End of Year Message to Church
Dear Church Family,
One of the great aspects of our Courtland Baptist Church family is the reverence we show for God’s Word. The Bible is central to our worship service, through multiple readings and preaching. It is our source for worship and, more importantly, for understanding what God wants to reveal about himself to us.
As we end 2022, please consider how we can all get into a daily Bible reading plan in 2023. There are several plans and ideas out there, and I thought I would share my plan, as well as some other plans to give you some ideas.
Ann Dove and I do the Bible.org Bible in One Year Plan. They offer this through their Bible app every year, and we have been following this plan every year since 2012. When we finish our reading tomorrow, we will have read through the Bible ten times in the past decade. I do not say this to boast, but rather to encourage you that no matter how busy one is, one can read through the entire Bible in a year.
A simpler, guilt free Bible reading plan is one that is developed by a conservative PCA pastor named Matthew Everhard. He created a free, downloadable list of all the chapters in the Bible so you can read in whatever order you want and simply mark through the chapter that you read. Since we read through so many chapters on Sunday mornings, you will already have help getting through it each week. Here is a link to his YouTube video, which contains the pdf in the description.
If you are not interested in reading through the whole Bible in a year, there are other methods to reading the Bible every day in a year. The Wretched podcast by Todd Friel on YouTube suggests several methods, such as choosing words in a concordance to read about, finding verses in a systematic theology book, and more. His YouTube video on this is linked here.
A word of caution: The danger in these plans is that verses can be taken out of context. Make sure if you follow one of these plans that you don’t read a verse outside of its context to make it mean what you want it to mean. Figure out what the author of the biblical book intended it to mean.
Finally, Pastor John Paul has suggested that you can read through five Psalms a day every month. With 150 Psalms, it takes thirty days at that rate. Psalms are a book of prayers, so each month you read them they are 150 prayers you are sending to God.
Regardless of the plan, ask the Holy Spirit to help you commit to reading God’s Word every day in 2023. Not only will it cause you to draw closer to God, it will also cause our church to grow in unity and mission.
Pastor Drew
