Starting Off the New Year…

We are all familiar with making New Year’s resolutions. Like you, I am guilty of making – and subsequently breaking – a gajillion of these.

What I began today wasn’t a resolution per se…

I came across this on New Year’s Day. Hat tip to the ever-hilarious and very wonderful Missy.

The Bible in 90 Days is the very first thing I bought in 2010.

After looking it over, I decided it would be a helpful tool in accomplishing something I have always wanted to do: read the Bible through in it’s entirety, cover to cover. It seems almost shocking to me that I cannot at the ripe old age of 37 say I have ever done this. Oh sure, I have read my Bible. Portions of it so many hundreds of times I couldn’t begin to count. I have read whole chapters, whole huge segments of it in consecutive order, whole Testaments even at once, but have never quite accomplished what I think everyone has the privilege of doing: reading the entirety of Scripture as it was given by God to us. His whole book. Cover to cover. Genesis to Revelation. “In the beginning”…to…”The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen!”

We Christians today are so consumed with “Bible Study” – which is wonderful, I am not knocking it. But I do not feel that today’s church excels in a very basic aspect of the Christian walk: we do not, on the whole, train up our children, young people, or adults to actually pick up God’s word and just. read. it. I love what Charlotte Mason had to say on the subject of children and the Bible…

Let all the circumstances of the daily Bible reading–the consecutive reading, from the first chapter of Genesis onwards–be delightful to the child; let him be in his mother’s room, in his mother’s arms; let that quarter of an hour be one of sweet leisure and sober gladness, the child’s whole interest being allowed to go to the story without distracting moral considerations; and then, the less talk the better; the story will sink in, and bring its own teaching, a little now, and more every year as he is able to bear it.

Of course, we could all take the Bibles we already own, and segment the pages into 90 equally divided sections, but I was quite happy to spend my $14 on this nice, large-print edition!  I do not feel brave enough to even set a goal of doing this whole thing in 90 days…knowing me and my tendency toward initial exuberance and subsequent laziness, I would be ecstatic if I finished this in 6 months, let alone 90 days.

That said, I am going to do my ample best to complete my 12 pages a day in this before picking up other personal reading (children’s school reading excluded, of course!).  It is my hope that I will cherish the process, and that God will bless my feeble efforts to love and read His word more diligently.

I leave you with a simple yet profound thought from J.I. Packer:

God has spoken to man, and the Bible is His Word, given to us to make us wise unto salvation.”

4 Replies to “Starting Off the New Year…”

  1. You’ll be glad you did. It’s amazing how much becomes clear(er) when you’ve been reading through the whole thing (though my pace is not nearly so ambitious).

    Yay also on the reading-through-with-kids bit. Now that the girls are sharing a room — and Sarah is a bit older and has been through the Jesus Storybook Bible a million times — I’m reading with both of them, and it’s amazing how no matter where you are in the Bible, God’s truth manages to sneak out and grab hold.

  2. You are so right about this. We say we are Christians and we neglect the Word! We have enough hours in our day to do EVERYTHING WE WANT TO DO. There are reasons we don’t have wisdom. Large print sounds good to me!

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