline. gutenberg.org
Bible Hub
Parallel translations, older commentaries, and word study tools in one place. biblehub.com
Most of what is listed above already sits inside Sojourner, the free Bible study companion published here. The confessions with their proofs, Calvin and Matthew Henry and Spurgeon, Strong’s and Thayer’s, and a nine thousand article encyclopedia all install with it and work with the network off.
Preaching to Sit Under
Reading forms you slowly. Preaching forms you weekly, and the preaching that forms you most is the preaching in the room where you can be known and corrected. Everything here is second to that.
With that said, there are faithful men whose recorded teaching has fed many. These are chosen with the newer and the weaker Christian in mind. Every one of them holds a Reformed confession, and every one of them is more concerned to feed you than to win an argument in front of you. Most of them teach at Ligonier, where a great deal of it is posted free.
Sinclair Ferguson
No living preacher is gentler with a troubled conscience. He is especially good on assurance, and on the way legalism and license are twin errors with one cure, which is Christ himself.
R.C. Sproul
He founded Ligonier and spent a lifetime making hard doctrine plain without making it small. On the holiness of God he has no equal in our time.
Joel Beeke
Shaped by the Puritans and by the Dutch Reformed tradition, he preaches to the conscience the way they did, which means he knows what to say to a Christian who cannot find his own faith.
Derek Thomas
A warm expositor who works through a book at a time. Good company when providence is hard and you want someone who will not rush past the difficulty.
Ligon Duncan
Careful, Presbyterian, and unembarrassed about the Standards. Useful when you want to see how the pieces of Reformed teaching fit together rather than sit loose.
Burk Parsons
He pastors the congregation Sproul served and edits Ligonier’s monthly magazine. His preaching is direct, short on flourish, and aimed at ordinary people in pews.
W. Robert Godfrey
A calm teacher of church history who will walk you through the Reformation and the Psalms without ever raising his voice. Steadying to listen to.
Stephen Nichols
Short, accessible teaching on the church’s past and the men God used in it. A good way in if history has always felt like someone else’s subject.
Spurgeon’s sermons, still preaching after all this time, are collected at the Spurgeon Center. He belongs on any such list, and he was better than most at speaking to the weak.
Two other places worth knowing. 9Marks will help you think about what a healthy church actually is, and Banner of Truth keeps the Puritans in print.
If you want to see the faith defended in public, Jeff Durbin does that work. Understand what it is, though. Apologetics is for the doubter and the objector, and it is a different thing from the preaching that feeds you week by week. Do not make a diet of it.
One caution, and it is not a small one. No teacher on this list is a substitute for your local church, and no teacher on this list is beyond error. Weigh every one of them, and weigh this site too, against the Scriptures.
These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
Acts 17:11 (KJV)
How to Actually Read
A plan helps. Pick one and keep it. A chapter a day, or a book of the Bible at a time, or a yearly plan that walks you through the whole of Scripture. The plan is a servant. If it becomes a burden that shames you every time you fall behind, shorten it rather than quit it.
Read slowly. Most of us have been trained to skim, and skimming is exactly the wrong habit here. Take a short passage and stay in it. Ask what it says, what it says about God, what it says about you, and where Christ is in it. He is always somewhere in it.
And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
Luke 24:27 (KJV)
Pray the text. Turn the promise into thanks, the command into asking, the warning into confession. This is the difference between studying a document and meeting a person. And read with others. Read with your wife or your husband, with your children at the table, with a friend from church who will ask you what you saw. You will see more, and you will be kept from your own blind spots.
And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.
Hebrews 10:24-25 (KJV)
Finally, remember who you are reading toward. Not a system, though the system is true. A King who is gentle with those who come to him. He rode into his own city on a donkey, and he holds all authority in heaven and on earth. That King calls you, and he turns no one away.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
Matthew 11:29 (KJV)
If you are not sure where you stand with him, start at the gospel rather than a reading list. If you want to ask a question about anything on this page, there is a note about how to reach us on the about page.