At Crestview, our rhythm is to follow up our Week of Prayer with a sermon related to the importance of the intake of God’s Word. So, this coming Sunday, my sermon will encourage us to meditate on God’s Word. Somewhat related to this rhythm is new Sunday School classes kicking off. Tom Dixon will be leading the adult class on Theology Proper. We have new curriculum rolling out for students, as well.
Some other tools our body finds helpful are:
The Discipleship Journal Reading Plan
Do you want to read the whole Bible?
The average person reads 200 to 250 words per minute; there are about 775,000 words in the Bible; therefore it takes less than 10 minutes a day to read the whole Bible in a year.
(For those who like details, there’s a webpage devoted to how long it takes to read each book of the Bible. And if you want a simple handout that has every Bible book with a place to put a check next to every chapter, go to Don Whitney’s checklist.)
(Justin Taylor provides a post on reading the Bible each year, and he’s my source for the above information.)
I love using the ESV Daily Reading Bible.
You might need lots of grace to accomplish this, so maybe you could try to Bible Reading Plan for Shirkers and Slackers.
There are many Reading Plans Using the ESV.
I’ve distributed the Navigator’s Discipleship Journal Plan a lot.
People have also benefitted from the Bible Eater Plan.
In terms of a newer resource, J.R. Vassar’s Church At The Cross has a Bible Reading Plan that is sensitive to the church calendar (think Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost and Ordinary Times). They have daily reading bookmarks you can download.
Tolle Lege! Take up and read!
This Sunday, Lord willing, I hope to start a week by week journey through John’s Letters.
Here’s a great quote from Michael Reeves Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith:
“…when you see that Christ is the subject of all the Scriptures, that he is the Word, the Lord, the Son who reveals the Father, the promised Hope, the true Temple, the true Sacrifice, the great High Priest, the ultimate King, then you can read, not so much asking, “What does this mean for me, right now?” but “What do I learn here of Christ?” Knowing that the Bible is about him and not me means that, instead of reading the Bible obsessing about me, I can gaze on him. And as through the pages you get caught up in the wonder of his story, you find your heart strangely pounding for him in a way you never would have if you treated the Bible as a book about you.” (pp.82-83)
I so love this quote because in an effort to make the Bible apply (which isn’t necessarily wrong), we can miss out on what the Bible actually says (which would be wrong). Look to exalt the Son as you read God’s Word and find Him satisfyingly good.
Piper had a great post yesterday entitled Read Your Bible More and More. The post was very helpful in helping me see how intake of God’s Word is not legalism. But I loved these quotes from J.C. Ryle’s Practical Religion (p.136):
Do not think you are getting no good from the Bible, merely because you do not see that good day by day. The greatest effects are by no means those which make the most noise, and are most easily observed. The greatest effects are often silent, quiet, and hard to detect at the time they are being produced.
Think of the influence of the moon upon the earth, and of the air upon the human lungs. Remember how silently the dew falls, and how imperceptibly the grass grows. There may be far more doing than you think in your soul by your Bible-reading.
Today, go to God’s Word and be very much affected..
Another exciting development beginning this coming Sunday is the 2012 Scripture Memory emphasis. For the coming year, our Elders have chosen to use the Topical Memory System verses from NavPress. We’ve incorporated this into weekly breakdowns and, as always, we will use the ESV rendering of the verses. Click here to access the 2012 Scripture Memory Page.
…can be done in better and useful ways by taking some of these tips from this recent post from The Blazing Center: How To Listen To A Sermon. Among other things, they encourage us to:
Remember Who Is Speaking
Listen Intently
Listen With Humility
Listen With Application in View
I commend the entire post. Think: What is one thing you could do to improve your intake of the Word through sermons you listen to? Well, jump over and get the creative juices flowing.
Sixty-Six Clouds “brings the Bible, design and technology together in a fresh and beautiful way. All 66 books of the Bible have been individually imported into Wordle to create a unique word cloud for each one. Word clouds quickly present viewers with the gist of written materials at a glance. Print quality images are available for purchase and a video version of Sixty-Six Clouds has also been created. Please email hello@66clouds.com if you would like to inquire about posters or if you have any special requests. Thank you.”
We are going to feature some of these in our environment on the book of Hebrews soon. Check them out for more info, or watch this video:
Tim Challies’ latest post, recapping something he’d written earlier and how something he read influenced how he read the Scriptures.
Andy Naselli thinks so. In highlighting D. A. Carson’s introduction to the book Hearing God’s Word, written by Peter Adam, he quotes a section from Adam’s work in which the following question is asked: “What devices do we use to hear God’s Word today and yet avoid its intended impact?” The answer:
“We can best answer this in terms of different types of personality” (p. 171). (In the following quotation, Andy Naselli replaced bullet points with numbers [pp. 171–72]).
1. Emotional people can easily deflect the Word by turning the hearing of it into an emotional experience. This means that they can test the reality of the coming of the Word by means of testing its emotional impact, and then focus their response on that emotional experience. But once the emotion has passed, so has the Word.
2. Cerebral people can easily deflect the Word by turning the hearing of it into an intellectual exercise. They substitute understanding it for responding to it, fitting it into their theological grid so that it does not impact their lives.
3. Ministry people can easily deflect the Word by receiving it as a message to be passed on to others. They can always see the application to others, but not to themselves.
4. Practical people can easily deflect the impact of the Word of God by reducing it to something easy to understand and to do. They will have no time for anything not immediately relevant. They will reduce the Bible to a set of instructions for daily living, and develop a legalism that blunts the power of God’s Word.
5. Superficial people will pay as much attention to the words of the Bible as to anything, and so will never be able to receive the words that can change them.
6. Reactionary people are those who always want to contradict what anyone has asserted about anything. They too will find that their habit of life makes it very difficult for them to receive the Word of God and let it bear fruit in their lives.
The conclusion (from the book p.172):
People use a God-given strength, but for the wrong purpose. It is good to be emotional, cerebral, ministry-minded and practical. It can even be useful to know how to avoid being overwhelmed by ideas, or how to critique what we hear. But these strengths can be used to avoid the impact of God’s words, and then they become great weaknesses.
It must also be the case that, in Western society, the massive increase in busyness must have a deleterious effect on our having time to hear God’s words; and the increase in the sheer quantity of words we hear every day must make it more difficult to focus on the Word of God.
In every age it has taken self-discipline to be able to hear what God is saying: though the particular pressures have varied, the central task remains the same. The Word of God addresses every part of us: mind, emotions, heart, intellect will, desires, fears, hopes, intentions, relationships and actions. No wonder hearing and obeying God’s Word is so demanding!
I found Naselli’s post of this so incredibly helpful. I don’t know where your particular temptation lies, but let’s not block the Bible with our weaknesses.
(p.136):
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