Libraries are gyms for the mind. How can we stretch and transform our minds? How can we find treasure troves of information, insights, and inspiration? How can we be better equipped, encouraged, and empowered to make a greater impact for the kingdom of God in society? Psalm 119 is the longest Psalm in the Bible, and it's all about the Word of God. Psalm 119, verse 33 says, teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes, and I shall keep it to the end. Give me understanding, and I shall keep your law. Indeed, I shall observe it with my whole heart. Make me walk in the path of your commandments, for I delight in it. Incline my heart to your testimonies and not to covetousness. Turn my eyes away from looking at worthless things, and revive me in your way. Establish your word to your servant who is devoted to fearing you. Turn away my reproach which I dread, for your judgments are good. Behold, I long for your precepts. Revive me in your righteousness. Libraries are important. Libraries preserve history and truth, and they make accessible a treasure trove of wisdom. a treasure trove of insights, and knowledge, and biographies, and devotionals, and examples of excellence, and commentaries, dictionaries, and handbooks, and concordances, and atlases, encyclopedias, and much, much more. Libraries are an armory. The library is a spiritual armory for any mission, any college, any ministry providing spiritual weapons for spiritual warfare. Libraries are a collection of selected sources of information. Other people, of course, today say, why do we need libraries? We've got the internet. Well, do you notice who controls the internet? Have you noticed the amount of fact-checkers, censors, who are deleting entire platforms, wiping out vast amounts of things? The thing about any library is it's a selection of recommended works in many ways. And what you've got digitally can be wiped out, can be deplatformed, can be deleted, can be selected. Just take Wikipedia, which is extremely biased in the most anti-Christian way and anti-freedom way in order to promote an agenda that suits the New World Order. You don't want to get your information from what the world, who hates Christ, wants you to know. you've got to go for the material which is made accessible for community for reference or borrowing. Any library is designed for a community, so it's one thing to have one designed for the city, but something designed for your church or your school or your college or your mission. Some books are so valuable and there's so few of them that they have to only be for reference, you can read them there, others you can borrow. Reading is the magic key to take you where you want to be. I remember hearing that growing up and it's true. Libraries are sanctuaries for serious systematic study. You know, a person can say, well, you know, I can get so much on the internet. Well, yes, you can if you're extremely disciplined and if you can find the right place, but it's like going into a big city. You can easily go down the wrong roads, you can get mugged, you can get caught up in the wrong places, you can get sucked into things, you can be distracted. All sorts of things can happen in a big city. But if you know where to go and if you've got a sanctuary where you will find serious study that is true to biblical worldview, well, that makes studying a whole lot easier. Libraries provide a quiet place for study. A good library provides a protected environment to preserve sources of knowledge, printed books and journals, and also these days, audio, visual, digital resources are also part of any library. A good library provides a sanctuary for serious study, a calm atmosphere for concentration for systematic study. Now, I knew what it was to grow up with a book where you could be engrossed in this book for hours without any distraction. Today, if a person tries to, oh, you know, I can read these things and access them on the phone. Meanwhile, I got how many distractions, things popping up. How concentrated serious systematic study can you do on a electronic device compared to what you could do when you've got a hardcover book? I'm of that generation that finds study with a hard copy book much easier. A library provides an inspiring environment for research, for assignments, for Bible studies, and for sermon preparation, amongst other things. Libraries can equip and empower you. Readers make leaders. A reading Christian is a growing Christian. If you want to lead, you must read. In fact, that last sentence is a quote from Napoleon. Napoleon used to walk amongst his generals handing books out saying, if you want to lead, you must read. and he was giving his men books like from Gustavus Adolphus and Oliver Cromwell and Alexander the Great. You've got to learn from the best. If you expect to win, you're going to have to learn from the best. And when they got to Berlin, he took them into the sanctuary, the tomb for Frederick the Great, and he said, Hatshepsut gentlemen, if he was alive, we would not be here. And he was determined that his generals learned from the best of the best of the past. Libraries provide time-tested tools to equip and empower you for exceptional ministry. When you study exceptional people, it stretches you to attempt things you could never have considered before. It stretches minds. Well, just think how the Vikings stretched frontiers. They sailed across the Atlantic long before Columbus and, well, This Viking would need a bigger ship, but it's a nice idea, having a Viking ship as your library shelves on the wall. But just the beginning. Libraries are gymnasiums for the mind. And as a gym is there to stretch your muscles, a library is there to stretch your mind. Now, your muscles can be stretched. There were people who came into the army in my intake who they could not run 2,4Ks. They could barely walk 2,4Ks from the start. They were getting sick on the side of the road. They're just unable to go at the pace required carrying them. But you know, repetition, week after week, month after month, these guys were sprinting it at the end with backpacks, with kits, with rifles and boots and helmets and all the rest of it. It's just as you can stretch your muscles, you can stretch your mind too. Reading is to the mind what physical exercise is to the body. Repetition brings revelation. A library is a hospital for the mind. Well, a good library can be indeed. Books are the quietest and most constant of friends. They're the most accessible and wisest of counselors and the most patient of teachers. You won't get a teacher more patient than a book. You can go over and over and over and it doesn't mind, doesn't get irritated that you've got to reread it again and again until you really get it. You won't find a quieter and more constant friend, a more accessible and wise counselor than a good book. A good library is a treasure trove. A Bible College's library should be a goldmine of biblical knowledge, a treasure trove of information, instruction, insight and inspiration. If they've got the works of Charles Spurgeon, the treasury of David, if they've got the sermons of Martin Luther, if they've got Calvin's commentaries, Matthew Henry's commentaries, they've got a lifetime worth of study right there. But there's so much more in a good library. A library is an oasis. Libraries are an oasis for searching souls and hungry, inquiring minds. A reservoir of living waters. a storehouse of spiritual food, providing information that can renew your mind, transform your life, and direct your energies. It can be an antidote to apostasy. We are living in an age of apostasy. We need libraries with a reliable, old, tried, tested, battle-proven, faithful