In 2010, over seventy people at Woodbury Community Church took The Challenge, a challenge to read through the Bible over the course of one year. Many of those who took The Challenge completed that challenge yesterday. Many did not, but in taking The Challenge, they read more of the Bible in 2010 than they did in 2009.

In 2011, I want to challenge you once again to attempt to read through the Bible. There is nothing that will change you as much as God’s Word. D. L. Moody once said, “This book will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from this book,” when referring to the Bible. When we spend time in God’s Word, we are changed.

In 1959, D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, the minister of Westminster Chapel in London wrote, “There is nothing more important in the Christian life than the way in which we approach the Bible, and the way in which we read it. It is our textbook, it is our only source, it is our only authority. We know nothing about God and about the Christian life in a true sense apart from the Bible. We can draw various deductions from nature (and possibly from various mystical experiences) by which we can arrive at a belief in a supreme Creator. But I think it is agreed by most Christians, and it has been traditional throughout the long history of the Church, that we have no authority save this Book. We cannot rely solely upon subjective experiences because there are evil spirits as well as good spirits; there are counterfeit experiences. Here, in the bible, is our soul authority.” (D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, Second Edition, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976, p. 6.)

One of the common requests that I received last year was for a reading plan that would allow us to read through the Bible chronologically. This year we’ll use the Chronological Reading Guide, which was put together by Back to the Bible Ministries. You can download your copy of the Chronological Reading Guide by clicking here.