It’s your friendly author of Christian books on Studying the Bible and some thoughtful devotionals. I love writing about God’s word, but today I want to talk about reading it.
I just finished reading through the Bible for the year. Revelation 21 was the last chapter that I finished a few moments ago.
This is the second consecutive year that I’ve read completely through the Bible in a year. And the 27th month of committing to daily Bible reading. To my shame I have to admit that it has been multiple decades before that since I had been so diligent at reading God’s Word.
I’m far from perfect at this – I tend to be best at reading during the week and struggle on the weekends (needing to make it up during the week).
I have to admit that the One Year Bible has made it pretty easy for me to do that.
In the past I’ve done the traditional One Year Bible – which offers a mix of Old Testament, New Testament and Psalms/Proverbs every day. That’s good.
But this year I tried the Chronological version. And that really blew my socks off!
- For one, the book offered a rationale for every chronology decision. And it was amazing to me to see how the publishers made all the decisions for when a given passage should be placed along the chronological timeline.
- It really brought the history sections of the Bible to life. The books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles (2 books each) are a long flow of story-telling. With the chronological version, they all got stitched together into one nice story – cutting out all the jumping around.
- I really thought that reading the Gospels as one continuous Life of Christ really made a lot of sense. It really gives the fullest picture of what happened with Jesus during those three years.
- It broke up the looooong section of the prophets. In the traditional sequence, it’s a long run of prophesy books from Isaiah to Malachi. For me they are harder to read because of the format of the prophetic messages. Putting them along side the contemporary histories helped give them context.
- I never really understood how much of the Old Testament was written after the Exile. It’s normal to think that when Judah was conquered by Babylon, that was kind of the end of things. But no! There are a lot of books in the Old Testament that follow that event. I really learned how much God worked with His people even after they went through punishment.
Needless to say, I’ll be doing the same thing again next year. In fact I want to use the same bible that I read last year in the new year. Since it is based on calendar dates (not day of the week), it is timeless.
I guess it’s a bonus that on Leap Day next year I’ll have a day off :).
I put together a page on my website that explains all about these One Year Bibles.
This is my number 1 discipleship recommendation. Read your Bible. Plain and simple, that one discipline can make a HUGE difference in your spiritual life. So if you don’t have that as something you are planning to do next year, I suggest you look at the page on my site and see if you can’t find a version that will work for you.
I checked on Amazon and the price is pretty reasonable for a year of Spiritual Impact (less than $20).
I’ll be back with you in the new year. There’s a lot to say, and I want to be much more regular than I have of late.
Here’s to 2024 being a year of significant spiritual growth!
Dennis
