Before You Start That Bible Reading Plan

It’s everybody’s favorite time of year again: time to pick a shiny new Bible reading plan. Maybe a fresh Bible, a new journal, some highlighters, and a devotional to go with it. You’re prepared. January 1 will roll around, you’ll crack open Genesis, and you’ll sail triumphantly into December 31.

Maybe you’re the kind of person who actually makes it to December every year. If so, great! You can read the rest of this article for someone you love who isn’t.

For most of us, though, the pattern is painfully familiar. We charge through Genesis and Exodus, slam into Leviticus some time in February or March, and stall out. Guilt or discipline might drag us a little further, but the joy we felt reading those first familiar stories evaporates. The plan keeps going, but our delight does not.

The problem isn’t that you’re a bad Christian or you don’t love God enough or you lack discipline or willpower.

The problem is the way you’ve been taught to read the Bible.

In this article, I’m going to offer four guardrails for your Bible reading this year. Not a new plan, but a new way of thinking about Scripture so you can actually love reading it.

Guardrail 1: You Have a Broken Method, Not a Lack of Faith

It’s not you. It’s the way you’ve been taught to read the Bible.

If you grew up in a church or a Christian home, see if this sounds familiar:

As a child, you were presented with Bible stories one-by-one like fairy tales floating in space. You learned names like Adam and Eve. Noah and Abraham. David and Goliath. Zacchaeus up in his tree. But nobody ever showed you how any of these people fit together into one story.

Then you got older, and they stopped telling you stories. Instead, you heard specific verses. Sunday sermons quoted the Bible, but it was always some verses in the middle of a book you couldn’t quite remember—2 Corinthians, maybe. The sermons might have been meaningful and good, but they mostly felt like disconnected material you were supposed to remember. The preacher was the expert; you were the audience.

At some point, maybe even this year, you decided to fix that. You were going to read the Bible for yourself and finally see the whole picture. So you grabbed a Bible-in-a-year plan or opened YouVersion, and January was awesome. You knew these people! There were some new faces, maybe some new questions (what’s with those giants in Genesis 6?), but overall, it felt good—right up until Israel left Egypt, and the stories you knew gave way to page after page of laws and sacrifices and censuses.

That’s where Bible reading plans go to die.

Here’s what I want you to hear today: You don’t have to white-knuckle your way through Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Chronicles, Romans, Revelation, or any other book. You’ve just never been taught how to read the Bible in a way that makes sense.

That’s what the rest of this article is about.

Guardrail 2: Stop Changing Plans; Change Your Posture

I’ve tried a lot of different Bible plans over the years: reading straight through from Genesis to Revelation; the Navigator’s plan that balances Old Testament, New Testament, and Psalms; chronological plans; yearly devotionals with a daily readings and reflections; audio Bibles; you name it.

Maybe you’ve thought what I used to think:

If I just find the right plan, I’ll magically care more, and Leviticus won’t be quite so hard this year.

Sorry. None of those plans changed my life.

A new Bible reading plan will not magically make you better able to hear the Word of God or understand His plans for your life. Switching up the order of the readings won’t suddenly help you “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). And for what it’s worth, I still tend to finish my “yearly” plan sometime the following March. A twelve-month plan takes me fifteen months on a good year.

Here’s what changed everything for me. It wasn’t one big “aha!” moment, but a slow realization over years of reading with lots of different people:

Real delight in Bible reading comes from understanding, and understanding comes from curiosity-driven reading (plus a few simple structures to keep you oriented).

If you don’t know what you’re reading, or why it’s there, or how it fits into the bigger story, you’re never going to love it. It’s not your fault: it’s impossible to delight in something that’s confusing and guilt-inducing.

So instead of blaming a lack of love or faith or discipline, I want you to pay attention to one thing this year: understanding.

Understanding does not require a seminary degree or years of parsing ancient Hebrew and Greek. It starts with two very ordinary shifts:

1. Read with curiosity instead of obligation.
2. Give your curiosity somewhere to land. (We’ll talk about those “simple structures” in the next section.)

