When I first started trying to read the Bible, I would just flip randomly to some passage and flip to another one if the first one didn’t hold my interest. As a result of that experience, I now maintain that any Bible reading plan is better than no plan. (I do sometimes flip the Bible open and read what I’ve opened to, but it is not how I approach a scheduled time for reading the Bible.)
Here are some things I’ve learned about reading the Bible:
- A verse here and a verse there does not give context for what a passage is saying.
- God sometimes gives me insight into my own life or circumstances through a passage, but that does not mean that my insight is the correct theological interpretation of the passage.
- The length of time I spend reading should be based on how much I can read and still be attentive to what I’m reading. (The amount may vary; it’s easier to read narrative than theology.)
- The letters were written to be read in their entirety; for a short letter, try to do so. (Some people may be able to read Romans in one sitting and be attentive the whole time; I am not.)
- There are advantages to reading small sections and looking at the details; there are different advantages to looking at the big picture—mix it up.
Ideas for reading plans:
- If you are new to the Bible, Matthew is one good place to start. It’s a nice combo of teaching and narrative. I find it helpful to pay particular attention to how Jesus relates to others. I think it is worth seeing the difference between the way he relates to the Pharisees, who thought they were keeping the law, and the people who were repentant, knowing they did not keep the law. The Sermon on the Mount makes it pretty clear we should identify with those who cannot keep the law.
- Pick any book of the Bible and begin reading it through. I suggest a minimum of one chapter per day.
- Pick a book and spend an extended period of time with it. (I’d give credit where credit is due, but I can’t remember where I read about this.) This is about reading the same passage multiple times (in one sitting or over multiple days) until you experience really knowing the passage. (In the story I read, a man finished reading Ephesians and felt like God told him to read it again—multiple times—and at the end of it, the man said he felt like Ephesians had entered into him.) I first tried this with Philippians and ended up spending 3 months in that book. Loved doing it. I moved on when I felt like God was no longer showing me anything new in it. I mentioned in the Reading, Part 1 post that there was a Bible reading plan where I liked the approach of listening to what God might want to say to me. This is the one. I find that as I repeatedly read the same passage, God does seem to highlight different sections of it. When he does, I spend some extra time looking at that section and thinking about it.
- If you want to read the whole Bible and decide to just start at Genesis and read through, be warned. There are places where your reading will bog down. Exodus has detailed information on plans for the tabernacle and later the same detailed information on building it. (Saying, “Moses obeyed,” could have reduced Exodus by four chapters.) 1 Chronicles has genealogies of people not mentioned anywhere else. Numbers has stories that are interspersed with sections filled with, no surprise, numbers. Some choices:
- Read straight through, planning on skipping the parts that are of no interest to you
- Read from multiple places in the Bible at once so it’s unlikely that all of the reading on a given day might seem tedious. The down side of reading the Bible this way is that it breaks up the natural continuity of many of the books. On the other hand, I find reading to discover what the whole Bible teaches about a particular topic helps to provide a different sort of continuity—so I read topically when reading with this plan. If you would like a reading plan where the Bible is divided for you into daily readings, there are online plans that you can find, or you could just divide the Bible into segments and read one chapter a day from each segment. The Bible easily breaks into three chapters a day (a little over a year to read) if you begin reading starting at Genesis, Job, and Matthew. If you would like to finish in less than a year, the Bible also breaks easily into five chapters a day, starting to read in Genesis, Joshua, Job, Isaiah, and Matthew. These segments do not have the same number of chapters. For instance, if you are doing five chapters a day, you will end the books of the law before you reach the end of any other segments. You could then choose to reduce the number of chapters you read per day, or keep it at five chapters by reading two chapters from a longer segment.
So, what do you do when you finish a plan? I find that sometimes I know exactly what I want to do next and sometimes I have no clue. No reading plan is detrimental, so if I don’t know what to do next, I just choose something and start with that. If I later sense God leading me in a different direction, I can always stop what I’m doing and change plans.
You may also find that your reading leads you into wanting to study a particular passage more closely. The next post will be about studying the Bible.
NOTE: I had a friend who read this post ask me why I did not suggest the daily readings from one’s own church tradition as a reading plan. In truth, I had not thought of it, because I do not do it. Many churches do have daily scriptures. If yours does, it’s an option well worth considering.