Numbering Our Days 2

Think about this: we have long-range goals, and short-terms plans for every aspect of our lives.  We have a five-year plan for saving for the down payment on our dream house.  We have the forty-year plan to prepare for financial independence at retirement age.  We know the very year both our careers and our finances will merge to make it reasonable to start a family.  But when it comes to our personal responsibility to master the Bible, the catch-as-catch-can plan is by far the most popular.

The most far-sighted of us may maintain the four-chapters-a-day-habit to read through the Bible in a year, but sad to say, even this worthy project is often set aside after one completion (or even before!) or becomes a ritualistic habit maintained year in and year out with little conscious thought. We wait for some mystical sense of where to arbitrarily begin reading (in five minutes or less) in order to find Scripture’s pertinent counsel for our pressing immediate needs.  The enormity of Scripture, the overwhelming responsibility of mastering it all, our own laziness to remain spoon-fed babies, its demand that we “do” it and not just “hear” it, our great ignorance of how to proceed in a personal, voluntary pursuit of learning apart from the forced school-test-required reading setting—all this has had a part in paralyzing us from immersing ourselves in His Truth.

Bible Study Cycles

Psalm 90 tells us seventy years is the normal course of life—eighty by reason of strength.  Instead of squandering this time resource  with undisciplined or nonexistent time spent in God’s Word, let’s use this general truth as a flexible framework around which we could design a lifetime of consistently deepening time spent searching the riches of God’s Word. Of course, no one has a guarantee of even another day, but thinking long-range about ideas to involve ourselves with God’s Word certainly won’t hurt. The worst that would happen is that we’d live long enough to achieve all our goals!

Now what I’m about to suggest can only come to you as a suggestion because this has not been my lifelong habit. I thought about too late in life to qualify as a lifelong habit! I don’t know of anyone who has tried this, but I would very much LOVE to meet someone who has and see how it has worked for them. I think the idea has some very powerful advantage, but without much field testing, it’s hard to know how successful this particular experiment would be.

Here’s some of the things I think would be advantages:

• It allows anyone to set short deadlines to finish various study modules,while allowing adequate time to cover all the Bible books, and a variety of topical studies.
• It provides a way to slowly and consistently add study tools that would be put to use, not sit decorating on shelves.
• Its basic cycle is compact enough to be repeated several times during a normal lifespan.
• It allows for flexibility and variation while maintaining a framework that is substantial enough to provide direction, even after a “lapse” of following the plan.

The suggestion? Design a lifelong personal Bible study plan on a ten-year cycle. Within each cycle, time can be designed to read through the Bible, as well as undertake study projects designed to take about a month each. Obviously someone could vary this idea and try for five or three or eight year cycle sets. Or someone could design modules to take more or less time than a month. I do think for most people, though, a month sounds like a lot of time to have to plan anything! Here are some other thoughts about this unusual idea:

• A monthly pattern over ten long years allows for 66 months to overview each Bible book individually for a month, and still leaves over forty month-long topical projects. That’s a lot of Bible interaction!
• Consistently reading through the Bible could continue along with these special study projects, but the first year of a ten-year cycle could be a special read-through the Bible to prepare the overall plan for the next years by narrowing the choices of the topical studies, and choosing the focus of the individual book studies for the coming cycle.
• While a person could decide to add such a Bible study program to their daily devotional routine, a different option would be to keep the devotional time of Bible reading, prayer and meditation as a faithful habit, and then carve out special study appointments with yourself once or twice in a week, with supplementary reading occurring at other times.
• With a written plan in place, it would be easy to change topics or books for the month, reinserting the bumped book or topic into a later time slot. But it does mean keeping a notebook or file of the overall plan, a source list, and a topical studies list that can be updated whenever additional worthy sources or ideas come along.