Round the Sphere Again: Bible Reading

Updated!

And updated yet again!

Without a Plan
When I took a Bible Survey class way back before I was married, I had to read through the whole Bible. I enjoyed it and learned lots about the different genres contained in the Good Book and how everything in it fits together. I used one of the through-the-Bible-in-a-year plans a couple of years ago and it was a good refresher, I suppose, but I also found it frustrating, because when I read, I like to ponder what I read. I like to answer the questions and unwrap the layers and you can’t do that with 10 chapters (or whatever it is) per day.

So I plan to never do a through-in-one-year plan again. I’ve spent over half a year reading and studying Romans now and I love reading that way. 

This year, Aaron Armstrong is not using a reading plan for much the same reason.

For me, the problem was that I wasn’t spending enough time soaking in the Word. With a strict schedule of 4+ chapters a day, I found there was very little time to stop and savor. Much of the time was spent consuming. This is not the way that I prefer to read my Bible.

Instead, Aaron plans to read a few books, “mastering them and being mastered by them.”

In my opinion, through-the-Bible-in-a-year plans are good for showing the whole storyline, and knowing the storyline is a necessary foundation. But once you’ve established the foundation, it’s time to move forward and build on what you’ve got by digging deeper into the text.

With a Plan
My friend Rosemary is using a plan, but not a through-in-one-year plan. She’ll be choosing books and reading them through twenty times before she moves on. 

How are you reading your Bible this year? Let me know and I’ll update this post with your info, too.

• Diane is going through the Bible slowly, too. She “started Genesis LAST January and just finished Deuteronomy.”
• Madge finds reading on a schedule frustrating.
• Kim’s (Hiraeth) daily reading is in Berkhof’s Systematic Theology, but she’s leading a study in Acts and participating in a study of Romans.
• Kim (The Upward Call) is reading the bible in a year chronologically and also teaching the book of John. 
• Judy is reading through in one year again.
• Becky is using this plan.
• Persis is using a Bible reading plan for shirkers and slackers.
• Staci Eastin is using Professor Horner’s plan.

Thankful Thursday: Conversion

Today, I’m thanking my heavenly Father for my conversion. Because it is God 

 …who … has shone in [my heart] to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6 ESV)

Salvation, from start to finish, including conversion, is the work of God. When, as a very young child, I first believed, 

it was “by God’s doing” that I knew what I knew. It wasn’t because I was a spectacularly precocious five year old; it wasn’t because it was a extraordinarily powerful sermon. It was by God’s doing: God’s saving grace, his enlightening and regenerating grace.

So I’m thanking him for this gift; I’m acknowledging that all the glory goes to God.

Only He, As the God-Man

J. I. Packer lists three things Christ “as the Mediator, came to do, and that only He, as the God-man, could do.” 

1. He came to reveal God to men. Before we can know and love God, we must be shown what He is like. In Old Testament times, God’s words, in conjunction with His ordering of events, had indicated something of His nature and character, but no disclosure of this kind could be final and definitive. To bring men to the point where they know that the whole truth about God’s outlook and attitudes has been set before them. a different sort of revelation was needed. Therefore God sent His Son, who perfectly bears His image, and who is perfectly identified with His Father’s purposes of love, to live as a man among men, and so make God perfectly known. …
   
   
2. He came to redeem men from sin. Scripture knows nothing of the speculation, popular in some places, that the Son of God was made flesh in order to perfect creation. It’s uniform witness is rather that he became man in order to redeem. As He said Himself, ‘the Son of man … came … to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). Isaiah 53 had foretold that the iniquities of erring men should be put away by the death of a righteous servant of God in their stead. The background here was the Hebrew sacrificial system, instituted by God centuries before to teach the principle that atonement for sin is made by the death of a perfect substitute for the sinner. But where could a perfect, sinless, wholly righteous servant of God be found? None qualified except the incarnate Son of God, who because he was man could be tempted, but because He was God could not and did not sin. …
   
   
3. He came to restore man to God. God the Son was always ‘in the bosom of the Father’ (John 1:18), enjoying the full riches of His Father’s fellowship, love, and glory…. But the sons of Adam were lost, banished from God’s presence by reason of sin. The Son of God came into the world in order that sinners might come to share His experience of God’s fellowship, love, and glory. He came to seek us where we are in order that He might bring us to be with Him where He is. He came to take us as His own brothers and make us His Father’s adopted sons, that we might see and share the Son’s glory and bear the Son’s own image, the family likeness…. When, as the second God-appointed head of our race, the ‘last Adam’, Christ receives those who by faith receive Him, He introduces them at once into a relationship in which the Father’s view of them corresponds to the Father’s view of Him; for Christ’s sake, and in Christ, the Father, reckons righteousness to them (because Christ is righteous) and accounts them His sons by adoption (because Christ is His son by nature). Following upon this, Christ works in them by His Spirit to transform them into His own likeness and root sin out of them, and some day, this task completed, He will bring them to ‘the holy city, new Jerusalem, where nothing unclean may come, there to enjoy the vision  of God and the bliss of knowing Him as their own God and Father for evermore.

From the chapter on The Mediator in 18 Words: The Most Important Words You Will Ever Know.