Do You Know the Bible?

Most of us don’t.  At least, not well.  The best method of getting to know your Bible, as simplistic as it sounds, is to read it!

Now, I don’t just mean reading from it — ‘though that’s good.  I mean reading through it.  Not necessarily all in order, but all of it.  You might be surprised at how few Christians have ever read the whole Bible.

How Do You Read the Whole Bible?

There’s a saying: “How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.”

Well, it’s kind of the same thing here.  You’re probably not going to sit down and read the Bible cover-to-cover in just a day or two (or even a week).  Especially if, like me, you’re a busy mom who gets interrupted about 5,294,210 times a day!  But you can read a little bit at a time, and those little bits add up.  You need a plan, though, so you can keep track of what you have or haven’t read.

For me, that can’t be a rigid “read these x chapters on January 6th” kind of thing, because I inevitably miss a day and then I’m behind and then I’m stressed.  That is not what we want.  (Stressed, I mean.  If a super-specific plan like this works for you, go for it!)

So I have an adaptation of Professor Horner’s method.

The Adaptation

I have the Bible “chunked” into seven different selections, one for each day of the week.  These sections are intentionally all different lengths – that way every time I read through, different passages are parallelling each other.  (Be sure to read Professor Horner’s write-up for more about this.  I thought it was really good, which is why I do it this way.)

Each day I read from whatever is that day’s section — whatever is next.  I have an average number of chapters I read — 3 (I can’t do 10/day as he suggests at this season of my life) — but I can read more if a given day allows for it, or less if I absolutely have to.

And I have every chapter on a grid, so I can just mark which chapters I read and know exactly what I have or haven’t covered.

Actually I have “bookmarks” for each day, that I adapted from an overall grid of chapters, so the chapters for each day’s portion are on their own slip.  This is really handy, because I can just put the bookmark for a given day of the week in the page of my Bible that marks the next chapter in that reading portion, and it keeps them all marked.

Get my Bible reading bookmarks

What About Bible Study?

Do note that this process is not “study”; it’s just reading.  The point is not to “dig in,” so much as to familiarize yourself with the whole of Scripture.

I think I’ve read through completely two, maybe three times, and I know the Bible so much better than before I started!  This is not all there is to Bible reading/study, and I don’t mean to imply that it is, but there’s definitely something to be said for having a good idea of where to find things in the Bible, knowing the gist of various sections, having an idea of things that are in more “obscure” parts of Scripture, etc.

And reading through like this will renew your mind and help shape your worldview to be more like God’s.

For more about quiet times, check out my Kindle book, Quiet Time Basics: How to Have a Quiet Time with God When You Don’t Know Where to Start.  (If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download the free Kindle reader.)