The day before yesterday, I attended church service for the first time since going to California a month prior to stay with family over the holidays. I returned just in time to catch the kick-off of a new program.
One of our pastors invited the congregation to, starting the next day, follow a Bible reading plan called “50 Days in the New Testament.” The plan assigns five specific chapters (15-20 minutes of reading) to each day so that the reader can finish the New Testament in 50 days. During that period, our pastors will deliver a series of Sunday sermons (called “50 Days of Focus”) that will sync up with the program to cover what participants read the week prior. The purpose is to start the new year aligning our hearts together as a church with the word of God.
The pastor explained that one way to follow the program is to use the YouVersion Bible app, which has “50 Days in the New Testament” in its library of “plans.” I downloaded the app, found the plan, and scheduled a reminder for myself to start the plan the next day. Yesterday, I started the plan in my dentist’s office while my wife and daughter had their appointments. I tapped “Start Plan” which paired day one of the plan with that day.
The app has a chapters checklist for each day of the plan. You can read the chapters separately (e.g., with your print Bible) and then manually check them off in the app. Or you can tap “Start Reading” and work through the chapters in the app. When you finish a chapter in the app, you can tap the “next” button and the app will automatically check off the chapter in your checklist and open the next assigned chapter. You can choose from 72 English versions of the Bible. For several versions, the app has audio readings you can play.
I did my day one reading (the first three chapters of Matthew and the first two chapters of Acts) in text on the app with my current preferred version: the New American Standard Bible 2020.
I am so grateful to my pastors for planning this project and so glad I came back in time to join in at the outset. It gives my Bible study practice the structure I’ve been wanting.
I had been working my way through the book of Matthew in October and November by working on a series of expository essays about it. I benefited a great deal from doing that, and I love the essays that resulted. But I found that the pieces were too complex and took too long to write to serve as a way to start my day strong. There is too much profundity to unpack in each Biblical episode for me to write about it briefly. And I needed a morning writing approach that facilitated finishing and publishing posts more frequently so as to give myself an ongoing feeling of accomplishment and momentum. I finally found that with my current approach of writing narrowly-focused essays about my own self-improvement endeavors.
But the soul still needs to regularly dwell in the word of God. I needed a new structure for doing that. And lo and behold God, through my church, provided me exactly what I needed.