Reading the Bible on a Tight Schedule
Article from Bible Gateway written by Jonathan Petersen
Even before the sun casts a shadow, the baby is crying and you’ve started your day. As your other kids awake, you feed and dress them while you’re getting ready yourself. The clock is relentless. Rushing out the door to daycare and then your job, you barely have time to nourish your physical body let alone your soul. That’s when you drive down guilt-trip lane.
Your pastor, your parents, your friends, your church small group tell you to read the Bible, study the Bible, even dissect the Bible. But who has time? The crush of each digital second hastens us with the tyranny of the urgent. Keep looking forward because the freight train of deadlines and responsibility is hurtling your way.
In our series of Bible Gateway 20th anniversary reflections, we’re exploring what it means to realistically engage the Bible in our hectic world. We all know the Bible is important to read—the most important book of all; underscored by it remaining at the number one top of the bestseller charts year after decade after century after millennia. It’s God’s Word to us, after all. And yet, once we bring it home from the store, somehow we keep neglecting it. “We’ll get to it… later.”
I speak from experience. My college days came with the commitment to read 12 chapters of the Bible a day: six in the morning; six at night. That soon became six chapters total. Then only three chapters just before bed. Sleep had a way of subduing my reading fervor and I quickly gave up. Through the years my approach is best described as “start/stop feast/famine.”
But we all have the same 1,440 minutes (86,400 hastening seconds) in a day to work with. Why do some people accomplish the impossible in that amount of time and others can’t even get out of bed? The answer: We do what we want to do. It’s that simple. We want to eat. We want to sleep. Nothing (at least for long) can keep us from these physiological basics. So it’s merely a matter of choosing to put the Bible’s “daily bread” intake on the same intransigent level as those essentials. Once you decide that, the rest is simply scheduling.
An initial approach to incorporating the Bible into your life’s routine and rhythm is to intentionally not make it an arduous task. The following are some ideas I’ve used in my own life to help keep the Bible front and center.
Read entire article on Bible Gateway.
