People sometimes ask me why I spend so much time with books. The honest answer is that for me, reading has never been a pastime alongside ministry — it is one of the primary instruments of it. My shelves are working tools.
I read to teach. Nearly everything I take in, from my reading, finds its way into my lectures at the seminary, into workbooks, into curricula for the Nepali church. I read to write — commentaries, confessions, and the classic Reformed works feed directly into my books, devotionals, and sermons. And I read to guard the church. Even authors outside my own tradition receive a careful hearing, precisely so that their claims can be weighed against Scripture and the Reformed confessions.
But underneath all of that lies something more personal: a conviction that sound doctrine is a matter of love, not mere accuracy — that a mind renewed by good books becomes a mind able to serve Christ’s people well. Reading, for me, is discipleship in slow motion.
And discipleship in slow motion is exactly what makes reading a long-term investment before it is an immediate help. A sermon prepared in a week draws on a mind formed over decades. The pastor who has walked slowly through the confessions and the great Reformed teachers finds that when crisis, controversy, or opportunity arrives, the resources are already there. In that sense, reading serves the self first: it deepens the well from which everything else is drawn. It keeps me teachable. It guards me against the drift of a mind fed only on its own thoughts. And — as Romans 12:2 insists — it is one of God’s ordinary means for the renewing of the mind. A leader who stops reading does not stand still; he slowly empties.
Research adds discipline to that devotion. It forces me to handle texts carefully, to engage honestly with those who disagree, and to keep checking my convictions against Scripture, history, and the wider church. That discipline protects a minister from two opposite dangers: novelty for its own sake, and tradition held without understanding.
What serves the self in this way inevitably serves the church for generations. A congregation is rarely deeper than its teachers. Books outlast their authors — the church in Nepal today can sit under Augustine, Luther, and the Westminster divines only because someone read them, translated them, and passed them on. Every hour spent in serious reading and research is therefore not private enrichment but the preparation of an inheritance: sound doctrine articulated clearly, errors answered before they take root, and a rising generation of pastors trained by teachers who were themselves well fed. The fruit of a reading ministry is measured not in a single sermon, but in the health of churches twenty and fifty years from now.
That is why I read: because the well must be deep before the water is needed, and because what a teacher pours into his own mind today becomes, in God’s kindness, the inheritance of the church tomorrow.