Having said that, some resolutions are best timed in correspondence with the starting of a new year. The missus and I have talked, and we’re both tired of *knowing* that we need to be reading God’s Word on a daily basis while *living* as if that weren’t true. We are, just like most Americans, “too busy” to find 15-30 minutes a day to spend in the Bible, but can watch 2 episodes of season 3 of The Office before we go to bed. We also both have our fair share of biblical/theological training in our pasts. It’s just enough to make us both sound like we know what we’re talking about on Sunday mornings, but we both realize the dangers of living off of meals from years ago.

I come from a background in college that hyper-emphasized spiritual disciplines. If you were having seven “quiet times” a week, coupled with regular progress through the Topical Memory System, you could be pretty sure you “meant it” when you got saved. OK, so it wasn’t quite like that but a person could get the feeling that failing to keep pace on the spiritual disciplines treadmill was a sign that his “walk” wasn’t what it ought to be. The up side of this attack was that I left college with a wealth of biblical knowledge. The down side was that when the pendulum swung the other way, I had enough biblical knowledge to keep me ahead of most other Christians around me, making it easy to find excuses to not crack open my Bible.

Hopefully I’ve come to a point that I can find a balance somewhere in the middle. I know that if I don’t have a system in place, I won’t do it. I also know that keeping up with the system isn’t the goal, but rather a means to an end. Just like a financial budget (I’m not so great with those, either), having a daily reading plan in place will help me to allocate time to something that I have already decided should be a priority. I also expect that each day of building this routine will make the next day a little bit easier.

We decided that the best plan would be to get through the whole Bible in a year. We both realize that there are going to be days where we fall behind, so Sundays will be our catch up day. Also, it doesn’t hurt that it’s a leap year so we’ll actually be reading through the Bible in 366 days instead of the customary 365. If ever there was a time to go for it, this is it!

Once my mind was made up, the only thing left to do was to find a plan that would get us through the Scriptures in a year. I don’t really like the cover-to-cover variety. If a guy can make it through Leviticus, he shouldn’t have to face Numbers and then Deuteronomy. Yes, these books are equally inspired. No, they are not as easy to read as Genesis or Acts. Through the magic of Google, I finally found a couple of plans I thought might work. I was originally leaning toward M’Cheyne’s Daily Bread. I really liked that it had two passages for reading as a family at meal times, and two to be read privately. The only thing I didn’t like about it was that reading one chapter each from four different books seemed like it would be tough to follow, like watching clips from four different movies each day and trying to keep them all straight.

So, I finally settled on a “blended” plan from Back to the Bible. I like that it has just two different readings each day, with about a chapter or so from the New Testament and two or three chapters from the Old Testament. It doesn’t jump around as much as some of the “thematic” plans out there since each book is read with the first through last chapters in order. It does, however, jump around in terms of the order of the books (eg. Gen. – Isa. – Ex. – Job…) so you don’t get bogged down in any one section or type of literature.

I took some time and put together a PDF with all of the months neatly laid out on three pages. If you’re interested, you can download the PDF here. I think it would be kind of fun to have two or three others “out there” keeping the same pace. If you’re in, leave a comment to let me know.

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Looks like I’m not the only one trying to answer the question, “What is the gospel?“