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How Bible Reading Will Change Your Life

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Trevin Wax makes an important point in his article “Routine Bible Reading Can Change Your Life.” Speaking of the perennial guilt many people feel when they consider trying once again to pursue a plan of regular Bible reading:

“Why do so many Christians start with a strong commitment and yet lose their way when reading the Bible? One reason may be that we have too high of an expectation of what we will feel every day when we read. We know this is God’s Word and that He speaks to us through this Book, and yet so many times, when we’re reading the assigned portion of Scripture for the day, it all feels so, well, ordinary…”

“I sympathize with Christians who feel this way. We’re right to approach the Bible with anticipation, to expect to hear from God in a powerful and personal way. But the way the Bible does its work on our hearts is often not through the lightning bolt, but through the gentle and quiet rhythms of daily submission, of opening up our lives before this open Book and asking God to change us. Change doesn’t always happen overnight. Growth doesn’t happen in an instant. Instead, it happens over time, as we eat and drink and exercise. The same is true of Scripture reading.”

He goes on to explain why these things are so. Check it out!

Announcing our 2019 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge

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We’re giving away a copy of the ESV Scripture Journal: New Testament Set and a one-volume reader’s Bible. To win one of these prizes, you simply have to prove you’d know what to do with it.

If you’ve been with us for the last few years, you might be caught unawares by this post. Here I come—like a thief in the night, like a landowner returning to check on his unprepared stewards, like a bridegroom catching those virgins with insufficient oil, like the lightning that flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other—to announce this year’s Bible reading challenge earlier than you anticipated.

Have no fear. I do this not to leave you behind but to bring glad tidings of great joy. I do it because many have spoken, and we have listened.

The last few years, we issued a 90-day Bible-reading challenge that had to begin on January 1 and end by March 31. But many folks have told us they would like to be able to get started over the holidays. While many are eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, or chasing a spirit of stupor, we hear that you—the readers of this blog, the champions of the covenant, the heroes who shine like stars in the midst of a present evil age—would prefer to redeem the time when you already find yourself away from your usual responsibilities.

And so we grant your request. This year’s Bible reading challenge may commence immediately. In fact, perhaps it already commenced for you, and you’re just now realizing it.

Here are the rules:

  1. You must have a United States mailing address to win one of the stated prizes. Residents of other countries will receive a $30 (US) Amazon gift card via email.
  2. You must read (not scan or skim) all 66 books of the Protestant Bible. You may choose the translation and reading plan (canonical, chronological, etc.). You don’t have to stop and meditate on every detail, but we’re trusting you to be honest about reading and not skimming. Listening to an unabridged audio Bible is acceptable. You may also use any combination of audio and visual reading, as long as you’ve read or listened to the entire Bible within the allotted time period.
  3. You must read the entire Bible within a 90-day period.
  4. That 90-day period must end by March 31, 2019. If you’d like to understand why we recommend such fast-paced reading, see our Bible reading plan for readers.
  5. To enter the drawing, you must fill out the survey below, letting us know the dates you read and what you thought of the speed-reading process. Your thoughts do not have to be glowing, but they should be honest; you’ll still be entered into the drawing if you didn’t enjoy your speed-read.
  6. In the first week of April 2019, we will randomly select 2 winners from those who have submitted the form. We will email the winners to get their shipping addresses.
  7. The first prize winner (if US) will get their choice of the ESV Scripture Journal: New Testament Set or a one-volume reader’s Bible in the translation of their choice. (Reviews: ESV, CSB, NIV.) The second prize winner (if US) will get whichever option the first prize winner didn’t choose. Any winner outside the US will receive a $30 Amazon gift card via email.
  8. Unfortunately, missionaries with DiscipleMakers are not eligible to win the drawing.

We will occasionally post links to the submission form on the blog between now and March 31. But you might also want to bookmark this page for easy access when you’re ready to submit your entry.

If you’d like a checklist to help you stay on pace, here are three. I won’t bother to update the dates, as I don’t know which day you plan to start.

  1. Canonical Order
  2. Chronological Order
  3. NIV Sola Scriptura Order

You may now begin any time, and may this be the ride of your life.

A Time to Read, and a Time to Stop Reading

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Everything on this site is here to help ordinary people learn to study the Bible. But from time to time, for the sake of balance, it is appropriate for us to remind you that there are extreme or extraordinary times when reading or studying the Bible is not the most important thing to do. In fact, there are times when doing it could be harmful or counterproductive.

David Murray, with help from puritan Richard Baxter, highlights one of those exceptional times: depression.

