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The Six-to-one Bible Reading Plan is a guide for reading Scripture
every day in manageable, bite-sized chunks, getting something of
the New Testament and something of the Old Testament every day,
and yet weighting the emphasis where it needs to be for Christians
- in the New Testament. I feel like just because the Old Testament
takes up almost 80% of the Bible doesn't mean we should be spending
80% of our time there. All of the Bible reading programs I could
find did that. I liked the idea of a formal plan for reading, but
I just couldn't find anything that fit the way I wanted to read
the Bible.
I started thinking about developing a new plan
for myself when my first attempt at a Bible reading program, the
"Bible in a year" program, went way too fast and required
that I hurry through my Scripture reading without much time for
meditation, reflection, incorporation and application to my life.
I tried the "Bible in Three Years" program, but that had
way too many days, and often weeks, where there was no New Testament
reading anywhere to be found. Plus, I objected to putting the same
amount of energy and time on reading Deuteronomy Chapter 17 as I
was on John Chapter 17. As Christians, I believe we need to know
the words of Jesus in a deeply penetrating way, and none of the
other programs out there had the emphasis correct. However, I am
deeply committed to studying the Old Testament in my readings -
as a matter of fact, I love the Old Testament - so I didn't want
a program that did not include it.
It also needed to include the Psalms and Proverbs.
I heard once that we should read the "Proverb of the Day"
every day, and if you divide the 150 Psalms up by 5, you can read
the entire book of Psalms every month if you read five a day. That
was all well and good, but by the time I finished that, I didn't
have any time to read anything from either the Old (Pentateuch,
History, and Prophets) or New Testaments.
So from that frustration sprang the Six-to-one
Bible Reading Plan. Over a three-year period, you will have read
the New Testament six times (twice a year), the Old Testament once,
Psalms three times (once a year), and Proverbs nine times (three
times a year). Each day contains on average three chapters - and
takes approximately one-half hour of time.
The breakdown in percentage of time devoted
turns out to be: NT 51%, OT 25%, Psalms 15%, Proverbs 9%.
But the most important thing to me is that there
is something from the New Testament every single day.
In this program, the New Testament Chapters
tend to be organized with a small book, then a large book, and then
a small book, and then a large book, etc. This is not strict, but
I heard that suggestion on the radio once and tried to incorporate
that idea where it made sense.
The Old Testament is largely chronological historically,
which is not exactly the order of the Bible. I wasn't rigid about
that, but I tried to intersperse the Prophets in the history books
where they would have been preaching at the time. Again, not perfectly,
I'm sure, because I'm not a Bible scholar, but that was my goal.
If this sounds useful
to you, you can download the self-extracting zip file here:
(bible_reading_pgm.exe)
It is a self-extracting zip file of a Microsoft
Excel file. Download and open it and save it to your hard disk.
Change the first date to the date you are going to start the program
and the rest of the dates change automatically. I would suggest
printing one page at a time. The entire document is 27 pages. You
can stick one page in your Bible and print the next page when you
need it.
If that doesn't work on your computer, you can
download the MS Excel spreadsheet
(bible_reading_pgm.xls), but be aware that it's 35 Meg and will
take a while to download.
Please e-mail me your thoughts about the program
to the address at the bottom of this page.
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