{"id":62490,"date":"2023-04-10T23:00:34","date_gmt":"2023-04-11T04:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/?p=62490"},"modified":"2023-06-29T09:09:53","modified_gmt":"2023-06-29T14:09:53","slug":"motivation-for-pastors-to-embrace-the-challenge-of-reading-communion-with-god-by-john-owen-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/?p=62490","title":{"rendered":"Motivation for Pastors to Embrace the Challenge of Reading \u2018Communion with God\u2019 by John Owen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some years ago, I was preparing a reading list for an upcoming sabbatical. I didn\u2019t have any pressing projects that required study, so I was at liberty to choose whatever books seemed like they would be most helpful and enjoyable. As I scanned the volumes in my office, my eyes fell upon an as-yet unread copy of John Owen\u2019s <em>Communion with God<\/em> on a shelf. Contemplating the title, I thought that this book probably had something I needed. After all, being a pastor meant spending a lot of time in God\u2019s Word and talking to people about the Lord, but it wasn\u2019t always conducive to communion with God. And when it boiled down to it, I wasn\u2019t 100 percent sure that I actually knew what \u201ccommunion with God\u201d meant.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So I read Owen\u2019s book that summer, or more accurately\u2014I devoured it. Owen can be a tough read; he never says something in ten words that can be explained in a hundred. And he definitely could have benefitted from an editor wrangling some order into the chaos of his syntax and outline (though the 2007 edition edited by Justin Taylor and Kelly Kapic has gone a long way towards giving the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is much gold to be mined from works that have stood the test of time and helped Christians for centuries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":332,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[322],"class_list":["post-62490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-preaching-theology","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/332"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62490"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62492,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62490\/revisions\/62492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}