One late afternoon at my grandma’s house, none of my cousins were there to play with and there was nothing else to do. So, I picked up a child’s bible story book and began to read. By the end of the day I had read every story in that book. “What an accomplishment!” I thought. Oh, how quickly life goes from bored beyond belief to enthralled with exalting emotion when you’re a child!
I still had a lot to learn in that stage of my life. Reading the bible is not something I needed to approach as a last resort to agonizing boredom or as a pat on my back.
My previous blog post “Finding Peace & Healing in His Word” discusses my theory about the correlation between Americans’ limited bible reading and society’s increasing anxiety. While studying and writing that post, I felt a call to read through the whole Bible in 2020.
How can we as Christians encourage others with the Word if we ourselves have not read it all? Is His word our go-to when we are lost? Are we continually reading to test our faith?
This is not to shame us, but to examine ourselves. We are called to examine ourselves in line with scripture. We know this if we are consistently in scripture.
“Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you-unless, of course, you fail the test?” (2 Corinthians 13:5)
“To examine yourself, in fact, is to submit to the examination and scrutiny of Jesus Christ the Lord – and this never to fix attention on sin but on Christ – and to ask Him to reveal that in you which grieves His Spirit; to ask Him to give you grace that it might be put away and cleansed in His precious blood.” Self examination “takes the chill away from your soul, it takes the hardness away from your heart, it takes the shadows away from your life, it sets the prisoner free.” (Redpath)
Here’s how my challenge is going thus far.
I’m barely on day three. I am filled with joy, because I am starting to look forward to my reading. I desire to approach my daily reading as if I’m having a coffee with a friend and getting to know each other better.
I’m going in Chronological order which is not in the order the bible is laid out. It starts in Genesis but then flips to the book of Job which took place in the same time period as some of the stories in Genesis. I chose this simply to understand the timeline the bible follows. You can always choose what works for you!
Each day of reading has looked different on the outside. The first day I read in the afternoon after getting home from Ruidoso surrounded by loads of laundry. The second day, I read outside at the hunting lease surrounded by nature. Today I read 30 minutes before work while making coffee.
Note: we don’t always do the same things with our friends so we don’t have to do the same thing when it comes to our daily bible reading!
I challenge anyone reading this to join me this year in reading the whole bible. Let’s keep each other accountable. Leave a comment here or message me on instagram to join me!
God bless
Love brits
Britney Froese 