Bible reading plan, anyone?

  • Jan 11, 2010

Our friend Ken Warwick sent us these links, compiled by blogger Justin Taylor and the Gospel Coalition. If you're still looking for just the right Bible reading plan for the year, one of these may be a good fit.

Crossway makes available 10 Bible reading plans, and allows you to access them in a number of ways.

ESV Study Bible (The ESV Literary Study Bible contains the same plan)

With this plan there are four readings each day, divided into four main sections:

  • Psalms and Wisdom Literature
  • Pentateuch and the History of Israel
  • Chronicles and Prophets
  • Gospels and Epistles

This plan is designed to be cut into four bookmarks.

M’Cheyne One-Year Reading Plan

With this plan you read through:

  • The NT twice
  • The Psalms twice
  • The rest of the OT once

The Discipleship Journal Reading Plan

With this plan you read through the entire Bible once and there are “catch-up” days:

  • To prevent the frustration of falling behind, which most of us tend to do when following a Bible reading plan, each month of this plan gives you only 25 readings. Since you’ll have several “free days” each month, you can set aside Sunday to either not read at all or to catch up on any readings you may have missed in the past week.
  • If you finish the month’s readings by the twenty-fifth, you can use the final days of the month to study passages that challenged or intrigued you.

The Journey Engage Scripture Reading Plan

The Journey, an Acts 29 church in St. Louis pastored by Darrin Patrick, is doing a church-wide reading plan this year.

This plan has you read whole chapters (a feature I like):

  • One New Testament chapter
  • Two Old Testament chapters

The Bible Reading Plan for Slackers and Shirkers

Advantages to this plan include:

  1. Removing the pressure to ‘keep up’ with getting through the entire Bible in a year.
  2. Providing variety throughout the week by alternating genres.
  3. Providing continuity by reading the same genre each day of the week.

The advantage of this plan is that it provides guidance as we read each day but does not put us on an internal guilt trip if we miss a day. We just pick up with the next reading. Also, this plan allows us to see the many interconnections between sections of Scripture.

Many Bible reading plans are good, but I find this one unusually helpful, since it combines two biblical values that seem to diverge in most plans: discipline and grace.

How about Bible listening plans (download and listen)?

Go to the ESV Reading Plans page.

  1. Right-click the “RSS” link of the feed you want.
  2. Choose “Copy Link Location” or “Copy Shortcut.”
  3. Start iTunes.
  4. Choose Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast
  5. Paste the URL from step three into the box.
  6. Click OK.

J. I. Packer made the comment that it was not until after the 17th century (as far as he could tell) that people started doing silent prayers and reading as opposed to praying and reading out loud.

For most evangelicals, silence represents the vast majority of our reading and praying. But I wonder if that’s to our detriment. One of the great enemies to Bible reading and praying is a wandering mind—and one of the great ways to make your mind wander is to do everything in your mind without involving your voice and ears!

. . . Here’s something else to consider: the entire Bible on audio is usually about 75 hours (or 4500 minutes). If you commute to work 5 days a week, that’s about 260 days a year. And if it takes you, say, 17 minutes to commute each way to work—and if you listen to the Bible on audio during your drive each way—you’ll get through the entire Bible twice in a year.