Here’s what curiosity looks like In practice:

• What are you actually curious about right now?
  Is it those giants from Genesis 6? Is it what’s happening in 1 Corinthians besides the famous “love” chapter you only hear at weddings? Is it why everyone quotes Jeremiah 29:11 but skips the rest of the chapter?
• What has confused you for years?
  What makes you look up every time it’s mentioned in a sermon, or makes you shrug guiltily when it comes up in conversation?

Curiosity doesn’t have to be grand. Your questions don’t need to be worthy of an article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. They do, however, need to be yours.

In other words, you don’t need a better plan; you need a better posture.

Curiosity, not obligation. Delight, not discipline.

In the next section, we’ll look at some simple structures that give that posture a practical shape.

Guardrail 3: Use Simple Structures, Not Heroic Willpower

The Bible is almost unfathomably long. The Protestant Bible is not one book; it’s sixty-six books arranged into 1,189 chapters spanning thousands of years of history, culture, art, and theology. When you think of it like a little library instead of one big book, you immediately see the problem: nobody can keep that much in their head without help.

There’s a lot of value in memorizing Scripture. But instead of relying on heroic willpower, a few simple structures can act like shelves in that library. They give you places to organize the characters, places, and stories you’ve heard all your life so you’re not constantly wondering, “Where did this come from?” and “Where does this go?”

All these books are much easier to understand once they each have a place.
Photo by Paul Melki on Unsplash.

This section briefly introduces two such structures. They’re not the only ones, and they may not end up being your favorites, but they’re easy to start with.

Structure 1: Old and New Covenant

You probably already know this one, but it’s absolutely foundational. And it’s a good way to start thinking of the Bible as a series of overlapping structures rather than a single jumbled mess.

Old Covenant: The covenant God makes with Abraham to make him the father of a great nation, with descendants as uncountable as the sand and the stars (Genesis 12, 15, 17). That promise shapes the entire story of Israel: “the people of God” are defined by family connection to Abraham and (later) life under the law given through Moses.

New Covenant: The covenant Jesus announces at the Last Supper: His body and blood given for the forgiveness of sins. Under this covenant, the people of God are no longer defined by blood relationship to Abraham but by faith in the saving work of Jesus, the Messiah.

You don’t have to remember all the details. Here’s the simple version:

• Old Covenant: God’s people are Abraham’s family under the law
• New Covenant: God’s people are all who trust in Jesus, by grace

How to Use This With Your Reading Plan

Every time you open your Bible this year, ask:

1. Is this story happening under the Old Covenant or the New Covenant?
2. What does that tell me about how people relate to God in this passage?

If you’re in Deuteronomy, you’re under the Old Covenant, and everything is shaped by lineage, land, and law. If you’re in Acts or Romans, you’re in the New Covenant, and the big questions are about faith, the Spirit, and (gasp!) including people who aren’t from Abraham’s family.

It sounds almost too simple, but these two questions will keep half the confusion in check.

Structure 2: Six Movements of Scripture

If Old/New Covenant is the foundational structure of Scripture, these six movements¹ show you the storyline:

1. Creation—God creates the world and declares it good. (Genesis 1–2; echoed in John 1, Hebrews 1)
2. Fall—Humanity rebels and everything fractures (Genesis 3–11)
3. Israel—God chooses one family (Abraham’s) to bless all nations and shapes them into a people (most of the Old Testament)
4. Jesus—The promised Messiah arrives, fulfilling Israel’s story and launching the New Covenant (the Gospels)
5. Church—After Jesus’s ascension, the Spirit forms communities of believers across the world (Acts and the New Testament letters)
6. New Creation—Jesus returns, evil is defeated, and God’s people live with Him forever (Revelation and all the many passages of hope pointing there)

That’s it. Six words you can actually remember: Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, Church, New Creation. Okay, seven words.

How to Use This With Your Reading Plan

When you open to a passage this year, ask:

1. Which movement am I in?
2. How is God relating to His people in this movement?

If you’re in Judges, you’re in the Israel movement, and the relationship looks like cycles of rebellion and rescue. If you’re in Ephesians, you’re in the Church movement: people from every background learning to live as one new family in Christ. If you’re in Revelation 21, all the way at the end, you’re looking at the New Creation movement: God finally dwelling with His people in a renewed world.

