2017 Bible Reading Challenge

Are you ready for the 2017 Bible Reading Challenge? I hope so! I truly believe that you will find this year’s challenge a wonderfully unique challenge and that it will be richly rewarding for you.

Let me give you a little background first. Three years ago, I read the Bible the whole way through for the first time ever. If you haven’t done that yet, I hope that you will do that –either this year or at some point. Doing that for the first time developed a passion in me to share the joy of this accomplishment with my readers and so my 2015 Bible Challenge for my readers was to encourage them to read through the Bible chronologically.

After two years in a row of reading through the Bible, I really wanted to continue my regular time in the Word for 2016 but was unsure of which direction to go. That is when my pastor offered our church family a challenge to read through the Gospels five times in the year of 2016. I decided to take that challenge and wow! It was so rewarding! He had us read the same chapters five days in a row. By the end of the week I was so much more familiar with the passage than I would have been if I would have only read it once.

And so –as I eagerly anticipated this year’s challenge– I decided to ask him if I could share it with my Growing4Life readers, as well. He graciously gave his permission and so I am pleased to present to you Pastor Chandler Cutting’s Bible Challenge for 2017–

Read Through the Epistles Five Times

You will find a PDF Schedule for download and printing below. On it, will be each week’s passage along with five boxes numbered 1 through 5, so that you can put a check mark in the box for each day’s reading. Committing to read the passage five out of seven days is really helpful because it gives us two days to catch up or to work on other studies we may be involved in.

[gview file=”https://growing4life.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Read-Through-The-Epistles.pdf”]

You will also find these three activities to do for each passage at the top of the sheet, so be sure to get yourself a blank notebook or journal.

1. Give each chapter a title
2. Find two promises in each chapter
3. Find three commands in each chapter

If you prefer, you can get two different color highlighters and just highlight in your Bible for the promises and commands. Do what works best for you, as this will help you to continue the study after the initial interest wears off.

Also, be aware that you may not find obvious promises or commands in each chapter. Sometimes they will be inferred or be found by looking at context. And you may not even find two promises or three commands for each chapter. Instead, you may find one promise and seven commands. That is okay! Write down what you find. These are just activities to get you thinking about what you are reading and not hard and fast rules to follow.

As an extra help, you will find some very helpful thoughts about scripture study by R.A. Torrey here. I highly recommend reading this post before starting any plan of Bible study. I know you will find it most encouraging!

I plan to refer to our Bible reading occasionally throughout the year and will try to post related articles and quotes on my Growing 4 Life Facebook page. I hope that you will consider following that page (if you aren’t already).

I pray God’s greatest blessing on you as you strive to know God and grow as a believer through the reading and studying of God’s Holy Word in 2017!