One of the strangest steps of faith I’ve ever taken as a pastor was telling a depressed Christian to stop reading the Bible. This Christian was in a terrible dark hole of depression and was tormenting herself every day by spending long periods ransacking the Scriptures for a verse that would cure her depression. She was frantic and desperate in her search and every day her “failure” only deepened her depression as she concluded that she must have been abandoned by God. It also left her mentally and even physically exhausted. Bible reading seemed to be harming rather than helping her.

I felt that her mind needed a rest and that she would never recover unless she stopped this daily self-torture. That’s when I said that she should stop reading the Bible for a short time to let her mind rest and to rebuild her emotional reserves. Then she would hopefully be able to read the Bible again with profit.

Murray goes on to quote Richard Baxter who counsels those with “melancholy” to refrain from “fixed, long, and deep meditations that will only hurt you” so that “you may later do what you cannot do now.”

I’m reminded of Ecclesiastes 3:1-15, where we’re told that life as God’s creatures in a fallen world means there is a time for every matter under heaven. God has made this to be so, that we cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. There is, in fact, a time to stop reading the Bible. Please consider Murray’s and Baxter’s helpful insights.

Check it out!

How to Fight Boredom With the Bible

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Jon Bloom believes the Bible is anything but boring. And he wants to help you understand what a remarkable book it is that you can hold in your hands. This book is unequaled, audacious, and unrivaled.

Are we bored with it? Oh, boredom! That plague of our finite, fallen, self-oriented flesh that so easily loses appreciation for the most precious treasures simply when they become familiar! Forgive us, Father, and hasten the day when we lose our amazing capacity for boredom and gain an amazing capacity for sustained amazement!

Check it out!

See Your Bible Reading Go from Chore to Delight

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Steve Midgley ask a great question at the blog for the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation: Is reading the Bible a chore or a delight?  The difference, he suggests, depends on how connected you feel with the characters. Or more specifically, the Character.

For the Bible is really a book about one person: God. He is the hero on every page. How much do we really care about him? So much of the time we read the Bible as if it were all about us. How can I find some comfort? How can I get a little guidance? How can I be spiritually strong? We come to the Bible as if it were a self-help manual, as if its prime purpose were to help us fix our problems. But it isn’t.

The Bible’s prime purpose is to bring glory to God. It does that by declaring his excellence and establishing his kingdom and, finally and wonderfully, by bringing all things together under one Head, even Christ (Eph 1:10). As long as we insist on reading the Bible as if it were all about us, we will not only miss the point, we will find it dull because we won’t be interested in the character that it is describing—God himself.

Check it out!

Dwell: a Deeply Satisfying Audio Bible App

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I have been a fan of audio Bibles for some time. First thing in the morning, while I’m dressing and brushing my teeth, I listen to the ESV: Through the Bible in a Year daily podcast. Then while exercising, I have often listened to a daily lectionary. And as I read and re-read books of the Bible to develop biblical thinking, I often alternate between reading and listening. In addition, we’re training our children for a lifestyle of devotional Bible “reading” through daily time with their own audio Bibles (a practice which has continued in our home long past the preschool years).

So I have tested many options for optimizing the audio Bible experience over the years. Some work out spectacularly. Others far less so.

And now that the Dwell audio Bible app is available, I’m happy to report it sits solidly in the spectacular category.

What is Dwell?

Dwell is not a CD set but a smartphone app. It’s currently available only for iOS, but an Android version is set to release in the next few months.

Dwell was designed from the ground up to be, not a Bible app, but a Bible listening app. You won’t find the text of Scripture anywhere in the app. All you will find is streaming audio of the Scripture being read.

Dwell uses the ESV translation (though they plan to add more over time), recorded by 4 voices with distinct accents and styles. You can set a default voice (my favorite is Felix, the East African), or have a random voice each time. Dwell offers 4 “album” options for contemplative background music, along with the option to turn the music off. You can set the volume for voice and for music independently to get the mix you most prefer.

The app allows you to listen straight through books of the Bible. It also has a library of “playlists,” which collect many verses around topics such as loneliness, creeds, the trinity, or God’s greatness. The app also has a library of “passages,” which are longer sections, but not entire books. So you can quickly choose selections such as Joseph’s story, the Sermon on the Mount, the fruit of the Spirit, or the friendship of David & Jonathan. Of these listening options, I most prefer entire books or passages; I find the playlists, with a few exceptions, to be somewhat arbitrary and unfortunately decontextualized.

Dwell also has many (currently 34) listening plans, such as Esther in 10 days, Psalms in 30 days, or Jesus’ miracles in 7 days. If you’re into daily routine, these plans are incredibly easy to use.

