The World’s Best Bible-Reading Program?

Back in October last year, I stumbled across a blog post by Dan Edelen claiming to be “The World’s Best Bible-Reading Program”.

Over the years I’ve used a number of programs, lectionaries and schedules for my devotions.  Most of them have the goal of reading through the whole Bible within a set time frame, usually somewhere between a year and three years.  I consider that after 20-odd years of Bible reading I’ve got a pretty good idea of the contents of the whole Bible.

What differs with this concept is that it's more based on meditating more deeply on each book within the Bible, immersing your spirit in it, without any time based goals attached to it.  To borrow the clique, it’s not about how much you get through the Bible, it’s about how much of the Bible gets into you.

I thought I’d give it a go.  So I’ve been immersing myself in the book of Matthew since October.  That’s 5 months on one book, 28 chapters.  (I’ll share my reflections of what I’ve learned reading Matthew in another post.)  I’ve found it quite a different experience focussing intensely on one book.  I’ve picked up themes and repetitions the author has used for emphasis that I hadn’t noticed before.  I found it helped to use a variety of translations on my different journeys through the book.

The biggest challenge has been step 9: “Take everything you’ve learned in this book and put it into practice.”  As you’ll find in my following post, there’s some stuff that I’m still working on applying.  I’ll keep working on them while I start on Mark.  I’ll probably have to keep working on them the rest of my life.

So here’s the link to this “Program”.  Go ahead and give it a go, then I’d appreciate you popping back in a couple of months and telling me what you thought of it.