If you took one hour per day away from the TV and gave it to the reading of the Early Church Fathers, you would have a truly astonishing theological education in about four years. If you read as fast as I did (and I was reading as slowly as I know how), the figure falls to three years and one month.

I recently conducted a little mathematical experiment, and the results were fascinating.

There is on my computer a 38 volume set called The Early Church Fathers. It contains all the important theologians of the first six centuries of the church. It is truly an intimidating mountain of material.

I added up the total number of pages found in all those volumes. It comes to a total of 46,187 pages. Wow. Surely, there wasn’t a man alive who could read all that in a lifetime. Out of curiosity, I decided to figure out how long it would take to read the whole thing. It is amazing how often God lets us think something is our own idea.

I selected a random page in Augustine, making sure it was not a half page, title page, or a page with illustrations; a full page of text. I read the page as slowly as I could, including the footnotes, making sure I really followed the argument and understood the contents.

Reading time: 1 minute 28 seconds.

I made an Excel spreadsheet and did a little math, and got BLOWN AWAY.

Suppose you read at a rate of 2 minutes a page – slower than my test page by 25%. Further suppose that you read only 1 hour a day.

You finish all 38 volumes in a little over four years.

In other words, if you took ONE HOUR PER DAY away from the TV and gave it to the reading of the Early Church Fathers, you would have a truly astonishing theological education in about four years. If you read as fast as I did (and I was reading as slowly as I know how), the figure falls to three years and one month.

This ignores the fact that by the time you cut out all the title pages, indices, half pages, blank pages, and other waste, you are going to carve about 6000 pages out of the reading.

This got me thinking. What else could be read in an hour a day? More data went into my spread sheet.

I was FLABBERGASTED. At reasonable reading speeds for each of the authors indicated, putting in one hour a day, you could read, digest, and understand ALL of the following in less than nine months:

Martin Luther, Bondage of the Will
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ
John Owen, Communion with God
John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
Jonathan Edwards, Complete Works
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Complete Works

In short, in a little less time than it takes to make a baby, you could start from scratch and still have enough theological acumen take a presbytery ordination exam and leave your questioners in AWE.

God, be merciful to me a sinner! I never really understood the value of a single hour. How vast the lost resources of my wasted time, never to be recovered! How many lost minutes, hours, days, months, years! If this is what an hour can do, how much have I thrown away? Thanks be to God for the atoning blood of Christ which alone can cover such sin! I plead with all of you, see from this how valuable your time really is, and make the best use of it that you can, so that you do not fall under like conviction with me. And may God deliver me from further crimes in this regard! Whatever God has gifted and called you to do, give your time to that. May your hours be mighty.

From a Facebook post.