Two Bible Reading Plans Compared
How’s that for a boring headline?
I mentioned in an earlier post that I was trying a new reading plan by Robert Murray McCheyne. I don’t usually like Bible years, and I still have some problems with this one, but I still plan to use it through the year. I’ve made this my evening Bible reading.
I didn’t use to have an evening reading plan, but the nature of my work tends to make for interrupted mornings. I’m a publisher, which usually provides for a flexible schedule, but I’m still supplementing that income with computer support work, and that often brings calls fairly early in the morning. So to steady things out, I started to divide my reading time and do part of it at bed time.
In the morning I read a daily lectionary. Right now I’m following the daily readings from CRI Voice. Daily lectionary readings have the advantage of being relatively short, and sometimes topically related. Since I also read the weekly lectionary passages several times during the week, I find that the two reading plans combine well.
This morning, the scriptures from the daily lectionary were Psalms 61, 62, and 68 (I combine morning and evening readings), Isaiah 52:1-12, Galatians 4:12-20, and Mark 8:1-10. Each passage is short and they are topically coherent.
On the other hand, my McCheyne reading plan had me reading Genesis 32, Mark 3, Esther 8, and Romans 3. It’s sort of like reading the Bible through four times at once without bothering to coordinate any of it. I felt like finishing the story when I read Genesis and Esther. The actual plan is to read the Old Testament once and the New Testament and Psalms twice during the course of one year.
Overall, I have the same problem with the daily lectionary, except for the fact that it doesn’t even pretend that I’m reading the whole of a particular topic.
I must confess that I’ve been happier with reading the Bible through, but I think the discipline of following these plans that don’t seem to suit me as well is worthwhile in itself. The daily lectionary is growing on me. Determination is keeping me involved in the McCheyne plan.
As I mentioned in a comment a few days ago, last year I completed the NIV’s One Year Bible which has you read one OT, one NT, one Psalm and one selection from Proverbs every day. The passages are in the order presented in the Bible and broken up based on an even reading pace. There is no effort to create topical unity. Nonetheless, I noticed that I was constantly finding themes that connected the readings. It is amazing how powerful our pattern recognition skills are, right?
Yep! Pattern recognition skills are very strong. I find I can think of a sermon topic that would take something from each chapter almost every time. If I sit back and think about it a bit, however, I become less comfortable with many of these.
I think that even though I’m not excited about the plans I’m getting value from following them, mostly because they are different from any previous approach. I’ve always either read the Bible through from cover to cover, or focused on a book-by-book approach.
I love the idea of Old and New Testament in a year plans, but maybe that’s because I started out a decade ago (after 9/11) with a plan that went chronologically through the OT (Like Gen 1-3) and the NT (Matt 1) simultaneously. I did that plan for years, and found myself growing weary of upcoming weeks of Proverbs as my OT readings. (Not to mention I think it took days to get through Ps 119; one year I wrote 119 out with the Hebrew and made it a craft project, just to spruce up the reading time some).
I should have stuck with what I knew. This year, I started a new O&T plan that’s a lot more choppy, and I’m finding it disconcerting. It’s too late to go back now, so (like you) I’m going to just follow the plan. But I sure see the wisdom now of knocking out large sections of the Proverbs in one sitting instead of dribbling over it one day at a time for a whole year.
(I’ll use the offices during Lent; I like how they’re organized esp outside of ‘ordinary time’.)
Good luck 🙂