A Week and a Day

Over the past seventeen years or so, I have read through the entire Bible twelve or thirteen times and the New Testament about 15 or 16 times. I have followed a plan that I found in a long forgotten book. I started at Genesis, Job and Matthew and read a chapter or two a day out of the Old Testament books and one a day out of the New Testament ones. When I finished one section I went back and started again.

So I ended up reading a lot of different books together over the years.

Over the years this has served me well. I began to see how the Bible is a whole, how the Old Testament ties into the New Testament, how much prophecy there is, how God uses really flawed people.

For the most part I have not been dogmatic about reading every day and have long stretches where I have not been very faithful at daily reading.

Recently, we started going to a church where they have developed a plan to take the whole church through the Bible in a year. It is called OWNit365 and can be found at OWNit365.com.

This plan starts at Genesis and Job and you read a couple of chapters a day. You get to take Sunday off or use it as a catch up day. You are reading from the Old Testament and from either the Wisdom books (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, etc) or the New Testament each day.

The sermons are based on readings for the week, the Sunday school lessons are based on the readings for the week, small group curriculum is based on the readings. There are tip sheets and pod casts and there a tremendous amount of work has gone into the program.

So Loralie and I have decided to do the program.

I have been at it for a week and a day. Started on 1 January.

What I have found so far: I love this plan.

I am taking more notes on each days reading and going deeper into each passage than I have at other times. I am learning more. And I am praying more.

Those are good things by the way.

But I have had to add in a chapter from the New Testament each day. I ended last year at Colossians 3 so I started this year reading from Colossians 4 along with the daily readings from the plan. I just couldn't abandon what I have been doing for the past seventeen or so years. I'll modify my reading so that I can stay on track with the plan as we go through this.

It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out through the year. The idea of taking a whole (semi-large) church through the Bible in year is pretty incredible.

There are several thousand people from around the world taking part in this. I will be interested in seeing how many are in this at the end of the year.

By the way, as I was talking with Loralie this morning, I told her: "I have to go get my Bible reading done for the day so i don't have to read the Bible on the Sabbath"

Gotta admit: that sounded a bit strange even to me...