A Good Diet

There is no way I could follow the British Christmas holidays eating schedule all year round. There are some days where it’s a massive meal (perhaps with a chocolate every 20 minutes) and others where we might not eat for most of the day because we know we’ve eaten far too much the one before. All cultures have their festivals and often they involve feasting. Maybe you can’t relate to a traditional British Christmas, but you know of similar examples like weddings, even funerals or just general feast days.

Healthy eating involves regular habits. That’s a good illustration for reading the Bible too. Daily reading of even a small amount will likely do us better than one-off moments in the week.

The purpose of this article is not to go into all the reasons why reading the Bible daily is a good thing to do. Rather it is to point you to some places that might help you to do that this year. So here are a few. If you have your own that you’ve found useful I’d love to hear from you too!

Bible in One Year (BiOY)
Nicky Gumbel and the team at Holy Trinity Brompton have been producing this for a few years now. It’s available as an app on your phone and now comes in 3 formats: The standard version, a youth version and an express version. If you’re a new Christian, the express version is a great place to start!

YouVersion
This app has loads of different Bible reading plans that you can choose from. You can find most Bible In One Year plans here (including most of the ones in this article)  as well as more thematic plans that range from a few days to the whole year. Plus if you have children, it even has a Bible App for kids.

The Bible Project
This is from the same team that make the Bible Project videos. Now you can follow their plan to read through the Bible in a year, supported by their brilliant short videos which help explain each book of the Bible to you.

Reading Plan app
This has become one of my favourites. It’s an app where you can set what days you want to have readings on as well as choose from hundreds of different plans. You can get it in both the Apple app store and the Google Play Store.

Follow Andy Robinson on Instagram
Andy leads LifeSpring Church in Horsham, within our ChristCentral family of churches. This year he is going to share daily readings on Instagram for three different Bible reading plans: The Bible in a Year, The Chronological Bible in a Year and The New Testament in a Year.

Buy a book if you prefer
Perhaps you don’t like the online versions of these plans and would prefer something you can hold. Why not visit the Christian bookshop in Stockton and see what resources they have. Nicky Gumbel’s Bible in One Year is available in paperback format and you might find that there or be able to order it in. There are also plenty of Bible reading notes and devotionals that you can find out there.

There's certainly loads more out there and whatever you choose to do, remember that the point of reading the Bible regularly. It’s that we might encounter Jesus! Martin Luther, the German church leader from the 1500s said that:

“Scripture is the manger (or cradle) in which the infant Jesus lies. Don’t let us inspect the cradle and forget to worship the baby”.

I think that's a much better Christmas illustration to take into the New Year!