There are times when I genuinely love reading the Bible. I read through the 90 day Bible once and was absolutely enthralled with it. If you're wondering or are inspired to do the same, it takes about 45-55 minutes of reading, at least if you're a slower reader like myself. That was such a good discipline to cultivate for me when I did it. It was back in the winter of 2010-2011 when I was in the middle of my round the world trip. I started doing it again this year but got hung up in the Old Testament which is likely to happen if you're a guy who loves the New Testament as much as I do.
A friend teased me when I said I had gotten hung up in the the Judges, Chronicles and Kings because they repeat the same stories three times. So I had started a 30 day Gospels plan and he was like, "Justin, those are the same stories only 4 times over!" It was a good point, but remember that I love the New Testament. You need all of Scripture to paint a more accurate picture of who God is though, so sometimes we just need to read the Old Testament just because it's good for us.
I go through stretches just like I assume everyone else does that I'll call dry patches for the sake of discussion. I'll be steadily reading for a month about and then I can go quite a while without reading any Scripture unless I'm hearing it on Sunday morning or on a podcast if I'm not careful. What do you do when you're in the midst of these dry patches.
Well, I'm going to share something with you that never fails for me. I do it every time I don't feel like reading the Word and it works every single time. Granted, it's not always right away or the next day, but pretty soon I'm caught up with the story of the Bible again. All I do, the 'magic' secret, is to pray about it. I pray for a hunger for God's Word again. Honestly that's all I know how to do at those points. Thankfully, it works every time.
The Bible is such a rich text. Some people like to look at it as an owner's manual or something like that. I simply like to think of it as God's story of how He came and rescued all mankind from their own sin. You see certain themes throughout the Scriptures. One of those is reconciliation.
2 Corinthians 5:18,19 states the following, "All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed us to the message of reconciliation." Now that's a beautiful picture if I've ever seen one! We would be wise to follow suit and not count people's sins against them.
If you've never read the Bible cover to cover, I would highly encourage you to do so. It takes quite a bit of discipline to be sure, but there are countless means of doing so with the most common being the year long Bible broken up differently by plans on YouVersion or in Bibles in the bookstores. It takes a lot of discipline to be sure, but I can't recommend it highly enough! As for me, I'm going to go read some of the Bible now!
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