Do you have a Plan for 2022?⤒🔗

The first congregation of Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was in a Welsh town called Sandfields. In his biography of Lloyd-Jones, Iain Murray relates how the pastor made efforts to get his congregation into the Word of God on a daily basis. It was his conviction that every pastor should go through the complete Bible in one year — “That should be the very minimum of the preacher’s Bible reading.” But he also believed that such a discipline of Bible reading would be beneficial for all church members. Initially, the Doctor developed his own Bible-reading plan which would take the congregation through the entire Bible in one year. However, eventually he discovered the read­ing plan developed by Robert Murray M’Cheyne and, for the rest of his life, this was the plan he used personally and that he recommended to parishioners.

Thanks to a godly elder in my previous congregation, I’ve become convinced that every Christian should have a plan for disciplined, regular reading of the Scriptures. I’ve been prac­ticing it now for several years and the blessings have been enormous. In past years, I’ve sometimes followed the reading plan recommended by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and used with great profit by many. You can easily find M’Cheyne’s plan with a quick Google. If you come across his original plan, it includes some helpful notes about the practice of daily Bible reading, including the dangers and advantages. M’Cheyne’s plan knits together family Bible reading and individual Bible reading, and you could do it that way. I’ve personally taken a different approach with it — I’ve used the family Bible reading in the morning and the individual Bible reading in the evening. With M’Cheyne’s plan, in the span of a year you go through the entire Old Testament once and the New Testament and Psalms twice.

Every late December this topic gets raised on blogs and social media. Every year naysayers trot out objections. My chal­lenge: why not just try it? It doesn’t have to be M’Cheyne’s plan, it could be any one of a variety of plans. Just search for “Bible reading plans.” There are one-year plans, two-year, and even three-year plans. You could work your work through the Old Testament in 2022, and then do the New Testament in 2023. There are plans that you take you through the Bible chrono­logically, either in the order events happened or in the order the books were written. Aside from those, you could decide to spend the entire year focusing on one book of the Bible – perhaps the Psalms or Isaiah. You could read a chapter a day and journal your way along, taking notes about how God is revealing himself and how he is pointing you to Christ. When you get to the end, start over and read it again.

Whatever route you take, if the Word of God is precious to you, and if you believe that reading it will enrich your faith, then shouldn’t you have some type of plan in place to help you stay on track? And what if you do fall behind? Sometimes events conspire against the best-made plans for Bible reading. If you haven’t fallen too far behind, do some catch up on the Lord’s Day — that’s a great time for some extra Bible reading. If you’ve fallen really far behind, just carry on with your plan and don’t stress about it. You’re not doing it to tick boxes or earn God’s approval. It’s not meant to be a mechanical duty, but a delightful spiritual exercise which leads to prayer and worship.

If you don’t already, let me encourage you to take up this practice as of January 1, 2022 — it won’t always be easy, but ultimately you won’t regret it! If you do take up the challenge, let me know how it goes.