The best book EVER.

A story of love and redemption. Struggle, promises, and hope. Faith and prayer. Sacrifice. Forgiveness.

The Bible.

You see, I'm a Christian, a live-it-out-daily (or at least I try) kind of Christian.  My faith is personal, not just a church service.  BUT I am not very good at sitting down and reading my Bible.  The biggest reason is not because I don't want to or because I don't have time, because I DO.  There's ALWAYS time, even when we don't think there is. The biggest reason I don't read my Bible very often is because I don't have a clue what to read!  It's a big book, where do I begin? I always find myself in the New Testament because that's what speaks most to us in this day.  I often use Bible Gateway.com to look up a specific topic area, writing down all the verses that apply to it.  I love that.  It is helpful.  It does speak to my heart. But, as I've been learning recently, the Bible is more than that.

"We mistakenly treat the Bible as if it were arranged by topic--you know, the world's best compendium of human problems and divine solutions.  So when we're thinking about marriage {for example}, we run to all the marriage passages.  But the Bible isn't an encyclopedia; it is a story, the great origin-to-destiny story of redemption.  In fact, it is more than a story.  It is a theologically annotated story.  It is a story with God's notes.  This means that we cannot understand what the Bible has to say about marriage by looking only at the marriage passages, because there is a vast amount of biblical information about marriage not found in the marriage passages. In fact, we could argue, to the degree that every portion of the Bible tells us things about God, about ourselves, about life in this present world, and about the nature of the human struggle and the divine solution, to that degree every passage in the Bible is a marriage passage." (Paul David Tripp, What Did You Expect?)

SO.  I've always wanted to do this and now I'm more motivated once again to read the Bible, the ENTIRE Bible, cover to cover.  To tie together the origin-to-destiny and everything-in-between story.  I've got my chronological Bible reading plan printed and I will plow through it bit by bit.  I don't care if it takes me a few months or more than a year, I just want to read every word. But it's all part of the great story.