Trying A New Bible Reading System

One of the things I am most passionate about is the need to spend time with God on a daily basis. I’ve compiled tips to help you be more consistent.  I’ve shared my “Gold Nugget” method of Bible study. And I’ve recently made available a PDF booklet that helps you to read through the entire Bible in a year, in a variety of different ways. Subscribe via email, and it’s yours for free.

This is one of the most important aspects of my life, and since I know it’s value, I can’t help but speak about it often.

This year, however, I’m stepping up the intensity a notch, at least for me personally.

I’ve decided to try Professor Grant Horner’s Bible Reading System. The goal is to read ten chapters a day, totaling 3660 chapters of the Bible throughout 2012.

It’s a bit audacious, I know.

I first heard about this method of Bible reading over at TimChallies.com. But I’ve tweaked it a bit to suit my own tastes.

Here’s the basic idea:

This method breaks the Bible up into ten different lists. The goal is to read one chapter each day from each list. Once you finish a list, you start that list again from the beginning. Since each list varies in length, you’ll be starting over each list at different times, resulting in rarely reading the same chapters together again. I like this approach because it allows me to connect parts of the Bible together that I normally wouldn’t.

Here are the lists, and their lengths:

• The Gospels (89 chapters)
• The Pentateuch (187 chapters)
• Large Epistles (49 chapters)
• Smaller Epistles (65 chapters)
• OT Poetry (62 chapters)
• Psalms (150 chapters)
• Proverbs (31 chapters)
• OT History (249 chapters)
• OT Prophets (250 chapters)
• NT Church – Acts, Romans, Hebrews (57 chapters)

Originally, Acts was in it’s own list, and Romans and Hebrews were included with the larger epistles. I felt that these two letters should be read a little more often, so I added them to the list with Acts.

As you can see, some lists will take a while to read, such as the history and prophets lists. These will take most of the year, and allow me to read the first part of it again. But I will have the opportunity to read most of the epistles five or six time throughout the year. Psalms will be read twice, with parts of it getting a third examination, while Proverbs will be read twelve times itself.

And on Day 32, I will be starting Proverbs over again, while continuing on with the other lists.

I’m pretty excited about this system. I’ve been using it since 2012 started, 18 days so far, and I am really liking it.

I keep a small Field Notes journal handy while I’m reading, to record my thoughts, but I haven’t really used it much. Right now, I’m more interested in simply letting the Word soak into my mind.

With 1189 chapters in the Bible, my goal of 3660 chapters this year allows me to expose myself extensively to God’s Word. Like I said, I’m pretty excited about that.

One of my biggest questions about using this system was the question of time. But after almost three weeks, I’ve noticed that I can accomplish reading ten chapters in just over 30 minutes. I read fast. If you read slower, you might consider breaking the list in half, reading five chapters in the morning and the other five in the evening. I decided against doing this because I am in the process of moving my devotion times from the evening to the mornings. I hope that starting my day with God’s Word, rather than ending it that way, will help me become more intentional with everything in my day.

In researching this system before I stated it, I stumbled across some bookmarks that you can use. You can get these bookmarks here. But since I revised some of my lists, I had to recreate the bookmarks to reflect that. Here’s an example of my bookmarks. Feel free to download this and use it for yourself. This image is in green. But I also created red, blue and pink as well.

This is a pretty large goal for me in 2012. I normally read through the Bible once every year, and read a few bits and pieces more often. In 2011, I read most of the Bible twice. This year is a considerable jump.

But I’m excited and optimistic. I’m looking forward to seeing what God has in store for my life through this process. I know it will be incredible!

What is your process for reading the Bible consistently? You can leave your thoughts in the comments section below.