Reading the Bible

If you google the frase " How to read the Bible", you'll get the staggering number of 5,860.000 results to your search. For the same search on Yahoo! Answers, the number of results is far more modest but still impressive: 31.340 results will pop up. These numbers might sound very impressive but, in talking to people, we realize that, while it's true that many have an avid desire to read the Bible and do succeed in their endeavor of improving their Bible reading skills and frequency, many have a wavering desire that surfaces every once in a while but doesn't last nearly enough time to allow any progress to actually occur. Some others do wish to read more and better always, but lack the determination and discipline necessary to do so, or just don't find enough useful tools to aid them in such a crucial spiritual discipline, progressing at a turtle speed on their own. Bible reading plans come and go, technics and tactics, legalism and fear rethoric fly around in a sea of motivations and schemes to achieve such a coveted goal: To commune with the living God as we read His self disclosure to us, the Bible. God is absolutely beautiful and one way He reveals the beauty of His holiness to us is in the fact that He has chosen His people from every tongue, tribe and nation. There is a remarkable diversity in the Body of Christ and people read their Bibles very effectively in many different ways. So we praise God for the sea of methods, tools and motivations found out there to read our Bibles. (at least for the lawful ones). Some are incredibly helped by the " read through the Bible in a year plan", some are utterly frustrated by them. The good thing about the existence of such a myriad of ideas is that every now and then a saint will share something with us that might just turn things around for the better. It is in that spirit that I want to share a couple of things I came accross recently and found very helpful. The first one is a series that Matt Chandler and Josh Patterson taught on their saturday seminars at the Village church in Texas. Chandler aims pretty high in part 1 but even when we can't do a whole hour, which we many times can if we set aside the time in advance, we can still use the tools he offers and definitely get a lot from our bible reading. Also, Don Whitney has some great stuff here. My favorites are the "emphasis reading" and the Phillippians 4:8 questions. In addition to it I am listening to the ESV podcast daily and, so far it has been a joy. The ESVSB alone has 10 reading plans and the podcast is really well done. Hopefully you'll benefit from these resources somehow.