Put these two structures together (two covenants and six movements) and watch what happens:

• You’re in Romans 8?
  • New Covenant, because it’s after the cross.
    • Therefore, our relationship to God is shaped by faith, grace, and the Holy Spirit.
  • Church movement, because Jesus has ascended and the Spirit has come.
    • Therefore, God relates to His people through the Holy Spirit in communities of believers.
  • Conclusion: Paul is talking about life in the Spirit for ordinary believers, not about going back to animal sacrifices or ethnic membership in Abraham’s family.

Romans 8 is still dense, but now it has a label and a location. It’s not just theological soup.

If all you did this year was follow your curiosity and place every passage you read inside these two structures, your Bible reading plan would already go more smoothly and make far more sense than before.

But if you’re thinking, “Jerry, memorizing a few words is not going to magically turn me into an expert,” you’re absolutely right. Structures don’t remove the mystery; they just give you a place to stand while you explore.

In the final guardrail, we’ll look at what it means to go deeper layer by layer without feeling like you have to understand everything at once.

Guardrail 4: Expect Layers, Not Instant Mastery

Even with a posture of curiosity and a couple of simple structures in place, it’s still easy to fall into two traps:

1. Curiosity trap: “I’ve been in the dark for so long—now that I can see, I must understand everything this year.”
2. Understanding trap: “I’ve known those two structures since I was a kid. I thought this was going to make me an expert.”

This last guardrail is here to pull you back from both edges:

Think of the Bible as a fractal: it always rewards deeper attention with more understanding, more delight, and more curiosity, in an inexhaustible cycle.

If you’re in the first group—the “I must conquer it all this year” crowd—take a deep breath. You can’t. Thousands of years of theologians from all over the world haven’t dug up every diamond in the Bible. You’re not going to finish the job in twelve months.

But you are going to scratch the surface, and that’s the point of this guardrail. Everywhere you look, there will be more to see.

My encouragement to you: pick one of your interests and go deep this year. Don’t follow a thousand rabbit trails. (I say that as someone who loves a good rabbit trail and has years of half-finished notes and rough drafts to prove it.) Choose one theme, one question, one part of the Bible that sounds interesting or cool, and let that be your “deep dive” alongside whatever reading plan you’re following.

If you’re in the second group—thinking, “this feels too basic”—you’re right that these two tidy structures leave out a lot. History, geography, poetry, theology, the way Biblical covenants mirror ancient Near Eastern treaties… we’ve barely touched any of that. Maybe you already instinctively slot every passage into the right covenant and movement without thinking.

For you, my invitation is: pick a new lens. This year, you might decide to read with one of these focuses:

• Geography: Where, specifically, are these stories happening? How does the land shape them?
• History: What’s going on in the wider world while this story was happening, or while this book was being written?
• Literature: How do poetry, history, and letters work differently? How does genre impact the story?
• Prophecy and fulfillment: Track one prophet (Isaiah, for example) and note how often his language resurfaces in the New Testament.
• Temple language: One of my favorites! Every time you see words about dwelling, presence, holiness, priesthood, sacrifice, or pomegranates, make a note. Watch how this thread runs from Eden to Revelation (and bring a huge notebook).

Putting It All Together

Put all four of these guardrails together and you get a very different kind of Bible year:

• You stop blaming your faith for a broken method.
• You chase curiosity and understanding instead of being overwhelmed by guilt.
• You use simple structures instead of sheer willpower.
• And you give yourself permission to go deeper one layer at a time, instead of trying to master everything at once.

That’s what I want for you this year: not a perfect reading record (I certainly won’t have one), but a growing, sustaining delight in the God who speaks through these words.

If you’d like a simple reminder of all this—something you can tuck into your Bible or screenshot on your phone—I’ve put these ideas into a short, printable Bible Reading Plan Preflight Checklist. It walks you through the four guardrails as a series of questions to ask before you start (or restart) your plan this year.

After you download it, I’ll also send a few brief emails in January to help you actually use these guardrails in real life, not just nod along and forget them by February.

1. Cribbed from Joshua McNall’s Long Story Short. ↩