works of dedicated ministers, missionaries, and reformers. We need information to counteract ignorance. We're living in a very ignorant age. An age where people are often boasting about how ignorant they are. I've heard people laugh about how little they've read, and, I haven't read a book since I finished college, and things like that. I'm talking about people as old as me, saying, I haven't read a book in the last 40 years. Not since I graduated from college, I've read about it. Literally, you get people like that who think that's clever, to advertise their ignorance. And there's people who... I've heard people speak like this in past as fraternals. You know, a minute before I get in the pulpit, I don't have a clue what I'm going to say. And somebody made a comment saying that's why minutes after you get out of the pulpit, no one can remember what you did say. And that's the point. There's people who are so lazy that they come up with super spiritual things saying, you know, I trust God to guide me while I'm in the pulpit. That's laziness. We should study to show ourselves approved of God. You can be better guided in a calm, quiet atmosphere of your library or your study, going through the Word of God, praying, working through it, think of the issues without any distractions. than you can when you're up in the pulpit and people around you. It's just sheer laziness for a person to get up there without preparation. We need libraries equipped with biblical knowledge and Christian answers for the challenges of our time. A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. In fact, if we don't offend anyone, then we're not being honest. It's cowardice to not be willing to offend people. We all need to be offended sometimes, and some of the most important lessons I've ever learned was given to me in an offensive rebuke, being told, you're wrong, and so on, and you don't like it at the time, but later on you realize, he's right, this is good, and actually brings good fruit. Libraries can be a solution to superficiality. We are living in an age of censorship. Never have there been so many censors. Well, they call them fact-checkers now. Satan was the first fact-checker in the garden saying that, did God really say? And we've got today Zuckerberg's Facebook censors who walk around fact-checking, not that they would know a fact if they tripped over it. How can you continue to depend on a medium which is in the hands of people determined to censor anything that goes against their narrative? You're living in an age where if you sit on a plane and read a book, people will probably be taking pictures of you because it's like, look at that, he's reading a book. And it's so counter-cultural today to be a book reader. In an age of superficiality, we need libraries that will challenge and enable us to dig deeper into the gold mines of God's Word. You can find some gold in some places by just panning in the rivers. You can get some gold dust and even a few nuggets in it. But to get the tons of gold, they need to dig deep into the earth, miles deep into the Witwatersrand. And that's where they found the reefs of gold. And so it is with the Word of God. You can get gold dust and gold nuggets by simple superficial reading of the Word of God, but if you want to get the tons of gold reefs, you dig deep. And this takes cross-referencing and getting the whole sweep of scripture and meditating on it. It takes time. Libraries provide an opportunity to improve yourself. Libraries provide free education. Nobody needs to say they can't afford an education. In fact, if you want a good theological education and you can't afford it, pick a fight with a Calvinist, he'll give you books for free. I mean, that's the way the reformed folks are. So the easiest way to learn is just to go and pick an argument with a, you know, try it with Hunter or Daniel and see what happens. And you'll find they're giving you books and so you can actually get a free education that way. Libraries enable us to compare sources and discern. Libraries provide you with unlimited opportunities to improve yourself. Now, I don't know what other kids were doing, but when I was growing up, even when I was in primary school, I'd spend Saturdays going into the library. I'd sit in the library for hours. I loved the library. I always was bringing books back to the library. The library provided unlimited amounts of books. Self-educated people cannot be fooled by institutionalized propaganda. People who read are not going to be impressed with the superficial soundbites of the Clinton News Network, the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation, Slime Magazine, Useless News and World Report, Satanic Alter Television, Evil TV, or any of the rest of them. The best thing any parent can do is to teach their children to love to read. and to get them into God's Word. A child who reads will be an adult who thinks. It is essential for those who love truth. Libraries are essential for all those who love knowledge, wisdom, and truth. You can find books, especially the old books, long before political correctness, long before all the garbage that they have dished out in the last few decades, and you can find things that could never be said today in mainstream media. Truth does not fear investigation. In the words of Jan Hus, professor of Prague University, truth conquers. And remember, what's the name for universities? It comes from Latin, uni veritas, one truth. The average professor in a university doesn't even believe there is truth, let alone one truth. So they should open up a diversity, an aversity, a polyversity, but universities belong to Christ. It is, the etymology of the word shows it. Universities were founded by Christians, and that's why we have the name, uni veritas, university. Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction. We're living in a world where people are so distracted that when you get to read, this is resistance to the new world order, this is resistance to the Gateses and Rockefellers and the, George Soros's of this world, you know, I don't care what propaganda you've organized for me up on the mainstream media, I'm going to read a book. I'm going to read the Bible. I'm going to read what's before your politically correct fact-checkers and censors. And I don't care what you thought police have to say, I'm going to bring up my mind and shape my mind and transform and renew my mind with that which is true, which is tried and tested, not the fashions, fads and frenzies of today. A house is not a home without books and cats. There's no such thing as too many books. There's just not enough bookshelves. And we've been adding a few bookshelves around here lately, too. And as for cats, well, cats rule. And in our mission bookshop, our books are approved by cats, like in this case, Elizabeth. Libraries provide systematic sources for study. Libraries must be well organized, carefully categorized, neatly presented, and diligently maintained. They provide precious resources for many generations. This is the thing. Do you know how many books we've got just here that go back four, five, six, seven generations? It's magnificent. I've got books that were printed in the 1600s. Those are valuable, but to read books that I've got literally from the writings of Oliver Cromwell, personal letters, things like this, and we've got all the writings of Luther and Calvin and Spurgeon here. You think what that does when you can get books that were written by people who were not influenced or propagandized by our generation's mass media, and to get fresh insights on the world and on the word from people from other generations. Extremely valuable. Books