We all have those moments where a seemingly insignificant statement has far-reaching effects throughout our life. For me, one came 17 years ago when an older mentor was helping me look for resources to grow my faith. As I was looking through the books she kept in her office, I told her that I really wasn’t sure what to read next. She told me to simply scan through the back of my favorite books and find the works those authors had read. Once I read who they read, just repeat the process. The idea was to follow the trail — which means, inevitably, that I came to read a lot of old books.

On the Trail

One of the books that started me off shortly after that conversation was my first Piper book, The Pleasures of God. But though the meditations I devoured there had a huge impact on me, it was really the back of the book that set in for long-term influence. I learned there of Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man which took very little time to read. However, it took me a couple of years to make it through Stephen Charnock’s Discourses on the Existence and Attributes of God.

I learned of John Newton and Abraham Kuyper, and witnessed how George Mueller worked through his wife’s death. From Jonathan Edwards I learned how a resolved life flows from a doctrinal life, and from David Brainerd that a short life can be a significant life. Many of those authors in turn led me to Calvin’s Institutes where he in turn quoted a man named Augustine so often that he had to be read next.

References in other books from men like J.I. Packer soon led me to more of the Puritans. For many years, I took Packer seriously that Pilgrim’s Progress should be read once a year, and I … (more)