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My Personal Bible Study

Acts 17:11 reminds me that I am supposed to be in the Scriptures every day, but laziness, what else could it be, always stood between me and personal Bible study.

Last year I came up with a plan that would ensure I spend time every day in a personal Bible study.

I can come up with all kinds of reasons to tell myself why I should or should not do something and yet I feel very accountable if someone else is effected by what I do or don’t do. So I came up with the perfect Bible study for me.

I sent a blind copy email to everyone in my mailbox. All those people who send jokes, cartoons, political barbs, you name it, they all got the same email. It was a request for help. Some of these people I had not seen in years and some I had never met, but if they had emailed me something then they received the email.

In the email I explained that I had always wanted to make a Bible study plan that I would keep to, a Bible study plan that would find me in the Word every single day. Unfortunately I am too weak. I wrote that the purpose of my email was to try and get people to help me, after all, shouldn’t someone in seminary read their Bible every day? All they had to do was agree to let me send them an email every day. I told them my plan.

I wrote that I had a ‘Read the Bible Through In A Year’ plan, you can find them on the internet, and that I would read the daily listed section every day in my Logos software, which is great because I can enlarge the type, then cut and paste it into an email and send it to all those who agree to help me. I said they don’t even have to read it. They can just delete it, but the point is that I won’t know who is reading and who isn’t and that if I think someone is depending on me I will do it every day.

Last December I sent that email to over one hundred and fifty people. Not quite twenty people gave their approval. Since then we have lost one person and picked up one person, so we are still at eighteen, not counting me. It is interesting that some of these folks do not go to church. I don’t know if they are reading or not, but I don’t know that they are not.

Every now and then I will get an email with a question on a passage or someone will ask me how I feel about a section or I will get a request to resend an email from a particular date. I know one man is saving all his emails. These occasional responses tell me that some are reading along with me, even if only occasionally.

At first there were times, right at bed time, that my wife would have to remind me. There were times I had to get up early because we had guests or we were visiting friends, but that’s why God made laptops! The bottom line is it only takes forty-five minutes a day, even for a slow reader like myself, to read through the Bible in a year.

The first month is the hardest. Now, often after I’ve sent the daily email I find myself still doing word searches and just playing. What started as a plan for daily Bible study has really become a daily devotion.

Proud? No. Grateful? Yes.

Submitted by Richard S. Adams