are precious and books are valuable, and they need to be protected from dust and dirt and damp and damage, obviously. Therefore, we must take special care as stewards of God's kingdom to preserve these precious resources for future generations. Sometimes we receive books from overseas in pristine condition, well-packed and so on. Other times we receive things thrown together, missing a cover, damaged and bent and buckled Bibles and sometimes almost perfect, except that they weren't looked after or they weren't packed properly and it's grievous. We go out of our way to try and repair these and even get some specially prepared bookbinders. Because when you've got old precious Bibles that go back hundreds of years, and these deserve to be well protected and preserved. Erasmus said in the 16th century, when I have a little money, I buy books. If I've got any money left, I buy food and clothes. Get your priorities straight. Old books help us discover the sensibilities once common to all. Let's face it, what they call common sense today is no longer common. I read old books because I would rather learn from those who built civilization up than those who tore it down. Isn't that true? Today we've got so much... It doesn't matter what's trending. I haven't been in a modern Christian bookshop in a long time because I don't care what's the latest current fashion fad trending, so what? The tried and tested is far more attractive to me. So I go into secondhand bookshops and go into the old place, like in Longstreet, and you find these treasures on the bookshelves. That is where you're gonna find truth. The latest fashions and fads, there might be some gems amongst them, but you're more likely to find it amongst the tried and tested than you are amongst the modern fashionable ones that are hitting the headlines right now. Redeem the time, read. Books build a staircase for your imagination. All the people that we've looked at in the Reformation Society that have made up the chapters of Greatest Century Reformation, Greatest Century Missions, Victorious, Christian Change of World, all of them were readers. That's what opened their minds up to dare, to trust, to step out, to achieve the things that they did. Victory and success love preparation. Learn to love reading and enjoy reading and learning as God prepares you to make an impact for the kingdom of God in a real sense, Books are staircase to success, stepping stones to success. You start with one book and then two, and it leads you upwards and onwards. Self-education is the only possible education. The rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature. That is true. When I look back and think, what are the most valuable things I've learned? It was from assignments, not so much from lectures, but from assignments. from getting in book projects, book summaries, having to, okay, what did I read? What did I learn from it? Now I've got to go back and read again because I was forced to do a book report, I was forced to do an assignment. Now I've actually got to think and ask questions. And this is when you really learn. If you're just sitting in a classroom and somebody's giving you lectures, it may or may not help, but it only really helps when you actually go back and you have to do an assignment to extra reading and it becomes yours. when you've got to think through the implications. So a good teacher actually should shock and surprise and offend the listeners to force them to go and do their own research, because that's where they're really going to do learning. Self-education, and the best way of self-education is loving reading. Reading provides foundations for life. My mother taught me to read before I went to school, so I could read by age five, and my earliest memories are of reading books. The library was a great attraction to me. It was probably my favorite place in the world, was going to the library, particularly Boulouin Library. Many times I spent school breaks at school reading in the library, and when I was growing up in Boulouin, I'd walk to the library at least once a week and take out the maximum number of books allowed, four at a time. And at age 12, I'd left behind The Hardy Boys and The Secret Seven and other children's books, and I was regularly checking out books from the adult section of the Boulouin Library. I remember the librarian peering at me over her glasses and asking in an interrogatory tone, you do know that these books are meant to be read? Yes, ma'am, I responded. She said, have you read all these books in the last week? Yes, ma'am, I have. She looked at me with a skeptical gaze, and she looked at the titles of the history books or wildlife books, which were my favorites. How old are you, boy? And I said, 12 years old, ma'am. And she said, and you've read all these books? Yes, ma'am. And she looked suspicious, but I did. My first mission, Hospital Christian Fellowship, first missionary I heard was Francis Grimm of HEF. He had planted Hospital Christian Fellowships in 100 countries of the world. I joined his mission, the first missionary who ever spoke at a church. And the first task I was given when I joined Hospital Christian Fellowship, well, one of the first, after sweeping out the garage and digging holes to fill them in again, moving rocks in one side garden to the oven and moving it back again. After those tests, I was led into a large room with empty shelves on the wall and a huge pile of boxes in the middle and told to organize the library. Now, this was a task that I relished. They couldn't have given me a better task. My previous employment before joining HEF was organizing the books at Oxford University Press in downtown Cape Town. And that involved moving mountains of books and arranging about 22,000 titles in categories and alphabetically. And when I was asked what my job description was, I was told, you move mountains of books. And that's what I did all the time, moving books backwards and forwards, in and out and on the shelves and off the shelves for OUP downtown. And so, in Literature for Africa, it's been a privilege to donate thousands of my own books for libraries, for pastors, for textbooks, for teachers, for books, for college and school library projects into Sudan. Ban of Truth trusts us and trusts us with vast amounts of great books to give to different pastors and college libraries all over Africa. Textbooks for school teachers in Sudan. We receive containers here in Cape Town, we sort through them, we categorize them, we inventory them, we designate them, they get shelved or sorted and donated, and sometimes Bible College lecturers come or missionaries come and they load up their buckies or their combis or an eight-ton truck or even a 32-ton. And when we get to Bible College consultations, we've always donated vast amounts of books, libraries of books. Each box contained one of each of these, and this is to be library donations to each of the 30-odd Bible colleges represented at this Bible College consultation. Here's a bishop in Sudan, Bishop Bismarck, with a donation of library books, which we were able to give to him because these authors had donated these books to us. and what a great privilege it is to put books in their hands. Well, one of our longstanding partnerships has been with Back to the Bible Training College, now called Back to the Bible Mission. which started back in 1991, 30 years ago, near Barberton, about 30 kilometers outside of Barberton, and it didn't look very forested at the beginning, but one of our people was one of the first workers there, George. Well, 20 years ago, General Shy Mulder took over, and he has developed it enormously now. General Shy Mulder was a legend