Dwell’s Limitations

You’ll want to know four things up front about Dwell before diving in:

  1. Dwell is still very much a work in progress. The user interface is highly polished and easy as can be, but the content is not yet complete. As of this writing, only the New Testament, Genesis, Exodus, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, Esther, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Hosea, Joel, and Jonah are available. But I have been surprised at how quickly new OT books have been added since the app’s release. As they receive more funding, they are quickly recording, editing, and releasing new content.
  2. Which brings me to the topic of funding. If you think of Dwell as only a smartphone app, you may be disappointed to hear that it costs money. (Note: There is a free version, which gives you access to only one voice, regularly interrupted by advertisements to buy the premium version. I found the ads to be frustratingly disruptive to the experience, such that I’d recommend only going unlimited unless you’d like to try before you buy.) But if you think of it as a deluxe audio Bible, the pricing fits about what you might expect. I eagerly supported Dwell when it was on Kickstarter, and I’m making copious use of my lifetime unlimited subscription. Dwell is delivering all that was promised and more.
  3. Dwell works only as a streaming service. You cannot download the audio files for offline playing. Since it consists of four entire audio Bibles (the four voices), the producers believed it to be too costly space-wise to store locally on people’s devices. So it functions only with an active internet connection. This might cause minor delays between tracks/chapters as your phone loads the new file, depending on the speed and quality of your internet connection.
  4. At this point, you cannot customize playlists or listening plans. The app is under vigorous development, however, so I wouldn’t be surprised if these features eventually show up.

Conclusion

I am thrilled with Dwell, and with the way it does everything possible to streamline the Bible listening experience. I can’t wait until the OT is finished, and they launch some through-the-Bible-in-a-year listening plans. This will no doubt replace my daily ESV podcast.

Dwell can’t compete with the quality of dramatization in NIV Live, but it doesn’t try to. For now, Dwell can hold a co-regency with NIV Live in my voracious Bible listening lifestyle. I highly recommend it to you.

4 Ideas to Improve Biblical Literacy

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Scott Slayton has four ideas to help you develop a robust biblical literacy. He writes:

Most Christians do not know the basics of the biblical storyline, basic facts about the Bible’s major characters, or the texts on which our most foundational doctrines are built. Many Christians try to have in-depth discussions about ethics and the relationship between Christianity and the government without knowing even the most basic facts about Scripture. It’s like trying to solve an equation when you don’t know that 2+2=4.

His suggestions are:

  1. Repeated reading
  2. Daily reading
  3. Scripture memory
  4. Supplemental reading

These suggestions may sound straightforward, but we have a hard time implementing such reading habits! Slayton explains what it could look like for you.

Check it out!

Update on Family Bible Reading

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I wrote last year about my commitment to my daughter to read her the entire Bible before her 18th birthday. This promise morphed into a weekly family Bible-reading extravaganza, where we spend 45 to 60 minutes simply reading the Scripture and letting the children ask any questions they have. I’m now writing with an update.

Jan Rowley, Creative Commons

  • We’ve been working on this for a little over 3 years, so it’s become part of our ingrained family routine.
  • 45 to 60 minutes may sound like a long time, but it goes quickly when the children get to play during the reading (my original post describes how we do it).
  • We don’t actually do it every week. If anyone is traveling, we skip it. But I would estimate that we miss only 1 or 2 weeks each quarter.
  • Going through the Bible in canonical order, we’re now in the middle of Jeremiah.
  • All the names in 1 Chronicles 1-9 were rough, and the kids were the least engaged for that section. But I spread those chapters over 2 sittings so it wasn’t too painful for them all at once. And they’re able to bear the occasional “boring” section when they get to play with whatever they want. They’re not required to just sit and listen.
  • Proverbs 10-29 was also rough. When the topic changes every verse, it’s hard to listen to a lengthy reading!
  • Surprises:
    • They loved the Psalms. Even though there are many of them, most of them are short. And the children really followed along with the mood of each poem.
    • They also loved Job. The drama engaged them, as the characters took turns making their speeches.
    • My sons loved Isaiah, though they’re not sure why. One of them could explain his love only by saying, “It was really interesting.” Jeremiah has not been as interesting for them.
    • While I’m sure none of the children would choose Bible reading time over, say, going to the local pool, I get almost no complaints from them about doing it. The only exception is when we’re in a dry spot (usually a list of names): After 30 minutes, I might start getting questions about how much longer we’ll be reading.
    • Almost every week, though, most of the children are sad when I stop. They keep asking for “another chapter!”
    • It doesn’t take nearly as long to read the Bible out loud as I thought it would. I’m surprised that we’re in Jeremiah already. At this pace, we’ll finish long before my daughter’s 18th birthday. We might even get through the Bible twice.
  • I’m now using the CSB Reader’s Bible. I love the CSB translation, and the children follow it well. And a reader’s Bible gives me “permission” to keep reading and reading and reading, without any distracting verse numbers, chapter numbers, or section headings telling me that I should stop.

