So when you’re reading Hosea, you can take a quick look and see that Hosea was prophesying to Israel before the Assyrian Exile. It’s one piece of paper that I keep in my Bible at all times–a quick explanation of how everything in the Old Testament connects to everything else.
And when you print it, do yourself a favor and print out my Bible timeline, too. If you print this schedule double-sided, you can fold it up to fit in your Bible. So if you’ve never read the Bible before at all, you could take two days for each day on the schedule or start with just the Psalms and the Gospels. My approach here wasn’t to leave the hard stuff for the end but to put it in an order that made sense. I can ease you into the Bible by giving (relatively) simple, pleasant stuff first. I will warn you: I didn’t start with the easy stuff. This schedule is more user-friendly, more reasonable for those who haven’t read the Bible before, and can start any day of the year. It also gives you a chapter of some poetic stuff every day instead of dragging you through Proverbs for 200+ days. This one still gets you through the whole Bible in a year (and the Gospels twice), but it goes chronologically through the Old Testament (more or less) with New Testament books and fun books like Ruth and Jonah interspersed throughout to mix things up. So I sat down and wrote out a whole new schedule. I began to realize that zipping through all of the Epistles in a month and then trudging through the Pentateuch wasn’t the best way to get much out of either.
#BIBLE IN A YEAR HOW TO#
I’ve used that schedule 1 ten times and it’s served me well, particularly since it’s loosely linked with the liturgical year.īut people have been asking me for years how to start reading the Bible, and my trusty old schedule wasn’t it.
#BIBLE IN A YEAR PLUS#
Plus the readings were associated with dates, so I couldn’t afford to get behind.
When I switched to a yearly Bible schedule, I had a few chapters of Numbers each day but also a Psalm and half a chapter of a Gospel to keep me motivated. The problem with my cover-to-cover approach (among others) was that I’d get bogged down in Leviticus or Ezekiel and it was hard to motivate myself to keep going. Every subsequent time, I’ve managed it in a year. The first time I read through the whole Bible, I started at Genesis and read till Revelation. The only way that’s going to happen is if I’m in the Word every day. I need to replace the Beyoncé in my head with some Baruch and the Frozen (much though I love that movie) with Philippians. And I need to know it all–not just so I can argue with it but so that I can live and breathe and love it. For me, it’s not enough just to read the books that I enjoy or the readings offered me by the liturgy–I need to wrestle with the hard stuff and find meaning in the boring stuff. I’m always finding new insights, being shown new connections, and falling more in love with the Lord as I come to know him better. Even having read the Bible 12 times, I still have to read with a pencil in hand. Aside from daily Mass and a commitment to silent prayer, the most important spiritual practice I’ve adopted as a Christian has been spending time in Scripture every day.
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