in the army. He was known throughout the army as the most devout, dedicated, uncompromising Christian there was. You could always go to him with problems. He was in charge of the engineers, amongst other things. He was running Bridge 14. They were building Bridge 14 in Angola under fire. one of the first big battles where the South Africans had to face the Cubans, and they had massive tanks, and we just had these little Elant naughty cars with a nice city, more cannon on, but still no real armor to speak of, except to stop bullets, couldn't stop a shell. And his engineers built this bridge, enabled our people to get across and to win that battle against the Cubans. General Scheimholder is a soldier's soldier, over 30 years in the army, serving in the world's army, as he said, 34 years in the world's army, in preparation for now serving in the Lord's army. And so under him, back to the mission as consolidated, grown, developed, they have in this beautiful valley. It's called the Valley of Mercy. And you can just see how it's gotten so much more green and so much more foliage since that early picture that I showed of when it got started. And this, for many years, has been the chapel on the top of the hill, which was the auditorium, the chapel, the main auditorium where everything was done from graduation services, morning prayer meetings. And of course, we always used to do PT every Wednesday as well. I would be called in to do lectures on missions and church history, sometimes Islam and worldview as well. And we've always been donating books to their students. And with their graduations, they get books, they get various kinds of study Bibles and so on. So you can see how this auditorium, which is now the library, used to look and how it used to be set out. And this is for the, graduation service in this particular case in 2014, where I was the speaker. And these are the graduating third-year students on that occasion. So Back to the Bible Mission has a three-year training program, and they train students from over 33 countries have come there over the years. And they train them, going through every book in the Bible, and they bring in speakers from around the world, and it's a phenomenal ministry, body, mind, and spirit ministry. Real privilege to be part of them. Well, they asked, us last year to come and sort out their library. Well, we couldn't do it last year, but this year, Elishka and I went through, and this is what confronted us, the raw material to work with, and you can see how the auditorium had been converted into a library, but the energetic carpenter had made all the bookshelves, made them 23 centimeters high and a lot of books are over 23 centimeters high. So we had to bring in some other shelves that hadn't been planned from the old library that we could fit in. So it didn't quite fit the style, but we were able to, in a side annex, get reference books which are over 23 centimeters in to the bookshelves and sort out the rest on most of the shelves. And Elishka and I were there for two weeks, and for one of the weeks I was lecturing on church history, but for both weeks Elishka was busy up the hill. When you walk up this hill three, four, five, six, ten times in a day, it's great exercise. And this is how it was on the final day, the 19th of March, opening up the or the new library, a manual library. And as you can see, now tiled floors and... magazine racks, we had to do some engineering to get that, and to be able to bring in all the different things necessary. They first thought that maybe it's a 12,000 book library. We estimate if you count journals in as well, it's probably 18,000 book and journal library. And to sort them out, and here's just the audiovisual section, for example. most of which came from us, all from Answers in Genesis, and great audiovisual materials, great materials. Of course, at least you get to categorize them, get things organized and labeled. These are just doctoral and master's theses by the Mulders themselves and some of their staff. Here you've got somebody who at age 60, Dr. Mulder and his wife, started when most people would retire, they went back to school, so to speak. Faith mission and studied bachelors in theology, masters in theology, doctorates in theology. he already had engineering degrees and all the rest of it, but while running his mission and lecturing and doing everything else. So what a privilege to sort out this library and it was a task because moving tons of books is what we do at Frontline and we would have been happy to have taken Jonathan up there too, or Ray, to move a few of these tons, but We did manage. And this is how it looked at the end. Studying areas. It's a nice facility. What a lovely... This has got to be the best building, room, the highest place at the college. And I think it'll be a sanctuary for study. It'll encourage study. It's got great materials. What was also fascinating for me is I regularly found... Do you see over this picture of Francis Grimm? That's Jan van Staden of Dorothea Mission, is Hospital Christian Fellowship founder, Francis Grimm, under whom I was mentored. Quite a lot of the books we came across were Hospital Christian Fellowship books, some of which looked uncannily familiar, and I wondered whether some of those had been stamped and processed by me back 40 years before, when I first joined Hospital Christian Fellowship. Could be. Looks like HEF donated quite a lot of their library to BBM. And so Back to the Bible Mission now has a sanctuary for study, and any of their students who want to study further and in depth, this will energize their work. So forget about internet connectivity and all the rest of it, they can always be online up at that library. And this is the service for the flag service. As they bring in all the flags, notice when a Christian flag comes in, all the flags are lowered. testifying to the fact that the Lordship of Christ in all areas of life. And a beautiful ceremony. My Bible and I, the choir singing. And afterwards people able to survey and explore the library and offer official dedication. Our Literature for Africa ministry donates an average of 100 tons of Bibles, books, and Sunday school materials to pastors, teachers, chaplains, evangelists, school, college libraries throughout Africa every year. The best year we ever had, we did 200 tons of Bibles and books donated in one year. That doesn't count what we sold through the bookshop. That's what we donated through Literature for Africa stores. To Zambia, to Covenant College, to Parliament. In fact, this book was made specifically because the Zambian vice-president asked me if I would be able to produce one small book that could summarize all the big books I'd delivered to him on biblical economics and crime and punishment justice and so that was General Godfrey Meander and I produced Biblical Principles of Africa, which has been one of our most successful books, published in English, French, and here they are being distributed in the Congo in French. And how wonderful to be able to be delivering all over, even up to Nuba Mountains. Here you can see a column I led into Nuba Mountains in 1997, marching up the Nuba Mountains with four tons of Bibles and books and school books. So literature for Africa is one of the ways in which we're trying to provide literature. When I went on my first mission to Mozambique, I heard something that really galvanized with me. I heard somebody say, yes, the missionaries taught us how to read, but the communists gave us something to read. And I was so struck by that, that what a failure if the church teaches people to read and doesn't give them something to read, but the communists put in the