Just Read Your Bible This Year (+4 Doable Bible Reading Plans)
By Pastor Kent Langham
Why do we as Christians, filled with God’s Holy Spirit, dead to sin and alive to God in Christ, struggle so deeply to bear fruit?
Why do we live so often beat down and burdened because we know we are sinning more than we should, know we don’t love Christ the way we should, and know we don’t love his body they way he commands?
This little article is not sufficient to answer these questions exhaustively, but I want to offer one suggestion that I think is biblical and definitely has proven to be true in my own life.
Christians struggle to be godly when they repeatedly fail in the realm of private devotion.
Again, this is very simplistic, perhaps overly so, but it deserves your attention. I have seen in my own life that when I fail to receive God’s grace from the ordinary means (Bible reading, prayer, and fellowship), I struggle significantly.
When I add to this a failure to eat properly and exercise regularly, I am an absolute mess. And instead of bearing the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23), I am prone to manifesting irritability, frustration, ingratitude, and impatience.
And here’s the thing about sinfully neglecting the spiritual disciplines: we progressively get more dysfunctional.
Rather than gravitating toward our Bibles, God’s people, and loving service, we gravitate toward our screens, our beds, and ungodly thinking. Before too long, we can become deceived and begin to say and think all the crazy things that are characteristic of people who don’t keep in step with the Spirit (Gal 5:25).
The Blessed Man
Thankfully, the Bible shows us how to be a blessed person, and it shows us what blessed people do. In Psalm 1, after telling us that the blessed man will keep his way from evil, David says of the blessed man that “his delight is in the Law of the Lord” (Ps 1:2).
Not only does the blessed man delight in God’s Word, however, he also “meditates on it day and night” (Ps 1:2). The blessed man’s life will be one marked by a reading of, love for, and obedience to God’s Word. The phrase “day and night” suggests a continual, daily seeking after and reliance upon God’s Word.
Being planted in the river is being planted in the Bible.
Bearing Fruit
This person who keeps his way from evil, loves God’s Word, and seeks God in it continuously, according to David, will bear fruit:
“He is like a tree, planted by streams of water that yields fruit in its season, and its leaf does not whither. In all that he does, he prospers” (Ps 1:3).
I am not saying that reading our Bibles everyday will magically change our lives, nor am I arguing for a superstitious view of our devotions. The pursuit of godliness is multifaceted. However, if Psalm 1 teaches us anything, it’s that the life marked by blessing and godliness will be a life saturated in the Bible.
The Vision for the Christian Life
Paul tells the Corinthian Christians that, whether in life or death, his aim is to please Jesus Christ (2 Cor 5:9). If our greatest aim is to live a life of godliness and please our Lord (and this should be our greatest aim!), then daily Bible reading must be a major part of this pursuit. Godliness certainly is more than daily success in the sphere of private devotion, but it is rarely less.
The most ordinary means by which God changes most of us are through reading through and studying Scripture privately and through availing ourselves of the corporate means of grace in the local church. I encourage you to be fully committed to both this year, but to aid with the first, we have developed a series of Bible plans that are designed to be flexible and accessible.
The way these plans are designed allows just about any Christian, no matter how busy you are, how much you dislike reading, or how short your attention span is, to read structurally through the Bible (or at least a portion of it). Here is how the plan works:
Four Bible Reading Plans
We have essentially divided the entire Bible into four sections, each with its own reading plan:
Pentateuch
History and Prophets
Wisdom Literature
New Testament
View, download, and print the four plans here:
Choose one section, and the plan will guide you to finish that section within the coming year.
Each section has a 52-week schedule and tells you what chapters to read for the week in order to stay on track. The weekly format provides more flexibility than a daily format and encourages staying on track.
Whole Bible Option
If you wanted to read the entire Bible in one year, you would read all four plans. So, you’d read the material from week one for all four plans and so forth and so on. This obviously would be the same if you wanted to read half the Bible, or three of the four plans. You could also get creative and read, say, the New Testament and the Wisdom Literature side by side in a year. You would just read the passages for the corresponding weeks for that plan.
Family Reading Option
One of the primary reasons we designed the plan this way is to encourage family Scripture reading.
It may be difficult to read the entire Bible in one year on your own, and even more so with your family. This plan allows for there to be structured private reading and family reading.
For example, a father could read three of the four plans privately and read the fourth plan with his family. Or he could read two plans privately, one with his wife, and the other with his children.
Again, this was designed to be accessible for people in all seasons of life. If you have older children, help them think through an appropriate portion to read privately as you also read together as a family. Get creative!
For the One who Struggles to Read
Lastly, for those who struggle to find devotional consistency, whether you just had a child, are in a particularly busy work season, or just flat-out struggle to read and comprehend, this plan has something for you.
Rather than over-committing, failing, getting discouraged, and giving up, I encourage those described above, particularly if you’ve never read the entire Bible through before, to start with just one of the four plans and commit to reading it this year. This will be very manageable.
I recommend those who greatly struggle to find consistency in Bible reading to start with the Wisdom Literature plan (the shortest of the four plans) and read the assigned readings every week. It ends up being about 3-4 chapters per week. Unless you are in a very unusual circumstance, you can commit to reading four chapters a week.
You may feel discouraged by such a small feat, but remember, the goal is to read the Bible. It’s better to read a major portion of Scripture in one year than to continue inconsistently jumping around from place to place and never really go deeper with God.
Next year, you could take up one of the longer plans, and after four years, you will have read the entire Bible. I am confident that doing this will bring joy to your soul as the Holy Spirit works fruit in your life.
Let’s Read the Bible!
For the sake of pleasing Jesus Christ and being a blessing to those he has put in our lives, let’s read the Bible this year!
Download our 4-Part Bible Reading Plan.