Daily Bible Reading

I read some Bible each day. Most days. Unless something gets in the… oh, look! A chicken!

As I read, I am reminded of the little girl who saw her grandmother reading the Bible and asked her if she were cramming for final exams. I’m old enough that some attention to final exams is not out of place, but I’ve been doing the almost-daily Bible reading since college.

It started with dating a girl from Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. IVCF was very much into “daily devotions,” including Bible reading. I wanted to impress the girl, and since she gave me pop quizzes on my daily devotions, I had to be on my biblical toes.

I had little acquaintance with the Bible except for the major stories that we pick up in Sunday School. Since I started weekly preaching at age 19, my daily excursions into the Bible were more like cramming for Sunday morning. Every worship service was a major exam. I knew there were saints in my congregations who knew the Bible better than I ever would.

So, to impress a girl and to keep the saints from seeing my ignorance, I read the Bible every day.

Then I encountered Elton Trueblood and the “Yokefellow” movement. I liked the idea of being a card-carrying Yokefellow, having pledged to daily spiritual disciplines, including Bible reading, and wearing my discreet little yoke pin, which was a humble way of proclaiming that I was a better Christian than those without said pin.

All the wrong reasons, but I found that being a citizen of the Bible made me a better citizen of the world, and so I think I do that almost-daily Bible reading not just out of habit, although that’s surely part of it by now, but because it’s the newspaper of the world in which I live.