MatthewMaynard.net

God. Bless. America.

Our pastor is out on vacation, and his son-in-law was filling in for him yesterday. The main thrust of his sermon was to get deeper into the word during the summer, to lay aside selfishness, and to come closer to God. He strongly encouraged the church to read and meditate on the Bible, and by meditate, I don’t mean Buddhist-like meditation. He encouraged us to do word studies, among other things.

One thing I’ve never done is read the entire Bible, straight through. I’ve read just about all of it, piecemeal, but I’ve never sat down and checked off each and every chapter and verse. It’s not that its all that hard, I’ve just been lazy. So I made it my goal to finish the whole thing by the end of the summer. You can too.

“But its too much, I’ll never get through it in just 3 months!” you say. Awww, poor baby. Call the wah-mbulance.

Its remarkably easy. There are 748 chapters in the Old Testament, not counting Psalms & Proverbs. There are 260 in the New Testament. There are 92 days in June, July, and August. That works out to a mere 8.1 chapters per day from the Old Testament, 2.8 from the New Testament, and if you read five psalms and one chapter of Proverbs each day, you’ll have finished both testaments in 3 months and Psalms & Proverbs three times. In a year you’ll have done it four times. And you can stretch it out throughout the day – once at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 17 chapters per day, and most of them are short.

The hardest part is making yourself find the time. But I can’t help you there.

Of course, getting through the Bible by means of brute-force is not enough, you have to apply it to your life, which means you have to understand it. For that, like Tyler yesterday, I recommend word studies. And reading really, really slowly. Look up the words you don’t know, and even those you do. It’ll do you a world of good.