Here’s another approach, as Pastor Andy Perry explains:
Each method we’ve promoted has had its advantages and we would still commend their use.
At the same time, plans like those named above frequently cause discouragement as our New Year’s Bible reading resolutions give way to the unexpected X-factors of life which seem to encroach with a vengeance after a few weeks or months. I don’t know about you, but I can’t seem to find a command in the Bible giving special importance to reading all 66 books of the Bible in a year’s time. Furthermore, as we’ve discussed in recent weeks, trying to speed through a book like Proverbs could be positively harmful since its poetry was designed to be read slowly and thoughtfully.
Therefore, let me suggest a new kind of reading plan for 2010, one that writer Margie Haack calls ‘The Bible Reading Plan for Slackers and Shirkers’ (I love that title!). Advantages to this plan include:
- Removing the pressure to ‘keep up’ with getting through the entire Bible in a year.
- Providing variety throughout the week by alternating genres.
- Providing continuity by reading the same genre each day of the week.
In a nutshell, here’s how it works:
- Sundays: Poetry
- Mondays: Penteteuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy)
- Tuesdays: Old Testament history
- Wednesdays: Old Testament history
- Thursdays: Old Testament prophets
- Fridays: New Testament history
- Saturdays: New Testament epistles (letters)
The advantage of this plan is that it provides guidance as we read each day but does not put us on an internal guilt trip if we miss a day – we just pick up with the next reading on the day it happens to be. Also, this plan allows us to see the many interconnections between sections of Scripture. So, as Margie puts it, on the same day you may be reading about God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis and a few days later read Paul’s commentary on the Abrahamic covenant in Romans.
Many Bible reading plans are good, but I find this one unusually helpful, for it combines two biblical values which seem to diverge in most plans: discipline and grace.
You can download the plan from Ransom Fellowship.
HT: Mike Miesen
