About 12 years ago, God pressed on my heart the discipline of a daily time studying his word and praying and I have developed an appetite for my 5 am-6 am time with Him. This year on June 20th, I finished a devotional study I had been working through each morning and I had nothing else planned out for my favorite hour of the day.
But on a whim, I decided to set my watch timer to 30 minutes and start reading at Genesis 1. Since then, I have not read every single day, but most days I have done the same thing. It is September 13 and I have read through the entire Old Testament and am on track to finish the entire Bible before the end of October.
Just to clarify, I am not a fast reader. As a matter of fact I am an “every word/proof-reader” type of reader. And to further clarify, I am not writing this blog to boast in my bible reading plan. After all, I am a pastor, and who doesn’t expect that a pastor is spending time praying and reading the Bible. But I am writing this to commend this exercise to anyone who is looking to read through the entire Bible at a good clip.
For some reason a stygma has developed around Scripture that makes people think that they cannot read it like they would read any other book. You can’t just pick it up and go for it. You need to pause over each word, or read at most a a few chapter lest you disrespect it by going too fast over the sacred script. But over the years I have discovered that varying my pace of study has been super helpful. Reading larger chunks gives an overview in a way that reading a paragraph or even just a chapter cannot provide.
Taking in the sweep of the epic accounts in Genesis in just a couple of days of reading is very different than reading it a couple chapters at a time over a month. I commend this plan to anyone who wants to become familiar with scripture or who has never read through the entire Bible.
3o minutes a day is not a lot of time. And for me, it has been very helpful to refresh the overview of Scripture in my mind. Let me know of you plan to give the “30 minutes a day” a shot. I’d love to hear how it works for you.
