Back in 2022, I read the full Bible over the course of a year following the 49-Week Challenge from YouVersion. I shared some details here, and it went well.
I’ve been planning to re-read it in full again in 2026, but I wasn’t sure where to start. I could certainly run the 49-Week Challenge again, but wanted to perhaps mix things up.
I recently read Andy Stanley’s book “Irresistible“, where he suggests that traditional reading plans like that aren’t ideal. From his book:
“Perhaps someone gave you a reading plan or devotional book that included portions of both testaments. A little bit of Old, a little bit of New, a little bit of Old, a little bit of New. That’s how most of Protestant Christianity operates today. Put the Old and the New in a blender and serve it up as a single dish. Most preachers mix and match Old with New. Most Sunday school teachers do as well. Most reading plans are organized around the blended approach, as are most Christian books, calendars, greeting cards, and, of course, Christian music.“
So what to do? I reached out to Andy through his site to see if they had any suggestions, hoping that someone from his team might send a link to something they suggest, but I never heard back. So, I turned to ChatGPT and spent a while working through it in there.
I got ChatGPT familiar with the core concepts from the book, then got to work on a plan. In the end, we simply inverted the reading to do the entire New Testament first, then follow with the Old Testament.
Once the daily plan was laid out, I spent some time to have it generate short summaries for each day, and pull in some thoughts from “Irresistible” to headline each major section. The result is this PDF that you can download right here.
As for Andy’s book, I highly recommend it. It gave me some new ways to look at scripture, and you should get it here and give it a read. I may or may not do a full summary/podcast at some point, so until then here is a PDF of all of my notes if you want to check them out.
Like you, I find great value in re-reading the bible. Also like you, I’ve several times used a reading plan to get through the entire bible in about a year. Several years ago, I decided to take a different approach and went to a ONE chapter-a-day plan, which means a 4-5 year commitment. (FWIW, I regularly rearranged what bible book to focus on next, not necessarily switching between old and new.) I’ve completed that twice now, and it was great! Now I’ve started a new plan, slightly inspired by Dennis Prager’s Rational Bible series, where he went verse by verse (mostly) adding commentary. I’m doing that for myself in other bible books, and I’m taking my time and going deep. I’m often comparing different translations and pulling some commentaries. The good news, digging that deep means you discover a lot of stuff you might have missed in a faster reading. The bad news is that I won’t finish a full pass until I’m around 175 years old! So, I’m getting more and more selective in what I’m studying. I also still highly value “co-reading” where I have a partner going through the same text and commenting and it continues to amaze me how other people find stuff I totalty missed, and vice versa.
Wow, those are some great approaches! I’ve shared a lot recently about going slow and deep with my reading, but the idea of “Bible in a year” largely contradicts that. I love the idea of a chapter-a-day, which may become my 2027-2032 plan!