Reading the Bible Every Morning

For several months now, I been trying to spend some quiet time every morning reading a chapter from the Bible and praying. (For the first few days, I might have read less than a chapter, but on the other hand there were a few mornings that I read more than a chapter.) I'm not a morning person, so when I started this routine, I thought it would be a lot harder than it's been. In all of these months, I've only neglected to spend this quiet time with God a few times. For me, it's mostly been a commitment to have a "quiet time" every morning.

I just wanted to blog about this to remind myself what I've been doing, and hopefully to encourage other people that might want to start spending a few minutes with God every day. It's been a good experience for me, and I'd recommend for others to give it a try, too.

I started this routine by reading the Gospel of John. When I finished John, I think I read Matthew (my memory gets fuzzy after a few months). After Matthew, I read Mark (which inspired me to post a blog entry about what I had read). Then I must have read all of Luke (which I had recently read part of due to the "One Year Bible" project in the evenings with my wife). Then I jumped to the end of the New Testament to read Revelations. After that, I went through Leviticus.

Since then, I've been reading through the Old Testament starting at Malachi going backwards (I start with the first chapter of each book, and then when I finish the book I go to the previous book). I've read Malachi, Zechariah, Haggai, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Nahum, Micah, Jonah, Obadiah, Amos, and Joel.

There's some method to my madness. I'm still reading through the "One Year Bible" every night with my wife. Before this year, I had already read the entire New Testament, but I had only read the Old Testament from Genesis to where I stopped in Isaiah (for no particular reason). So by reading from Malachi backwards, I'm trying to finish reading the Old Testament before the end of December. (If I stay on schedule, I think I'll be able to say that I've read the whole Bible by sometime in November.) The Bible's a big book, but I'm kind of embarrassed that it's taken me so long to finish reading it. (And then, I'll just put myself on a schedule of re-reading.)

Since I finished reading Joel this morning, I plan to start Hosea tomorrow. (By the way, I'm not trying to brag since most of these books that I've read in the morning aren't very long.)

By the way, I've been doing all of this recent Bible reading using the ESV translation (which has been my favorite translation for several months now). I still refer to other translations, but I've been using the ESV as my primary translation for reading and studying the Bible.

Correction: This probably means more to me than anyone else, but I think I started my morning readings by reading the Gospel of Mark. Then I read Matthew and Luke. (I have read John recently, too, but it was part of my "One Year Bible" readings in the evening.) I guess then point is that I've been reading in such a disorganized order that I've lost track of what I read when.