hands of somebody that the church taught how to read, but the communists reached them with their literature. Karl Marx said, I will conquer the world with the 26 lead soldiers of the alphabet. The printing press, it's powerful. where you can view our Literature for Africa Shipment Offload video online, produced by Christopher, and our Bibles for Africa video online, which is longer with more interviews, done by Ndomiso, and there is the Mission Sinoub Mountains of Sudan video, which was done mostly via Raison, and that's been translated also into German and into French, and those show some of the biggest literature distribution projects we've ever done. Christian Liberty Books was started 25 years ago, particularly to aid parents to home educate their children. So we launched Christian Liberty Books in 1995, and CLB has well over 5,000 titles available, over 6,000 if you count audiovisual materials, mostly home education materials. And we have open days, we distribute huge amounts, donate a whole lot. Some of the books that I've produced have included Great Extension of Mission. It's probably one of the most popular books. In fact, it's so popular that Life Challenge Africa asked to print 10,000 copies at their expense. With our mind just giving them the material and forgoing any royalties, said, no problem, glad to donate it. And they distributed them to every pastor and youth leader they could in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. and flew me in to give lectures on examples of excellence in the Great Ascension Missions. Victorious Christians Who Changed the World, which is 32 chapters. chapters, 32 biographies on Christians from Perpetua through to Mary's Lesser, and a sketch of some Salafi history, a whole lot of books, The Greatest Century of Reformation, of course, and going through the Bible, every book. These are just some of the resources we've published, but most of the books in CLB, of course, we import from overseas. You can view the bookshop video tour online, which Indemisa put together. Very helpful. And also a home education video, another one done by Indemisa, which is very helpful for people interested in getting involved in home education. We know that, especially during this lockdown, there's a lot of people who can't reach otherwise, and the postal service isn't as reliable as it used to be, so we are putting digital libraries online, a lot of digital books. We've gotten many top class authors, lecturers, speakers from around the world to donate their books to us digitally that we could make available through William Carey Bible Institute. We first had in mind this digital library online being for restricted access countries where people couldn't otherwise get it and sometimes we're delivering it to them on flash drives or SD cards in places like Egypt, but other times they can access this directly within Mongolia or Trinidad and Cuba. And so this distance learning program's got some of the most powerful materials available completely free. Audio, video, PowerPoint, books, PDFs, a whole lot of things. And then we've been doing a digital, we've been doing a library program for many years. It was aimed first at pastors. but now more prisoners are actually using it than pastors, but I believe sometimes the prisoners are pastors. In fact, we just heard that Canada's locked up a pastor for having his church open during the lockdown, and they've ring-fenced his church, and he's in maximum security prison for over a month already because he dared to have church services. Can you imagine in Canada? Now you've got an underground church operating in Canada. That's how bad it's gotten, but we used to do it And it still works somewhat about postal service. We send them a free book, they write a book report, we send them a second book, they write a book report, we'll send a third book and so on. Now they can do it digitally as well. Those have got access to internet. And this is another one of the programs available. 29 of our books are now available as e-books as well. It's not either or, it's both and. There's some people who prefer a needed e-book and others who prefer hard copy, and I'm one of those who prefers the hard copy, but we must cater for the different needs out there. I know there's some travelers who prefer things as e-books, and so even Victorious Christians is now available as an e-book. There's a whole lot of free PDF books that we put on, which include some old classics like Father Arthur Lewis is one of the first board members of Frontline. He's the one who wrote the book Christian Terror, which exposed the World Council Church's funding of terrorism in Rhodesia. And Soweto but God, which is a phenomenal book, produced 1976 on the 1976 Soweto uprising, absolutely insightful for people on the ground who saw what really happened there. And Handbook for Cape Independence, also free e-books. We've got at least 70, probably up to 80 or so, tracks in several languages too, available free online, and they can be downloaded especially at livingstonefellowship.co.za, more being translated into Afrikaans as well and made available, including electronically. and our newsletters, of course. So we greatly increased our digital resources last year in particular, and that's good, and that's important, but the emphasis here right now is on hard copy libraries. Libraries are there for character training. A person's character is to a large extent developed by the books he reads. The heart of him who has understanding seeks knowledge. Having a craving and a desire and a hunger for knowledge will enable one to achieve far more than anyone else could. Ditch the man cave and bring back the study. Men need to be made wise and great once again. Instead of just having these overgrown teenagers who just want to watch sports on big flat screen TVs all the time, ordinary people have big TVs. Extraordinary people have big libraries. Libraries are a size of a desire to increase one's intellect. Whatever things are true, whatever things are honorable, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, worthy of praise, think of these things. That's what Philippians 4.8 is commanding us to do, is to focus our minds on the excellent. It's not hoarding if it's books. There's no such thing as too many books, there's just not enough bookshelves yet. The discerning heart seeks knowledge. And if you haven't made use of one of the libraries at the mission, we used to have one library, now we've got a few libraries, you can find them all around us. So, we've of course got big Reformation 500 events coming up. And 500 years ago, Martin Luther made his My Conscience is Captive to the Word of God stand. And so on this Saturday, this weekend, we're holding a Reformation 500 Conscience Captive to the Word of God conference right here. And it'll be live streamed from nine o'clock to four, and if the discussion time goes over, maybe even up to five, and on Sunday, the 18th of April, on the actual anniversary of Martin Luther's stand, we'll have a Reformation 500 celebration service right here in the upper room, and we'll live stream it too, God willing. Programs on the web, you can go onto reformationsh.org web, get the program, I've got some here by the doorway for those who want the hard copy, and we'll have also a children's program parallel during the day. On Saturday night, for those who haven't seen it and want to, we will be screening the classic Martin Luther film, award-winning, absolutely extraordinary, and that'll be seven o'clock here on Saturday night. So, any questions, any comments about libraries, gyms, for the mind? Questions, comments? In Cape Town itself, which library do you