It's Not Too Late to Start Reading the Bible!

There was an online survey on a Christian publisher’s web site recently that asked, “How many times have you read through the complete Bible?”  Almost half of the over 5,000 people who responded said that they had never read through the complete Bible.  The Bible can be a little intimidating at times.  It can look daunting, and yet most of us would pick up a book of similar size in the book store and not think twice about it.  The Bible is different.  There is just something about it.  We know that we should read it, but . . .

The Bible is an amazing book!  We can often take the Bible for granted.  It sits on the self and may come down at Christmas or Easter.  Every once in a while we will feel inspired to take it off the shelf and read some of it with every intention to keep reading every day, but it just seems to get pushed out of our schedules.  If we stop and think about what the Bible actually is we begin to realize what an amazing gift it really is.  To communicate Gods’ word to all times and all places, God chose to use almost every available kind of communication:  narrative history, genealogies, chronicles, laws of all kinds, poetry of all kinds, proverbs, prophetic oracles, riddles, drama, biographical sketches, parables, letters, sermons, and apocalypses.  Wow, talk about covering all the bases!

Billy Graham once said, “It is in the Bible that we find the answers to life’s ultimate questions:  Why am I here?  Where did I come from?  Where am I going?  What is my purpose of being here?  The Bible has a great tradition and a magnificent heritage.  It contains 66 books written over a period of several hundred years by many different people.  Yet the message, divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit, is clear throughout.  The 66 books become one.”

The Bible is God’s word for us.  It speaks to our hurts, our worries, our joys, and our fears.  It reminds of God’s loving care for us not matter what we face.  Through the Bible we read about how people struggled with faith, how God works in and through many different situations and challenges, and how God is always faithful.  Throughout the Bible we see God’s wonderful plan of salvation through Jesus Christ.

One of the things that I want to encourage you to focus on this year is to be intentional about reading the Bible.  I know that it is almost the end of January already, but I want to encourage those of you who may have faithfully started to read the Bible as a New Year’s resolution and may have trailed off to pick it up again.  I also want to encourage people who may have thought about reading the Bible in a more intentional way to not wait until January 1, 2015 to start, start now!  It is never too late to start, or to pick it up again.

Don’t know where to start?  You have lots of options!  If you have a Bible app on your phone it probably has several Bible reading plan options for you to choose from.  You can go to a Bible web site like www.biblegateway.com/reading-plans/ and either read it from the web site or have them e-mail you a passage to read every day.  There are also several Bibles that have reading plans printed in them for easy access.  You can also choose to just dive in on your own starting with Genesis – although I would suggest starting with the New Testament if you want to just sit down and read straight through.  Praise God for the gift of His word!

God bless, Rev. Liz Arakelian, www.LivingHopeEC.org