a big challenge for the entire next year

As both a new stimulus for our spiritual quiet times and a commitment for frequent fellowship together in the scriptures, my wife and I have prayerfully decided to commit to reading the entire Bible over the next year. I have never read the entire Bible from cover to cover and am very excited to finally have exposure to all that God intended for us to read. We are praying that God will grant us wisdom during our journey through all of the scriptures and continually humble us as we continue to learn as much as we can about his majesty and glory.

After being led to this decision, I began to review the many ways that this opportunity could be undertaken. Some one-year Bible reading plans use a list of what scriptures to read each day while using your current Bible and other plans have Bibles to purchase that are rearranged into daily readings either (1) chronologically or (2) with separate NT, OT, Psalms, and Proverbs sections. I found the later choice more appealing and gives you a neat perspective from each portion of scripture every day.

Next, we needed to decide which translation we would use as a one-year Bible. (I found this translation comparison graph as a wonderful resource during my research). The NASB is my favorite translation for Bible study and exposition, but we needed one that would both read and flow well for daily reading to more easily grasp the overall context and meaning of the scriptures. This led us to consider both the NIV and NLT translations. Of these, I found the NLT to be a much easier daily read and thus was a simple choice for us (especially since we both grew up with the NIV and were interested in approaching the scriptures from a new angle).

The One-Year Bible Online web page has links to the daily reading passages that match with our Bibles from Tyndale Press and so we are able to read anywhere we have internet access as well. The passages link to Bible Gateway, which is an incredible scripture resource that will let you lookup and compare literally dozens of scripture translations.

We are over one week into our study and are very excited already at how much we have enjoyed both reading through the scripture and discussing our thoughts and questions with each other - it has both brought us closer to each other and to our Savior.