recommend Well, I'm sorry to say that that's no longer so about our National Library. I used to go to Cape Town Library and Pines Library and it was great. But I tell you, they've gutted these libraries and for example, I was at Hemingsway's bookshop out in Hermanus, and it's a treasure trove. I was like, oh, this is great. Can never go there without walking out with a packet of books. But when I asked him, where did you get this? The shopkeeper hung his head, and he said, you would weep to know. I said, well, tell me. He said, we were told, come with the biggest vehicle you've got to the back of the Cape Town Library. They're throwing out their old books. And they were being thrown to dumpsters. including leather-bound first editions, things like this, and they swept up all the things that you can buy for a fortunate Hemings race. I mean, they were literally throwing it away. I heard the same thing when I was up in Pretoria. I was at the Erfenes part of the bibliothèque of the Fortrecker Monument, and they took me into this magnificent room that was climate-controlled with these signs that if a fire occurs and the lights get out quick, because they'll flood it with, is it freon gas, to be able to, helon? Helon gas, in order to wipe out any fire, and just to preserve the books. There's thousands of valuable books there. I said, where do you get these from? This woman looked at me and said, they were about to be incinerated. Pretoria Library was throwing out all the old books to make space for the modern propaganda Marxist junk and garbage. They just were throwing it out. and we went in the biggest buckies we could and we scooped up as much as we could save. And some of them included family histories, things that were single copies, didn't, were no other copies around, Hansards, things to do with parliamentary history, records of the old Transvaal Republic, things just thrown out. In our own, you can see in the cupboard here, I've got a first edition of a David Livingston book published in New York. Now, it's not the first edition published in England, but it was published one year later of Missionary Travels. One of our people picked it up in the States for $2. Now, that sells for about $2,000 on Amazon, a book like that. Somebody sent me a book from America many years ago. It was the first edition of David Livingston, with all the maps and charts and sketches and so on, which you'd never get in a later edition. And inside this book was a stamp University of Tennessee, and over it, a stamp discarded. In the top corner was a pencil, $2. It had been sold in a library sale. This man picked it up. I mean, imagine the University of Tennessee. How dumb must that librarian be to discard first edition of Livingston's Travels? Which, by the way, a book in that condition is well over $2,500 on Amazon if you want to try and purchase such a thing. But libraries all over the world are throwing away precious books. And people like us pick them up. Some of our friends in the States, like in Eagle's Nest, will box up some of these and will ship them to us and give them another opportunity in life, because apparently the people in American Europe are no longer interested in the history. But there's some people out there in the colonies, in the Styx, in the outermost parts of the Earth, that can hopefully rebuild civilization from those who are throwing out the foundations of the civilization. I mean, can you imagine? So I used to, I used to go down every single Saturday to Cape Town Library and I'd come back with piles of books. My children used to enjoy going to Pines Library. We would go there frequently in the evening and I think we went often once a week and everyone would pick up books and we'd read them at home and it was great fun. And then after a while we stopped because they'd thrown all the books out. And now they had, you know, Karl Marx and Steve Becker and Mandela. They apparently didn't have space for all the old books that we used to read. So I don't know what good libraries you've got around here. There might be some good librarians who preserved some libraries, but I think the average municipal library is gutted and stacked with propaganda. Anyone have any better insights? It's been a while since I've been in a municipal library. but recently I met a lady from, a girl from Italy, she's about just three or four years older than me, and she studied languages in Italy, so like Latin and Greek and everything, and we met because I was reading on Clifton, I actually read a book called La Mortier, and she was so shocked to see a young person reading, And then she told me that she actually got a job as an editor in Italy when lockdown started. And then she lost the job because no one in Italy is reading even during lockdown. Everyone is just on their phones, online, everything. No one is actually reading books there. It is crazy. Well, when I've traveled to America on speaking tours, it's been staggering to me how you can be saturated with this 24-7 coverage, as they call it. You're walking to catch your plane at the airport, and everywhere you go, there's screens, and they've all got the same thing. And even if it's different stations, they're all saying the same thing, with the same images, and the same repeat things at the same time. And it's just unbelievable when they've got so many stations in America, but then you discover that they're all owned by six men. We've all got the same worldview. And so there's not that much variety when you get down to it either. And it got so bad that if I'm visiting England, I won't listen to BBC. I turn to Russia Today if I want to know the news about something going on. I don't know how you found it when you were in London, but I just found a BBC. I couldn't handle it. It was nauseating. Yeah, I think it is it is like that Yes, that's also true when you see valuable pictures and so on you need to actually make copies of it Do you know when we've got for example? the 25th anniversary of the St. James Massacre, I had journalists coming to us to get pictures of it. And I said, you're from the August. You must have the best pictures. I mean, the pictures I've got are photocopies of newspaper cuttings that I had at the time. And I had a few pictures of like the blood on the Bible on the carpet and things like that. So we had some of our own pictures, but most pictures were my pictures of photocopies of a newspaper article, he said, we've got no records left. They just, they incinerated everything. Imagine a newspaper taking your history and just incinerating it. That's videos, photographs, details of terrorist attacks, of things like, you know, Church Street Massacre, the bomb blast in 1983. You try and find a photograph of that. the microfiches, for goodness sakes, which don't take up any space, and incinerate them. They burn the videos, the documentaries, the films. You try and find something about almost anything that's pre the digital age. They'll only select the images that they want you to get on digital. Well, that's why at the Reformation Society we've been working hard at getting pictures, putting it on the internet. In fact, if you try something like how the Vikings were one to Christ, for example, and you type that in, about all it comes up is our works that we've put out there. And it's similar with a lot of Martin Luther and other things, because you type in Martin Luther, up will pop up Martin Luther King. If you want Professor Martin Luther's materials, you've got to dig further, and most of those come from the Reformation Society. There's a new war on what can be put on the internet, and they de-platform some things very quickly. So that's why the hard copy libraries