New Year’s is the traditional time for evaluating our lives and making a list of things we’d like to change in the coming year.  Many times for Christians, getting into God’s Word in a more regular and systematic way is on that list.

A while back I discovered Professor Grant Horner’s Bible Reading System.  As the title says, I think this is the best Bible reading plan in the world.  I tried many times over the years without success to read the Bible through in a year’s time.  Part of the problem for me was that all of the plans I previously tried were sequentially structured.  Some did split the daily reading between an Old Testament and a New Testament passage but within the testaments the sequential model was still followed.  Horner’s plan is different.  Instead of reading straight through the Bible or even straight through the Old and New Testaments simultaneously, you read one chapter a day from each of ten lists of books – ten chapters per day.

This variety made all the difference for me.  With the sequential model I had a tendency to get bogged down in books like Leviticus or Isaiah when reading 8 or 10 chapters per day.  With Horner’s plan I read a bit from the law and the prophets, a bit from the historical and wisdom books and parts of the gospels and the epistles each day.  Not only does this variety help me maintain momentum but it gives me a better sense of the overall flow and structure of the Bible as well.  I’ve found myself several times reading a passage and then reading about the fulfillment of that passage in the same day or within the same week.

Using this system, you will read through the entire Bible in 250 days.  The plan can be customized as you go along.  For example,  Proverbs and Acts are their own lists -  meaning you read through each of them every month. After  reading through them several times, I began substituting additional chapters in the books I was still working through for the readings in Proverbs and Acts.  I’ve heard of other people structuring the readings so they read through Romans every month rather than Acts.  It’s easy to adjust the plan to meet your needs after following it for a few months.

If you’d like to try Dr. Horner’s plan in the coming year, the link below opens an Adobe file giving you all the details you need:

Professor Grant Horner’s Bible Reading System.

If you do try it, let me know what you think after a few weeks.

May God richly bless you in the New Year!