I'm becoming a biography buff

I've realized in the past 2 months or so that I'm becoming a biography buff. I love biographies. They fascinate me to no end. They not only fascinate, but they also encourage and inspire! Now this is actually not a new thing for me when I think about it. In past years, my focus of biography was on movie directors. I struggled to find everything I possibly could on the directors I loved most. I bought books, watched interviews, read critiques, and studied their films endlessly. I think I have a tendency to latch onto some object of research, and then seek to attain as much knowledge from it as possible. First, it was movies. Recently, it's been Christian biography. I've been listening to a slew of a lectures by John Piper, each about an hour long, with 30 minutes for Q & A afterwards. They are so interesting. Since I'm not a good or fast reader, these lectures have been so beneficial for me, because I get a good amount of important details on the lives of these men, some great commentary and applications, and most importantly I've been able to see the similarities and also the differences between so many amazing, godly men of the past.

Some of the men I've learned about are C.H. Spurgeon, George Whitefield, Bill Piper, Andrew Fuller, Athanasius, William Tyndale, John Newton, John Bunyan, St. Augustine, John Calvin, Martin Luther, John Owen, J. Gresham Machen, William Cowper, Martin Lloyd-Jones, and Jonathan Edwards. Piper just reads some biographies about these men, and then each year at the annual pastor's conference, he gives his reflections on the biographies he read. These men are so graciously used by God that it's really hard to even consider or imagine yourself among that list. In fact, apart from the grace of God, I would say, near impossible. Now someone like William Cowper who would never put himself in that list is another story. His is perhaps the most heart-riveting, disturbing, and challenging story I've listened to yet. Cowper was a man who struggled with dibilitating depression his entire life, survived literally dozens of suicide attempts, suffered 4 major, life threatening attacks of depression that sank him into utter darkness, and yet he is a man responsible for some of the most glorious hymns ever written. He wrote hymns like:

"GOD moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm."

and...

"There is a fountain fill'd with blood
Drawn from EMMANUEL's veins;
And sinners, plung'd beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains."

If God can use a man such as William Cowper, I think there is hope for literally anyone. The thing that people like C.S. Lewis, and Lewis' benefactor Piper often point out is that biography and reading the writings of the past are incredibly important because they give us a frame of reference that is outside of ourselves. We can't see our own blindspots in our culture today, so when we look at writers of the past, they merely had different blindspots. They can see things in our culture that are clearly wrong that we never would have had eyes to see ourselves, and we see things in their culture that seem so blatently wrong but to them, they were unknown. Someone once said that it would be just as perfectly fitting for us to read works of the future, the only problem is that we can't get our hands on them, so we'll have to make due with works of the past.

I think this principle is so true, and I cherish it. Particularly looking at the life of the puritans, you see a kind of raw, survivalist Christian rigor that is simply impossible to attain in the lives we live with such comfort and triviality. Now I don't know if this means that we should even try to immitate that sort of lifestyle since the circumstances won't permit it and they would perhaps not be as beneficial as they were at the time, but that note of caution is but a small whisper in my head compared to the clear, audible scream in my ear that cries, "We need men like the puritans TODAY!" We need their view of God and life. Just for me, to get tastes and glimpses of their perspectives on life have been incredibly beneficial for me.

I hope, when I get the time, to purchase some of these biographies and study more about these men, their lives, and their published works.