If you take on the challenge of reading through the Bible, consider praying through the Bible. A practical way to move into this is by underlining or highlighting the passages where God is speaking to you. Make notes in the margin of your Bible, and in this way, you will make your Bible your own personal study and devotional Bible. Keeping a journal will help you track of your own growth as a disciple of Jesus Christ. There will be times when your experience of reading the Bible is as dry as a desert. Understand that God honors the discipline we bring. Sometimes seeds are planted even when we are not aware of them. Journaling is a way to connect seed-moments, moments of growth, and harvest moments that yield significant fruit in our lives.

Reading the Bible is a means of encountering God and being transformed by the encounter. By reading the Bible we are able to read what God has said and the record of what God has done in human history. Best of all, God continues to speak through the Bible and to act in the lives of those who read it. Be warned, though, the Bible is not just a neat and tidy catalogue of life lessons. It is much richer than that.

When you read the whole Bible, you discover an overarching story of redemption that spans many generations of biblical characters. Knowing the Bible’s basic plot helps you move through the Bible. It not only makes reading the Bible more enjoyable, it also gives you context clues to understand what you are reading. In elementary school, children are taught how to use “context clues” to discover the meaning of words. Often you can guess at the meaning of a word by how it is used in the sentence and in the overall conversation. Context clues also work when you are reading the Bible. As the plot unfolds, knowing what stage of the plot you are reading can connect you to the writer’s intent.

Wanting to know more about the layers? The Layered Bible Journey arranges your readings so that the biblical plot unfolds in the right sequence of events, which is a big deal since the books of the Bible are not arranged in chronological order. There are chronological reading plans available that also attempt to solve this problem. The problem with these types of plans is that the reader is made to plod through side-by-side accounts of each time period from multiple books of the Bible. The time period being addressed then appears to move in slow motion. What should be inspiring becomes wearisome. The goal of this reading plan is to help readers uncover the stages of the biblical plot in a way that pulls readers along, so that you experience the Bible in a way that is closer to how you experience any good book.