Build Up

Outline

Scripture Reading

Dive Deep

Go Long

Build Up

Re-Write

Prayer

Pray Your Heart

Air It Out

Take A Walk

Pray the Scriptures

Journal

The Why

So a quick history of me with the Bible reading plan...

It came out of a time in college for me and a couple of my best friends as we got together for accountability and to grow in the LORD.

It was during this time that one of my good friends came to us with a Bible reading plan idea he got from one of his professors at the time.

The professor commented that he personally felt, reading the Bible the whole way through once in a year wasn’t enough. He felt, we should be so captivated by God’s Word, that we should read it multiple times through in a year.

And thus this plan was born.

The What

For the context of this series we are in, this Bible reading plan is going to feel like a hybrid between the first two (Dive Deep & Go Long)

Because it is a hybrid between the first two, this is a bible reading plan that I believe, can radically change the way you will read and understand the Bible.

This is a Bible reading plan that at the start, is going to seem like it is too much to do but I promise you it is not actually as much as it seems.

Essentially it is this. Your goal is to read 25-35 chapters of Scriptures per week.

Yes you heard me correctly. 25-35 chapters per week. But not just any random chapters. They are specific. Let me show you what I mean.

The How

The 25-35 chapters is to be done, in the same book of the Bible.

Here’s what I mean. If you were to take on this Bible reading plan:

Step One: Pick a book of the Bible you want to study.

Step Two: Apply this plan.

It would look like this -

If you were to want to study the Book of Ephesians

Ephesians has 6 chapters in total. So in order to apply this plan your goal would be to read the whole book of Ephesians, start to finish, 5 times in a week (as you will have read 30 chapters).

Or if you were to pick a longer book like Matthew, which has 28 chapters, your goal would be to read the book of Matthew the whole way through just once that week (as you would have read 28 chapters).

Or if you were to pick an even longer book, say the book of Psalms which has 150 chapters, you could read anywhere from 25-35 Psalms per week, which would mean you would finish the book in anywhere between 4-6 weeks.

Resources

Now I know 25-35 chapters per week sounds like a whole lot of reading

But I wanted to break this down and provide some resources to show it is much more manageable than you would initially think.

25-35 chapters per week means roughly you are reading 3-5 chapters every day.

I use a phone app called Streetlights. It has all of the New Testament and they are adding the Old Testament in as well but it has various readers with some music in the background. Its a free app and I want to use it for our example.

To show this is more manageable than expected, 3-5 chapters per day of the book of Ephesians equates to roughly 14-18 minutes per day if you were to read along with the audio bible.

This is why one of the main resources for this method to help out is an audio bible.

I will put some here on the screen but the key to using the audio bible with this particular method, is you have to read along with it. The audio bible is to keep you on pace but also focused to keep you from getting distracted.

Most times, the thing that makes our bible reading take much longer is we start, we get distracted and go do something, or we send a text, check some social media etc instead of, in the case of this plan, dedicating just 20 minutes every day and you’ve nailed this method!

The Addition

Now with how this plan is set up, it is going to be hard to journal and tear apart individual verses like the dive deep method. However, this method is great to use as a supplement to the dive deep plan.

There are two different: additions or creative ways to amend this plan

Build Up in Layers

Build Up to Dive Deep

Build Up in Layers is what I used when I described first doing this plan back in college.

We would shoot for the 25-35 chapters per week after picking a book we wanted to study. The time reading through the book the goal was like Go Long - big picture big themes. The goal was not for individual verses but the overall theme of the book.

And then, with each next time we read through it, we progressively slowed down through the book to look at individual verses. The reason for this is because after the 3rd time reading through the book, you can start to remember where the author is going next, so now you can look at verses without tearing them from their context.

OR you can begin to see patterns and themes in the individual verses.

Build Up to Dive Deep would be using this method, doing your 25-35 chapters per week of a book, and using that, to find verses then you want to study deeply and after identifying them, using the Dive Deep method to examine those verses individually in a deep way.

The Build Up method is a great way to ‘build up’ your capacity to read larger amounts of Scripture, understand them deeply, and apply them to your life.