Far be it from me to disparage a New Years resolution, especially one so ennobling as the resolve to increase one’s own Bible literacy. I know that, by offering a way to salvage a failure, it is theoretically possible I might make the failure more likely in some cases. But I think it is far more likely that there are many who have quit sometime in March, or in Numbers, whichever came first.
I write this post because I think that people who read the whole Bible every four years are better off than people who read less than half the Pentateuch in the first quarter of every year.
Furthermore, I do not want you to give up you resolution! Reading the Bible in a year would be fantastic!
But, if you do fail, I want to show you that your efforts need not be in vain. You can take advantage of the progress that you made and build upon it. As I have written before:
Here’s the key point: if your resolution doesn’t have failure built into the plan then you will probably fail to keep the resolution.
So You Forgot Your New Year’s Resolution… What Now?
My proposal is simple. Keep reading! Don’t think about it as a project to complete with a deadline. Think about it as a daily habit. Make it a daily habit. It doesn’t matter how soon you finish. What matters is that you read the next chapter every day.
If you attempt to read the Bible in a year, and fail on one day to keep up with your reading schedule, the only way to salvage the project is to do even more reading on another day. In other words, any failure makes another failure more likely. You are trying to sprint up a steeper and steeper hill.
But what if you simply want to develop the habit of reading the Bible every day? Then, if you miss a day, it is a setback in acquiring the habit. But there is no added workload. The only thing you need to do is to resume the practice. There is no additional work that must be done to keep a schedule because there is no schedule. All that matters is the habit of reading one consecutive chapter a day.
Resolution Salvaging & Habit Stacking
I did this. I got in the habit of reading one chapter a day. Eventually, as that became routine, I added a second chapter because I generally desired to finish with the Bible in less that three years. If some day I would feel too squeezed to complete that task, I planned to only read one then resume two a day (I don’t think that has happened yet, though I do occasionally miss entire days).
By the way, I think James Clear would call this “habit stacking.” If I had started at two chapters a day, maybe I would have been unable to succeed. But once I had one chapter down, adding the second chapter, was relatively easy and took root quickly (so to speak).
A Side Bible Lesson
But I can tell you that even one chapter a day, reading consecutively, is enough for you to get a new appreciation of the narrative. So I will add the following into evidence, hoping no one considers it so controversial that it distracts rather then supports the message of this post.
As long as I can remember, until reading the Bible woke me up last year, I thought I knew that Judah was (to be) the ruling tribe in Israel, because Reuben, Dan, and Levi got demoted from their place. That was how I read Genesis 49:3-12 and Jacob’s blessing of the twelve.
But reading straight from Genesis the Second Kings I was struck by the thought that
- I was reading one continuous story (which I would always have affirmed but now I really felt it, for lack of a better way of expressing it).
- Israel as a whole (not Judah especially) was the final main character
- Which means that the majority of Israel cannot be written off as a supporting cast for the story of Judah.
- And the majority of Israel is the Northern Kingdom
- And the tribes of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh who were directly adopted by Jacob (Genesis 38), are of central importance.
Of course, Judah and the Temple are important, an Israel is judged for establishing independent worship. But Judah is important because they are supposed to serve Israel and the Temple is important because God wants Israel to meet him there.
But we shouldn’t just read back Judah’s special status back into the narrative. First Chronicles is establishing a new reality, signified by its casting back all the way to Genesis (similarly to how Genesis 5:1-3 treats Seth, beginning the creation story over).
And then I found confirmation of everything I was thinking but wasn’t sure how to prove:
The sons of Reuben the firstborn of Israel (for he was the firstborn, but because he defiled his father’s couch, his birthright was given to the sons of Joseph the son of Israel, so that he could not be enrolled as the oldest son; though Judah became strong among his brothers and a chief came from him, yet the birthright belonged to Joseph),
1 Chronicles 5:1-2
So, apparently, once the birthright leaves the firstborn, the father is free to land on the son he believes most qualified. Judah’s royalty was prophesied, but it had nothing to do with who was counted as the firstborn. The transition from exile to restoration, if anything, is when Judah becomes firstborn.
(This may have implications for Jesus being a Judahite yet being from Galilee…)
All of this was from the habit of reading a chapter of the Bible a day. I had read the passage in First Chronicles before but never considered the implications because I hadn’t really been aware of the flow of the narrative.
Habit Stacking & Resolution Salvaging
Notice that habit stacking and resolution salvaging are two paths to the same place. You can start small and build up, or you can go big but keep making progress even when you can’t keep up with your original plan.
And if you do this, how are you failing? God wants you to read His Word and know His Word. He hasn’t given you a time table. If a Bible reading resolution leads to you reading the Bible multiple times over the next decade, that will be a victory. The only thing you will lose is an entirely hypothetical “better,” that might only prevent you from really doing better than starting over every year.
And you might lose your bragging rights. Since humility is a virtue God loves, that is a victory too.