are so important. It's hard for them to mess with all of those. But what's on the internet's important to reach people, but you can't trust what's there. And you can't trust it's going to be there tomorrow, either. So everything you put on the internet, you've got to preserve and back up. So if the D-platform were deleted, you can re-upload it, maybe on other platforms, too. You said it was happening with hymns, old hymns. Yes, yes. You can't, like the music, even like, I was looking for violin music and stuff, And it used to be available in bookshops. Also you can get these nice old hymn books. It's difficult to find anything online. Well, that's the other thing is, when I was converted, just common to see people walk to church carrying a hymn book or prayer book or Bible and so on. Common to be in a church and have hymn books, prayer books and Bibles in every tomb. And now? Most are digital. I mean, it's useful. We use it. But the trouble is, after a while, everyone can lose it. It used to be everybody had a handbook with music in their home. At least one. And now, you're depending on the internet. Now you turn to the internet and say, why is it not there anymore? There's a whole bunch of people just scrubbing the internet of whatever doesn't fit the new world order. So I don't like some character like Zuckerberg deciding what I can see, learn, do, or what's important. Whenever any news headlines hit, look around for the real news that they're distracting you from. So, other comments, questions? How many people do you think are actually looking for those sort of books? Because if you were a librarian and you had to find to make some sort of a living out of it, you're going to struggle. because there are very few people that have to be one. Correct. But now you're talking about a private librarian, because if it's a municipal librarian, they're getting paid by the politicians. So that's a different story. But yes, I would hope that this is where... That's why when I go down Longstreet and I go to some of these second-hand bookshops, I can find treasure and I can say that... Calc Bay, there's a very good bookshop there, where I get quite a lot of key livingston books. And you ask them, and they will find it for you. But I mean, that's private enterprise. But if you're going to somebody in a state university, librarian, or municipal librarian, they might be a good person, but they are under a system that's going to try and crush them and prevent them from really getting good material. I bet that up at UCT some of the best books are gone. The old library was great. Going up to UCT library 40 years ago and so on and looking for things and getting books that you couldn't get anywhere else. And I wonder if they're still there. Maybe like University of Tennessee is discarded, thrown out for maybe a sale, but maybe just incinerated. There's a lot of that that's gone on. Back in 1994, on which you won't believe how many hundreds of tons of books were just discarded, thrown out, incinerated, and so on. And that's criminal. I have in my library down here, and at home, I've got books of Karl Marx, and of Muhammad, and a whole bunch of things of the enemy too, because To me, it's important to even know what the other side's saying. I wouldn't see the point of just getting rid of those as well, because I want to know what the other side says. Truth doesn't fear investigation. So do you know one of the things that Ray Comfort did? back at the anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, he published the Origin of Species and distributed them free on university campus. Of course he had a preface and so on, but he had every word of Darwin's speech, including the full title, and because a lot of people with Darwinism were not ever having read what Darwin had actually said, most of which had been disproven since, of course, and a lot of which is politically incorrect now, and so he thought, well, Do you know they went berserk on campus because he's giving away Darwin's Origin of Species book for people to actually see what he actually said. So, you know, we're not afraid of the other side. Sometimes we'll disagree with him. I've quoted a lot from Karl Marx because a lot of people are Marxists who don't even know what Marx thought and stood for. Okay, any other comments, observations? Marxist fiction or Marxist nonfiction? No, I mean literally what they were talking about in Mozambique was the Roman Catholic missionaries, priests, had taught the people to read pretty well. But they didn't have much of a program of giving them Bibles and books. And so in came the communist propaganda and so on. So it was propaganda, some of it could have been fiction, but it was all pushing the Marxist worldview. And that's the thing, Mozambique became a very Marxist country until they saw that it didn't work. Unfortunately. No, of course there's some modern people who've polished and made them nicer. I was just given some books that were being handed out free, beautiful full-color cartoons which are totally Marxist, aimed at children, books which are being distributed out there. There's some insidious stuff. I've seen hard copy cartoon-type books on the life of Karl Marx, make him look like he's one of the nicest people ever. And that's being given to our children in schools. I was given that in KwaZulu. He said, this is a textbook we meant to teach. And this teacher, of course, didn't, and passed the book on to me. But that's what's being given by government princes to them. Yes, Henry. President Trump. I went to the leading bookstores here and none of them could supply me of any of their Trump books. He published more than five books during his lifetime. The only platforms that could assist were your online platforms. And I want to take, like, an example for the city of Cape Town at the deeds office. Even there, they have all the deeds in hard copy, but they're struggling with it because it's in hard copy and they don't have a digitalized platform for it. try to go over to the digital platform, they're battling because they have to scan it in and all these costs occur. But there has to be a link into evolving into the new technology as well, because it's nice to have a hard copy. It's very convenient if you've got it, but if you don't have it, to get access to it, it's difficult. So one has to look into the new benefits that technology offers to try and incorporate that, so that more people can read it. I agree, and I'm so glad you brought that up, that's so important. One of the parts of the Upper Room development of this Livingston House extension is our new Pioneers Network Recording Studio, where we are bring in a lot of old technology, audio cassettes, reel-to-reels, even 60 mil films, much of which has never been digitized. And so we are going to research and find out what hasn't been digitized and what hasn't. A lot of it, we'll make value judgments, what should be first and so on. But I think so much of this needs to be made available, digitized, put on the internet and so on. And I'm wanting a lot of the old books we've got here, some of these books are unbelievably rare to find, that we can have them scanned and made available digitally and so on. So what I would like to do is put together these digital libraries also, different ones, William Carey Bible Institute. In fact, Andrew's researching how we can get bulk amounts of these and produce bulk on SD cards and digital, on flash drives. And we can have a William Carey Bible Institute library, we can have our Rhodesia Heritage Library, we can have the Frontline Fellowship, Great Commission Course, Biblical Worldview, going all the way back. We've got 30 years