Choosing a Bible Reading Method
The Bible is God’s Word to us. According to 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.”
Let’s be honest. With 66 different books, written by different authors in different time periods, made up of poems, history, prophesy and proverbs, the Bible can be a little daunting to read. We need to read it, study it, ingest it and apply it to our lives, but where do we start?
There are many different approaches to reading the Bible. Just navigating all the reading plans can be as intimidating as deciding where to start! I’ve tried quite a few over the years and I enjoy many of them.
I find that it’s not an issue of which Bible reading plan is “better” than another. It’s more about where you’re at in your relationship with God at the moment and what you need the most at that time.
Maybe one year you read through the whole Bible. At another time, you could just focus on one book per month. Try different methods and see what is the most beneficial to you. The point is to draw closer to God by learning more about His character and how He has designed us to live.
The first thing to decide is how much of the Bible you want to read in how much time.
Read the Bible in a Year
One popular method of Bible reading is to read the whole book cover to cover in one year. The Bible has 1189 chapters, so if you read four chapters a day, six days a week (leaving one day a week to catch up), you will read it all in one year.
Pros
One positive aspect to this approach is that it gives you a big picture view of the Scriptures. Many times, if we aren’t committed to reading through the entire Bible, we’ll focus mainly on the “easier” parts, such as the Psalms, Proverbs and the New Testament. We tend to shy away from books like Leviticus, Song of Solomon, and the prophets. As Christians who seek to live by the Bible, we really should have read through the entire thing at least once. Reading it in a year is a doable way to do that.
Cons
There are a couple things that can make this time frame tricky. First, depending on your season of life, four chapters a day might feel like a little much. It’s easy to start on track for a while but then get bogged down and behind. This can especially happen as life gets busy and you end up in sections of the Bible that are harder to understand.
Also, it can be easy to slip into making our Bible reading into a task that needs to be checked off. Any method can move into the category of “chore” rather than life-giving time with our Creator. Four chapters a day make it harder to go into much depth, so it can easily become a work that we’re doing for the sake of saying we’ve done it. So if you choose this method, I encourage you to guard against that. Pray before you read and ask God to speak to you. Even through Leviticus and Numbers.
Here’s a link to some downloadable Bible in a year options.
One Book per Month
A slower, more in depth time frame is to read and study one book in a month. You would read through the book multiple times during the month and perhaps memorize parts of it. Many do this with a New Testament book, but you could do it with an Old Testament book also. Shorter books tend to lend themselves more to this approach. Some read the entire book in one sitting every day, or a given section (i.e. Romans 1-7) every day. You could theoretically read as much or as little of the book each day as your time allows.
Pros
The advantage here is that you get a much more in depth understanding of a book when you focus on it every day for a month. You could combine this with Bible journaling where you illustrated various passages as a way of meditating on them.
Cons
The downside is that you’re not getting a broad spectrum of Scripture. Also, for those who thrive on variety, it may be challenging to stay in just one book for a whole month.
New Testament in a Month or a Year
The New Testament has 260 chapters, so you could opt for a slower pace and read that in a year at less than a chapter per day. Some also read the entire New Testament in a month, but that requires 9 chapters a day, 7 days a week – a much larger time commitment.
Your Own Pace
Another option is to simply read at your own pace. You might get through several chapters one day or just a few verses. The nice thing about doing it this way is that it allows for the flexibility of busier days versus calmer days. The downside is that if we’re not committed to reading a certain amount per day, we can tend to move very slowly through books that are more difficult.
Once you’ve figured out how much you want to read a day, where do you start?
In Order
You can always start with Genesis and read through to Revelation. (Or Matthew, if you’re just reading the New Testament.) It’s a good, no nonsense approach.
Chronological Order
Many of the books of the Bible weren’t written in the order they appear. For example, many of the Psalms were written by David as he was going through the experiences found in the Old Testament history books, and Paul wrote most of his epistles while traveling the journeys outlined in Acts. Reading chronologically can be a neat way to see how everything fits together in the Bible.
Here’s a pdf of a chronological reading plan.
Horner System
This is a group of ten lists, some in the Old Testament and some from the New. The idea is that you read one chapter from each list a day. So you might read one chapter from Genesis, one from Psalms, one from Isaiah, one from Matthew, etc. It’s a nice way to satisfy the desire for variety, but it can feel like you lack any sort of continuity. When I’ve used this method, I’ve sometimes felt like I lost track of the flow of each book because there’s so much jumping around. You can modify this idea and read several chapters from an Old Testament book, some Psalms and some New Testament. That gives variety and a broader scope of Scripture while still maintaining the flow of each book.
Whatever you decide works best for your current season of life, try to see it through to the end. All Scripture is God breathed, so ask God to show you how to apply it to your life. Even if the culture it was originally written in was completely foreign to us, we can still see more of who God is and how He interacts with His people. We can take the principles that are taught and apply them to life in the 21st century. Enjoy your journey reading God’s Word!
What Bible reading methods have you most enjoyed?