I just want to remind you of something you may have heard me teach at some point. I think it is helpful to distinguish between Bible reading and Bible study. In fact, I think it is a healthy approach to divide whatever time you give to being in the Word into these two categories, rather than trying to combine them.
Combining reading and study can be frustrating. You often feel like you’re not retaining anything. You often wish you could be somewhere else in the Bible. You try to study something without much motivation for it. Often you lose heart and give up on both!
Keeping these components separate helps your reading. This way you feel free to keep moving, to scan lists, to not pronounce every name or look up every single place on a map. You are free to enjoy getting the bigger picture of what is going on. (If you want to stop and look something up, go for it, but you don’t have to!)
Keeping “study” separate helps your study. In your “study” time you can study whatever part of the Bible you want (go where you are motivated), in whatever way you find most helpful (marking or colour coding the text, studying with a commentary, drawing charts or pictures to depict the flow of content, paraphrasing the text in your own words, memorising key verses or sections, meditating on a single phrase or verse, journaling in response to the text, studying a character, a topic, a Bible book, a chunk of Bible books, etc.)
This site is focusing on the reading part of the package. Stay in the Word, and remember not to lose heart by trying to study every detail you read.
Just a line to let you know that I am grateful to God for your website and the emails. A good start to 2009. Thank you.
With the reader being “live” rather than recorded in a book, I find it quite motivational. Also, I’m finding it really profitable to read both your comments and those of other people from all around the world.
I listen to an audio Bible whilst reading, as hearing the intonation and expression of the narrator helps me even more to appreciate the context and also my mind is kept from wandering as I need to keep up!