And a New Year Begins

The years go by fast don’t they? My wife and I were just reflecting last night on seventeen years of marriage and raising kids how quickly it goes by. If you aren’t careful, your entire life will fly by and be over before you even notice.

I have realized that this is one of the greatest tragedies we human creatures face. Socrates famously said “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Are you living your life or just sort of passing through it?

As a way of being intentional this year I am recommending that we all consider taking the time to read the Bible. This year I plan to use a plan created in the 1800’s by a pastor named Robert Murray M’Cheyne. M’Cheyne created this plan for his congregation when he was 29 years old. He never got to complete it because he died of Typhus three months later. But he had great wisdom in his advice to the church about this plan.

He recognized the pitfalls of such an ambitious thing as reading the Bible in year. He was not naive about the shame and guilt that can hit us when we miss a day or fall behind. He also saw the dangers in reading as merely a discipline without paying attention or caring about what we were doing.

But he also thought that it would be helpful to read through it every day. He thought it would give families something to discuss together from the word on a regular basis. And he thought it would be nice for everyone in the church to be reading roughly the same things.

I can see the wisdom in that. Let me caution you that if you miss a day or two a week, don’t let that stop you. Just miss that day and pick up the reading on the day you are on. One of the enemies tricks is to make you think it’s no use. And the gospel combats that by reminding you that Christ is good enough for all of our failures. The enemy would like to rob you of gospel joy and make you feel that you are so far behind you may as well give up. But to believe the enemy is to forget the gospel. Just find each day as a new opportunity to start fresh.

Let’s try to spend a year “roughly” reading the Bible. For many of us that will be enough.

There are many ways you can access M’Cheynes plan. If you use the youversion app you can access it here. There is a very cool app called dwell that includes this plan. Dwell is entirely an audio experience where you can edit the voice reading to you as well as background music. I really like Felix who has an African accent and the piano and cello background music. Or if like me, you kinda like to go old school and use paper, there is a two page outline of every reading for every day available on the web. We will have some these available at the church.

Let’s not aim for perfection. Let’s just aim to read the Bible a little more this year than we did last year. What do you say?

If you’re with me, share this post with your friends.