Bible Reading Plan, and the Rationale Behind the Method Culture speaks to us in many ways and from

a lot of different sources: music, movies, TV, the Internet, school, shopping malls, and so onthese all press their claims on us, our time, our money, our loyalties, and perhaps most deeply, our sympathies. Not all of what culture says is bad, but its sure not all good either. In fact, not all of what Christian culture says is bad or good in itself. Generally speaking, how we understand it and how we participate in it determines whether it is good or bad for us, or in a given situation. It is not always good to eat chocolate, but neither is it always bad; it is not always good to work out, but neither is it always bad. So the task is to figure out how, and how much, and where, to participate in the cultures around us. We need a standard. We need perspective. The standard is the Scriptures; the perspective is Gods personal self-revelation to his church. Do we really believe this? Do we really believe that the same God who created the world, and who created us in his image, has revealed things about himself to us through the Bible? And do we really believe that we can know God, or know him better, by reading his Book? We can tell what we think and what we really believe by how we behave. Do you believe you can trust the ropes of a homemade tree-swing? Then you sit in it. Do you disbelieve? Then you dont sit in it. There are other factors as well. We might simply be lazy and not want to walk to the swing, even though we know that if we did, it would produce more enjoyment for us than if we didnt. Or we might have a habit of not sitting in swings (maybe we grew up in a swingless society), so that no matter how much fun we know it is, our habits keep us from acting on that knowledge. So if the Scriptures are Gods self-revelation, and they provide the standard we need to know how to live life in the culture around us, and if we have free and open access to them, and if they tell us that we ought to read and learn them every day to understand Gods perspective on things, and if we believe all this, why dont we spend more time reading them? There may be a lot of reasons; some of them might even be good ones. Maybe one of the conditions above doesnt hold. For example, maybe you have been kidnapped and sent to a desert island with no Bibles available. Or maybe you are subject to forced labor from morning to evening, lets say, moving boxes of Bibles from one building to another, then back again to the first building, but you dont have a single moment to read them all day long, and at night you are too exhausted. Kind of unlikely, Im guessing, though of course there are lesser degrees of these kinds of things. But one of the following seems more likely for most of us. 1. We are lazy and just dont feel like spending time reading. Movies and texting much more fun. 2. We want to read the Bible, we really do, but we have never developed good habits, and every time we try to start a reading plan we keep with it for a couple days or

weeks, but then something disrupts the planwe go on vacation, or change our exercise routine, or start studying for schooland our Bible reading gets neglected. 3. We dont really believe deep down that reading the Bible is all that important, or that it is actually Gods word to us, or that it will keep us from sin and lead us into good and upright ways, or that it will tell us what we need to know about God or our work in his kingdom. You judge for yourself (if you want to). It may be something totally different for you, or possibly it is nothingmaybe you do read and study the Scriptures every day. One more thing before I unveil the grand plan for this year, and how I hope it will help you develop lifelong habits. Lets compare two souls. The first soul well call Mr. Thinkahead, the second, Mr. Now. At age 18 Mr. Thinkahead opens an investment account that yields compound interest (you earn interest, and then you earn interest on the interest), and faithfully invests a modest amount into it every week, not enough to break his budget, but as much as he can reasonably spare. Interest compounds at 10%. Mr. Now doesnt care about things like this and is therefore able to use his money to buy a surfboard, a nice wetsuit (he and his surf buddies dont care that the hoodie is dorky), and some other really cool stuff. After a year, Mr. Now has a lot more cool stuff than Mr. Thinkahead, and has had a whole lot more fun. He has an uber-cool job at the surf shop, and might or might not go to college later, depending on how much fun it is, how much it costs, whether the school has promising beaches, yada yada. Mr. Thinkahead keeps investing in his account, goes to college, and does other things of that sort. Now fast-forward 30 years. Mr. Now changes his name to Mr. Usedtobe, is tan as leather, and often wins the Over-40 surfing contests. Hes squatted on a beach shack property and now claims ownership, though several others also say they were there first. Mr. Thinkahead is a millionaire, thanks to compound interest and the faithful habit of small investment to his account. It is weird to think, but small and regular investments into an account that compounds at 10% will make you into a millionaire in 30 years or even less. The story is not about becoming a millionaire, but about the power of habit over time. Begin playing a musical instrument at age 18, stick with it, practice (correctly) every day, and in ten years you will be really good. In twenty you may be the best in the state. In thirty years, one of the top in the nation. (In fifty, back to the best in the state due to muscular degeneration.) Practice anything in the right way and consistently, and since God has made us as learning creatures, you will end up great at that thing. Or you could look at the dark side of the same principle: begin smoking now, smoke just ten cigarettes every day, or

