Rereading the Bible
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.