Bible Reading Plan

I’m convinced most of us don’t read our Bibles. I think we believe the Bible is God’s Word, I think we believe the Bible is our authority, I think we believe our lives are better when we read the Bible, but I don’t think we really read it. I think it just sits there.

Am I wrong? Man, I hope I’m wrong.

Let’s say you are reading your Bible. Everybody’s reading the Bible.

I’m reading the Bible every day. I’ve got this plan.
I read the whole Bible every year, front to back. I follow this program.

Most of us can read the Bible. It’s not that hard. If you don’t have a Bible and you can’t afford to buy one, you can get a free one at any hotel or hospital. I can’t speak for the Gideons as an organization, but I don’t think they care–just take it! Also, anybody at any church will happily give you a Bible.

It’s not that we don’t own Bibles. It’s not even that we don’t read our Bibles. It’s not that we don’t believe the Bible is the holy Word of God–we do! The problem is that we don’t read the Bible formatively. We don’t read the Bible in order to live. We mostly read it for information instead of transformation.

We are surrounded by words. Our society is drenched in words. We are word-saturated. But most of the words we read morning, noon, and night have no impact on our lives. They don’t change anything. Grocery lists, newspapers, energy prices, text books, Facebook and Twitter, novels and magazines, owners manuals, menus and billboards and the continual crawl at the bottom of the screen–we’re constantly reading. But whether it’s a Texas meme or a Washington tweet or a story about a kidnapping in Wyoming, it doesn’t really change our day-to-day lives.

There’s a temptation to read the Bible the same way you read an email from work. Especially when you download the Bible onto your phone, there’s a real danger to read the Bible like you read the internet. We read it for information, to gain knowledge. We read it for entertainment, to laugh or to kill time. We read it for inspiration, to find something to get me through a tough spot or encourage me to achieve my goals. We read it out of desperation, when we’ve got nowhere else to turn. Or we read it out of determination, to check that box on my Christian disciplines or New Year’s resolution list. We can’t read the Bible the same way we read a cookbook or a James Patterson novel. It’s different.

What if, in 2025, instead of reading the whole Bible from Genesis through Revelation, you hunkered down in ten core passages? What if you identified ten foundational Scriptures that speak to the most important things: the nature of our God, his mission, your holy purpose, God’s grace, Christ’s love, the Holy Spirit’s power, the ways we should treat each other and think about the world. What if you camped out on those ten passages for the whole year and really got them inside your soul? Memorize them, meditate on them, pray them, journal them, recite them out loud. Instead of every word of the Bible rushing by you this year, what if you dug down deep into ten core passages until they became a part of you?

What would those ten passages be? How would you identify them? How might our God change you this year if you committed to this very different way of engaging his Word?

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IF Texas commits zero turnovers…

IF the Longhorns commit fewer than six penalties…

IF Texas scores first…

IF Wisner and Blue combine for 130+ yards rushing…

IF the ‘Horns defense holds Jeremiah Smith to under 110 yards receiving…

THEN Texas will beat Ohio State tonight and advance to the national championship game.

I really believe all five of those things must happen if the Longhorns are going to hang with the Buckeyes tonight. If even one of those five things doesn’t happen, they’re toast. That means not one single fumble or interception, and no turning the ball over on downs, going for it on fourth down and not making it–that counts as a turnover. It means Quinn Ewers can’t throw the ball 35 times; Texas must control things in the trenches with the run. That means the ‘Horns must play a perfect game, the best and most complete game from start to finish they’ve played all season.

Hook ‘Em!

Allan