This tract was reconstructed from notes taken in a meeting more than twenty years ago, where these things were shared as a personal testimony of what the Lord had used to grow a hunger for His whole Word.
I have never met a Christian who was sorry he read too much of God's Word. I have met many, myself included, who are sorry they read too little of it. If I could put one thing into the hands of every believer, it would not be a book about the Bible. It would be a plan to simply open the Bible itself and read it, all of it, for the rest of their life.
Before I say anything about how to read, I want to settle a question that keeps many believers from reading two-thirds of their own Bible: Is the Old Testament really for us, or was it just for Israel? Let's let Scripture answer.
When the risen Christ opened the Scriptures to His disciples, He did not point them to a New Testament that did not yet exist. He pointed them back to the very books some believers today are tempted to skip:
And from those same books (the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms) He opened their understanding, so "...that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations..." (Luke 24:47). The gospel we preach was already written there. Jesus Himself said so:
Peter agreed. Writing to remind the church of what mattered most, he said,
Notice he puts the words of the Old Testament prophets and the words of the New Testament apostles side by side, as one authority, one memory the church is to keep. When Stephen stood before the council in Acts 7 and gave the fullest gospel sermon recorded in the book of Acts, he did not begin with the empty tomb. He began with Abraham, and worked patiently through Joseph, and Moses, and the wilderness, and the tabernacle, because you cannot show a man his need of Christ, or God's pattern of deliverance, without first showing him the history God spent fifteen hundred years writing.
Paul tells us plainly why that history was recorded and why it is still ours to read:
The Old Testament is not a book we have outgrown. It is the record of everything God did to prepare a people for His Son, and it is still, today, "written for our learning." If we will not read it, we are throwing away three-fourths of what God troubled Himself to write down for us.
I did not come to love reading the whole Bible on my own. The Lord used other people, and other men's example, to show me it could be done and that it was worth doing.
The first push came before I was even old enough to understand it. I remember my grandfather's Bible, worn, marked up in his own hand, verses underlined and dated in the margins next to notes of what God had shown him that day. I did not need him to preach the gospel to me in words. His Bible, and the life that came out of it, preached it to me just by sitting on the shelf where I could see it used, day after day, year after year.
Later, a visit with a brother named Carman put something practical in my hands: a one-year Bible reading chart, laid out day by day so that the whole Bible, Old and New Testament together, could be read in a single year. I had never seen anyone actually plan it out before. It had not occurred to me that "read the whole Bible" was something you could simply schedule and then do.
So I tried it. The first time through took me about eight months. I remember finishing the last page of Revelation and feeling like I had walked the whole length of a country I had only seen postcards of before. I did not stop there. I went back to Genesis and started again, and then a third time after that. Each time through, I was seeing things in Leviticus and Chronicles and the minor prophets that I had walked right past the first time, simply because now I could see how the earlier chapters set up the later ones.
Along the way I found I was not the only one who had made a practice of this. Hudson Taylor, whose life of trust in God started the China Inland Mission, made it his rule for decades to read through the Scriptures and never lost his hunger for them. His biographers tell of the day it came out just how far that hunger had carried him,
George Mueller, who by faith alone fed and housed thousands of orphans in Bristol without ever once asking a man for money, reportedly read the entire Bible through on his knees well over a hundred times across his life. Whatever the exact count, it was not the reading itself he prized, but what the reading did to his soul. In his own journal he wrote of the discovery that changed his devotional life for good:
Dr. Mark Cambron, who co-founded Florida Bible College and founded the Messiah Broadcast, serving as its president for four decades, taught me a different discipline again: reading repetitively, and reading in several places in the Bible at once, so that Scripture began to explain Scripture.
The Navigators put one more tool in my hand: a structured, daily plan for walking through the whole Bible methodically, book by book, year after year, instead of leaving it to whatever felt convenient that morning. Between Carman's chart, Taylor's and Mueller's example, Cambron's method, and the Navigators' daily discipline, I came to see that reading the whole Bible, and reading it again, and again, is not a special calling for a few unusually devoted men. It is simply what is set before every one of us who has been given ears to hear it:
You do not need my testimony, or Hudson Taylor's, or George Mueller's. You need your own. The only way to get one is to open the book and begin, not just with the New Testament, but with all of it, from Genesis to Revelation, on some kind of plan that will actually carry you all the way through.
If you don't already have a plan, our Bible Reading Plan generator will build you a day-by-day schedule through the whole Bible, at whatever pace fits your life, and let you track each day as you go. Whatever plan you use, use one, and do not put it off. Read it all, and read it often, all the days of your life.