Hear the Word

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to try to be more disciplined in reading the scriptures regularly and thoughtfully, by following the M’Cheyne bible reading plan. This is certainly the most ambitious I’ve been, the plan goes through the Old Testament once, and the New Testament and Psalms twice in each calendar year, which amounts to 4 chapters per day!

While I would struggle to find the time to sit down and do that much reading every day, I’ve found that with an audio bible I can use time that otherwise would be wasted. 20 minutes walking each way to work, going for runs, cleaning the dishes. All time spent doing mindless tasks that could be spent doing something useful – Hearing the Word and praying about it. These days you can choose your version and get the whole bible on one cd as MP3s and put them on iPod, I’ve been listening to The Bible Experience, a dramatic reading of the TNIV with sound effects and so on – a little cheesy to be sure, but it does help bring narrative sections of scripture to life.

Listening to an audio bible is not quite the same as reading through it – you can’t read the same verse 5 times to mull it over, but this is the way that people had access to God’s work for millennia before the invention of the printing press and the near universality of literacy. And we have the luxury of being able to look it up again when we get home.

So if you’re struggling to read the bible, why not engage with the scriptures old-school, and Hear the Word?