twenty, and you can increase your health risks 100-fold over the next 30 years. At some point, it is impossible to reverse the health problems you will develop. Now, to our real subject. You dont know exactly what God has in store for you, but you know that whatever it is, it involves knowing him. There has never, ever been a situation where God wanted to bless a child of his by helping that child to know God less. With regard to your knowledge of God, where do you want to be in 30 years? Mr. Now will be talking about the glory days of high school, or possibly college, when he was sospiritual! He read his Bible in Bible class, and he listened sometimes at church kind-of, and stuff. Mr. Thinkahead might look back at high school with reverie, but will never long for a day when he didnt know the Lord as well as he now does. That would be absurd. Of course this appeal is to your spiritual sensibilities. There are a lot of metaphors we could look through to try to spur ourselves on to better habits and character. We are soldiers, for example. Soldiers need their armor. Soldiers need to train. Soldiers arent really in it for themselves, but for their commanding officer and ultimately for their king and for the kingdom. What kind of soldier doesnt train? Maybe one who wants to get killed, or turns out a coward because he is unprepared for real combat. Whatever metaphor we want to use, we can see the stakes are as big as the value of our lives. However we value our lives and our service in Gods kingdom, to that extent we will value our training and the development of thoughtful habits and character, and of course the part of that training of which we are thinking is knowing God by knowing his selfrevelation. Also notice that we are not talking about whether you are sinning because you didnt read the Bible this morning, or yesterday. We are talking about how the little choices you make now, and then remake tomorrow, and then remake the next day, add up, even multiply in the end, to take us to places we could never have imagined possible. To try to start the process, I will be incorporating a Bible-reading schedule into your Bible assignments. If you faithfully read every reading but at the end of the year you stop reading the Bible (whatever reading plan you might end up using), the whole thing didnt really work for you. In thirty years you will be Mr. Usedtobe, and most likely will not be working much or at all for Gods kingdom. And you probably wont care, because you will not really know what could have been. In other words, we will need to work together this year to get things going. In the end, this will need to be more than an assignment for you. But not less. Ill do my part: Ill give you a checklist of passages to read every day. You can refer to the schedule online at http://www.esv.org/assets/pdfs/rp.lsb.pdf. If you want to read the daily readings online, they may be available at http://www.esvliterarystudybible.org/plan. (At some point this site may expire if you have not purchased access to it.)

For purposes of grading, you must use the reading list I give you (the one with the boxes to check). You may check a box if you read all passages for a given day, on that day for which they are assigned. You may not make-up readings after the day for which they are assigned. It might seem to you like it is better to read a lot of the Bible later than to not read it at all, so it would be better for me to let you do it late, possibly with a grade penalty. I agree to a certain extent, but I want most of all to give you every incentive possible to read the Bible every day, and I am willing to sacrifice the other benefits you would get from reading the passages later and all at once on a given week, in hopes of developing the good habit of daily Bible reading. It may not be a perfect system, but it is the one we will use. On Wednesday of each week you will turn in a copy of the checklist. (If you dont, I will assume you have not done your readings and will give you a zero). I will not accept emails vouching that you have done your readings, nor will I accept a different list from the one I give you. You must use the exact physical list I give you at the beginning of the year. If you lose your list I will replace it for you but will charge you an entire weeks worth of reading credit. Readings will be required for every day of the school year, from the first to the last, including Christmas day and Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter breaks. I will trust without question that you have accurately represented what you have read. This grade will add up to ten percent of your entire grade for the class. Another ten percent of your grade will come from comprehensive exams over the material covered in the Bible readings. There will be two of them, the first one including all of the Bible reading material for the first semester, the second one including all of the Bible reading material for both first and second semesters. These are not the same as the regular exam for the class, and will be administered at a different time, before the scheduled final exams. I will give you more guidance later, but generally they will test your awareness of simple Bible content and location. So for example, I might ask, Where in the Bible is the genealogy of Jesus? There are two correct answers: Matthew 1 and Luke 3. It should be obvious that this type of knowledge is not the end (as in telos) of your reading, but rather a faulty attempt to get you to acquaint yourself with the Holy Scriptures. To be clear, the telos is, in the language of Proverbs, the fear of the Lord; or in Pauls language, to know the Lord; or in kingdom language, to be faithful servants. Identifying chapters and content is like a ladder to the telos. I dont think there are errors in the reading list, but there may be. If we find any, I will tell you so you can correct them. I will also give a bonus test point for the first person to notify me of any kind of error (provided I agree it is an error that needs fixing), whether it is sequential or a typo or something else.