I realized years ago that believers live in a very imperfect world. We are fish swimming upstream and there is nothing that the enemy of our soul would love more than to keep us weak and ignorant of God’s holy Word.
I knew that I had to find some form of ‘structure’ around my daily Bible reading. I found that I would get on a spiritual tangent and spend all my time in Proverbs, or shift over to Psalms, or again to the book of Acts for fun and adventure. But if you asked me who Habakkuk was I’d say “Habak who?” Since I knew that every word in the Bible is inspired something had to change.
I then tried a straight read through the Bible for X amount of minutes per day. The problem was that life would happen and I’d lose track and such. I needed something with a bit of ‘drive’ behind it. Something that would push against the desire of my flesh to stop. That’s when I heard about ‘Bible in a year’ idea. The idea is that the whole Bible is divided into daily reading segments so that the whole Bible is consumed in a calendar year. Genius! And so I began.
I spent time on Odb.org and simply clicked their daily Bible reading link but recently I discovered that it was linking to a Bible company whose ethics I can no longer suffer. So last week I disconnected myself from Biblegateway.com since its owned by the questionable company Zondervan.
The only problem was that now I had to search for another website that I could go to that would allow me to check to see where I was at and where I should be at. I found most of the websites either linked to Zondervan, or, didn’t have the audio Bible option (which I like). Most were just a list of 365 days and you had to figure out what day you were on today. Too hard for me.
Thankfully I found this website which appears to have solved my problem. It’s the International Bible Society’s site and although their website defaults to the NIV version (shame on them) at least it has all the features I need and doesn’t send traffic to Zondervan’s site.
I also understand that this great website has a pretty impossible-to-remember URL for people who want to actually go their daily so I made a permanent page here at W.O.T. for you to remember more easily:
This turned out to be *even better* than the program I was on because it also breaks out Psalms and Proverbs into their own daily chunks which is just awesome. Truly Psalms and Proverbs need to be consumed daily and it looks like this program does it. Here is a quick tutorial to set yourself up and navigate the tools:
Also, it is helpful to note that you should right click (or whatever the option is on your device) and ‘open in new tab’ when you click the Bible links because for some reason it doesn’t open a new tab/window automatically.
Although there is an option to change your start date, you may want to consider just starting today and leave it as January 1st. It is useful, I find, to have January 1st always as the start date. I don’t have a lot of explanation as to why but I just find it helps keep momentum.
Finally, you may want to consider doing what I plan which is to drop where I am in my current plan and use this. Mine didn’t have the Psalms/Proverbs section so now everything is different from where I am. I think it’s very worth changing the plan to synchronize with this one.