of different lecturers and people from all over who've come for BWSs, and many of these have never been digitized. And so we've got the cassettes or the videos, and now we need to convert them. So if we could get someone to sponsor to employ an individual or two to just scan, digitize this. We've got the technology here. I mean, even the 16mm films, to convert a lot of these through to a lot of it as a treasure trove. So much of what you see these days is not just repetitive. but it's often just fitting in a certain narrow narrative. And to be able to widen people's minds, a lot of people would be shocked. I showed some video clips to my son Calvin the other day on what life was like in Rhodesia, and he's looking at it. He just couldn't believe what he was seeing, saying, what? But not to see a still, but to see the video of it, and he had no idea that you could have had a life like that. And most people won't know, because it's not available. Nobody has this sort of thing available now. So if they can take someone like President Trump's books and make them next to unavailable, they've done this on a lot of things. Just take the bestseller books, for example. This is a classic. I've been to some of these newspaper editors and said, how do you determine your bestsellers? I said, I don't see on here the Bible, which obviously is the bestseller every year. Oh, well, no, we don't put the model in because then it would be the bestseller number one every time. Well, then you should at least put an asterisk saying except for. I don't see any Christian books here. You don't have James Kennedy books or John McArthur's books or James Dobson's who sold millions of copies. Oh, no, well, we don't have Christian books. We need to have an asterisk about that too. How do you determine your bestsellers? Well, we contact, in America it's ten bookshops. Ten bookshops! In New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ten. And they get their bestsellers and that's what they publish as the national bestseller. In England it's something like that. I don't know if they have ten or fifteen. In South Africa it's about five exclusive bookshops. That's where they find and that's where they put them and they don't go to Christian bookshops. So it's not what was printed, it's not what was sold. It's what they try to promote from their selected bookshops, which are totally secular humans. I can't remember the guy's name, but it's the guy, economist, that wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad. He said, having a bestseller book is not about how much, how well you write, it's how well you can sell. Best seller, it's not best writer, it's best seller. That's true. It's true, and it's availability. So for example, when you're going through airport terminals, and I've been through a lot of airport terminals, I used to excitedly go and look at the bookshops. I don't even bother anymore, I haven't bothered in years because the junk they've got in airport bookshops, it's the trash they want you to read. They don't have the good books there. If they did, it's a total accident. But normally, they've got the absolutely puerile, mediocre, meaningless, average narrative that doesn't disturb the comforts of the average propaganda out there. You won't get the real things out there. They're not going to have something like Tortured for Christ or God Smuggler or something on New York book exchange in the middle of the airport terminal. It's just pathetic what's going on there. You just think, in our country, how are you going to get a book like Shooting Back on one of the most dramatic events to take place in Cape Town, the St. James Massacre? And do you think there was a bookshop in the whole of Cape Town that could take Charles' book? There wasn't a publisher in the country willing to publish it. had to get published in America, couldn't get published here. And even that had to be done out of the normal, because the publishing houses are controlled by the people who control the media and the bookshops and so on, and they've got an agenda. If you don't fit an agenda, tough. And so it is on all these matters. So yes, bestsellers don't mean much. But it's still a fact that Christian books outsell secular books, because Christians read more than secular people, and the Bible outsells them all. So when they come out to the bestsellers, it's a fraud. It's a marketing scam. Just like the Oscars, the Academy Awards are there to promote films that they like. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the best film. There might have been a time that it did, but now it's the one that's the most gay or the most trending transgender, whatever. They've got an agenda, so they're not going to pick it by which was the best film. The Kendrick brothers are never going to be given an Oscar, you can be sure, because they're presenting the gospel. It doesn't matter how good their film is, they won't even be considered. Mel Gibson's The Passion was one of the 10 top most successful films in history in terms of actual ticket sales, box office sales. He didn't have a chance of getting an Oscar because he made a film that was honoring of Christ. There's no way they're going to give that an Oscar. And Mel Gibson was the son non grata for years. I mean, they hated him. They boycotted him. The Hollywood elites would not allow his film to be shown in their cinemas. Lock, Stock and Barrel, AMC and others, which had, what, 3,000 cinemas? They would not have Mel Gibson's. Even though everyone was pouring in to see them, they denied their cinemas the most popular film at the time because they just hated the message. That's not all about money, even. And yeah, that's just one of many examples. That's a good question. There was a time that I used to get Charles Dickens books in Bolloway Library and in the Capeton Library, and Jane Austen, of course, was popular. I don't know if there would be any more. That's a good question. Somebody needs to do a bit of research on this, but it's been a while since I've been walking into our libraries. Now, I'd like to do English history and English literature open day for our CLB for homeschoolers again, and it would be interesting going through that, but I must say, some of the best books ever written are hard to find in the average library these days. But check your areas. I was horrified how Pines Library got gutted. In the 90s, it was great, even into the early parts of 2000. But I don't think I've been to Pines Library in the last 12 years. For example, as I as a local author, I donate to Pines Library my hardcover Faith in the Fire in Sudan book and so on. Yeah, it's a major book about a major event, the biggest war in Africa's history. It's the only book covering the war in Sudan. And I went to check it on the library, and at the time I said, oh no, they'd sold it already. It didn't even get on their shelf. They just immediately put it into, it was donated to them. Local author, couldn't even get my book in Pound's library even after giving it to them. They just sold it and won their Saturday sales to make space for Biko, Mandela, Marx, Bursak, Tutu, what have else, Mugabe. I mean, who needs these relevant books? Let's bring in the Marxist propaganda. Any other comments, observations? Justin. all the time and the Google Docs, what do you say? Well, you can still get gems there because some of them may not get as much traffic or catch the headlights, but the internet's so huge, it's hard for them to clamp down everything simultaneously. And so there's a lot of gems, but when you find something valuable, download it. Because don't depend that you can always go back to the site and it's gonna exist there.