I hope this encourages you. You don’t need a perfect plan, a perfect curriculum, or a perfect set of family devotions. And you don’t need to do it the same way I have done it. But be encouraged: You can simply read the Bible to your kids!

Why You Shouldn’t Skip the Genealogies

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J.A. Medders understands the temptation to skip boring parts of the Bible, such as genealogies, even in his preaching. But he advises us not to do it. Why?

  1. Genealogies remind us the Bible isn’t about us.
  2. Genealogies remind us of God’s promise to send a son.

Medders has some needed encouragement to help us better align our hopes with God’s priorities. And I agree. Each year, as I commit to reading the genealogies along with the rest of the Scriptures, I find myself appreciating them more each time. Medders concludes:

[Genealogies] remind us about a list of names where you are listed. Right now, in Heaven, the Lamb’s Book of Life is filled with the names of those who would be redeemed by the blood of Jesus. And if you believe in the risen Lord, your name is on a page—and it’s written in ink older than the earth (Rev. 17:8). You aren’t listed in Exodus 6 or Matthew 1, but you are listed in Heaven, in a genealogy of Christ’s brothers and sisters.

Check it out!

NIV Live: A Bible Experience

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in the last few years, I have developed great joy in listening to the Bible. I listen to portions of it every day. Sometimes I like to listen to it while I follow along with the words. And sometimes I enjoy hearing it on its own. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out I actually spend more time listening to it than actually reading it.

This enjoyment has grown out of the fact that my smart phone makes it easier than ever before to have an audio Bible with me at all times. I subscribe to a podcast that follows a daily lectionary of readings. I have two complete audio Bibles (different translations) in my music app. And I eagerly backed Dwell, a Bible app designed from the ground up, just for listening.

With that background in mind, I’d like to tell you about something that has knocked my socks off: NIV Live: A Bible Experience. Calling NIV Live an audio Bible would be a little like calling the Superbowl a football game; while technically accurate, the label doesn’t quite capture the spectacle of the thing. Which is why, I think, the creators don’t call NIV Live an audio Bible; they call it A Bible Experience.

NIV Live presents an audio recording of the complete text of the NIV Bible. And everything about it attempts to draw you in to the experience.

  • After stating a book’s title, the audio has no unwanted intrusions. No mentions of chapter numbers to distract you from the experience. Just the text.
  • Dozens and dozens of readers. And many of the readers are professional voice actors. While I’m sure other such things exist, I had never heard an audio Bible treated with full, professional voice acting before I came across NIV Live.
    • Each reader has a role, as though the Bible were a very long play. The same actor plays Moses, every time Moses speaks. Another actor plays Yahweh. Another plays Jesus. And so on, down to the most minor characters. It’s fascinating to listen to different gospels, and have the same actor playing Peter every time he speaks.
    • Actors who read the role of an apostle also read that apostle’s letters. For example, the reader who plays Paul does both Paul’s dialogue in Acts and all of Paul’s epistles.
    • There is one narrator who reads all Old Testament narratives. New Testament narratives are read in the “voice” of the author (Matthew, Mark, Luke (who also reads Acts), and John). The different literal voices of the gospels give each gospel a remarkably different feel.
    • Not every reader is a professional. NIV Live employed many pastors to fill minor roles, and these are some of the most distracting parts. It feels mismatched to have someone act a role, while another person in the same scene is merely reading a text. But I can imagine hiring this many professional voice actors would have over-exceeded the available budget.
  • Tasteful music. My first impression (Genesis 1 and 2) was that the music was distractingly repetitive and annoying. But once I got used to it, I came to love it. I found it very well placed to highlight the mood, a climax, or a transition in just the right way.
  • Sound effects. Listening to the Bible was like listening to a movie. When we were in a city, I could hear (and therefore picture) the bustle of the busy marketplace. Battles were chaotic. Encounters with creation were framed accordingly.

I listened to the entire Bible in just over a month earlier this year. I couldn’t believe how fun it was to have the Bible not only read but also dramatized, without abridgment or interpretive summarization. If you think it would be too distracting to have the Bible dramatized in such a way, NIV Live might not be for you. But if you’re willing to try something a little different from what you’re used to, NIV Live provides an experience unlike any other.

One technical note: I prefer listening to my Bibles (or any spoken-word audio) at faster-than-normal speed. While NIV Live has a beautiful and fancy app, I can find no way to change the playback speed within the app. It is possible, but annoying to download the complete audio after purchasing it, because you have to download 66 files, one book at a time. But once you do, you can sync it with an audiobook app, which should enable you to change the playback speed.