Oh yeah.

You can read it twice in a year! I even found a project recently where you read the bible in 90 days! Now that's a challenge.

For someone who has never read the bible at length before, the idea of finishing that thick book in a year is very daunting. To make it worse (temporarily), let's look at some bible stats:

The bible contains:

• 66 books (39 in old testament, 27 in new testament)
• 1189 chapters (929 in old testament, 260 in new testament)
• 31,103 verses
  

 Whew! Why did God give us so many words!? (Although many wish God had said more.) But we shouldn't let these numbers overwhelm us. As mentioned in another FAQ, it boils down to whether you truly believe that the bible is God's word. If you do - you should be aching everyday to read it, not even able to put it down! King David wrote Psalm 119 to express how much he loved God's word (law) - meditating on it day and night!

As some of you may have done already, dividing 1189 chapters by the 365 days in the year gives you about 3 1/4 chapters a day. If you think about it, that's not very much at all (bible chapters usually don't even take up one page in most bibles). All the Lord of the Rings fans out there - how much of the book could you read at one sitting? More than four pages?

If you're not much of a reader, I understand that reading even those ~3 pages a day will be challenging. All I can say is - how much do you really want to do this? How much do you really want to hear God's words? There are so many riches waiting for you to discover in God's word.

I'll end with a hard saying. If reading the bible is letting God speak to us, then conversely, every time we got for a period without reading the bible, we are effectively shutting God's mouth, closing our ears to His words. Let's change that in 2008.