Friday, December 30, 2011

Plan to Read the Bible in 2012

You will, Lord willing, do many things in 2012. But only one thing is necessary.

If you really believe one thing is necessary, if you really believe that man cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, then why would you not PLAN to do in 2012 that most necessary thing?
"But I don't know where to start."
How about looking here? If you can't find a plan to suit you among those options, you may want to consider creating your own!
"But I'm not much of a reader."
Well, I'm not much of an exerciser, but I need to do it. And you need to feed on the Word more than I (or you) need to exercise!
"But I don't have time."
Really? You don't have time to feed your soul? Will you have time to eat in 2012? Or will you be too busy? Do you know how much Bible food you can eat in 2012 in just 15 minutes a day? You're probably not going to believe this math when you read it. So, first, double check it. Then, after you see for yourself, why don't you go and really see for yourself over the course of 2012?!

Let's say that you are a pretty slow reader. You read, on average, about 200 words per minute. Just for the sake of reference (and to anticipate the objections), 200 words per minute is not very fast. It's just a hair slower than an average read-aloud speed. Reading at 300-350 words a minute is not abnormal for your average caffeinated adult.

If you read the Bible 15 minutes a day for just 300 days out of the year (missing 65 days!), at 200 words per minute, that amounts to 900,000 words read in one year. The total word count of the Bible varies from translation to translation, but most translations come in under 900,000 words. The ESV, for instance, is just a bit over 800,000 words. Theoretically, you could read the entire Bible in 2012 if you were able to give 15 good minutes a day to it!

The question is, "Do you want to?"

1 comment:

  1. Pastor McGarvey, it was a pleasure to meet you last Sunday. I must say I regret that our meeting was as brief as it was.

    My thoughts on this post: I guess what I have trouble with is not so much in reading itself. I've always been a pretty ravenous reader, and I rarely seem to have problems with intellectual comprehension of what I read in the scripture. My difficulties usually arise when it comes to really gaining spiritual understanding beyond basic head knowledge. I tend to read the Scripture like a textbook, rather than what it is, which is a letter from God to us. Thus, my understanding of the word of God often becomes quite cold and abstract, and at the same time I have this really bad tendency to think that brains is equivalent to spiritual maturity. Needless to say, we're working on it ;).

    Do you think perhaps there is something of a symbiotic relationship that goes on between the disciplines of the reading of the Word and prayer? I've had this thought for a little while. It seems that the reading of the Word roots the discipline of our prayer in objective truth by shedding light on our spiritual experiences and giving us wisdom to understand our spiritual experience that is more solid than our feelings; And yet at the same time the discipline of prayer as part of our personal relationship with God, and particularly the pratice of turning the Word into prayer, keeps our comprehension of the scripture from being too abstractualized.


    Stand Fast,

    Andrew Romanowitz
    www.crossandresurrectionmusic.blogspot.com

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