Bible Reading Plan for 2022, Jesus' Kingdom and Suffering, and Parliamentary Procedure
Weekend Newsletter: January 1, 2022
Happy New Year!
As I mentioned last week, every new year is a great opportunity to renew your commitment to spending time in God’s Word. If you haven’t picked your Bible reading plan for 2022, it’s not too late!
I strongly recommend the M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan, which I have personally used for around twenty years. The full version of the plan takes you through the New Testament and Psalms twice each year, and through the rest of the Old Testament once each year. Or, you can break up the reading by going through one “track” at a time.
(See the full plan here.)
I have published one years’ worth of short Bible meditations that you can access for free at another website, Free Daily Bible Study. You can receive each day’s assigned reading and meditation by email, or you can download audio recordings of the meditations through podcast.
Again, though, there are a number other Bible reading plans as well. Here are two resources that I offered in last week’s weekend newsletter:
18 Possible Bible Bible Reading Plans (Ligonier): If you’d like to find a new plan for this year, this page offers a number of possibilities. For any of the plans, you can download a convenient PDF to see each day’s reading assignment.
Bible Reading Plan Generator: If none of those out-of-the-box options work for you, this is the last item on Ligonier’s list. The Bible Reading Plan Generator is an amazing tool to let you get really specific about building your own plan to read through the Bible.
Genuinely, the main thing is to find some plan that will engage you with God Word each week. Then, stick with that plan. Get in the Word, and stay in the Word in 2022!
This Week’s Post
This Week’s Sermon
"Out of Egypt and into Nazareth" - Matthew 2:13–23
In the first half of Matthew 2, we saw the right response to Jesus’ rightful kingship through the worship of the wise men from the east. In the second half of Matthew 2, we will see the wrong response to Jesus’ rightful kingship through the rage of Herod. Together, we are seeing that no one can remain neutral to the kingdom of Jesus. Either we will worship him, or we will seek to destroy him. Jesus Christ is born the king, and as the king, his reign makes a definite claim over our lives. More than that, this passage also puts a very clear expectation of suffering on those who would follow Jesus. If those who were associated with Jesus merely by the incidental details of the time and place of their births suffered because of Jesus, how much more should we who associate with Jesus by faith expect to suffer? While this is a challenging truth for us to ponder, it comes with a corresponding promise, that Jesus claims his kingdom through suffering.
Last week, I published an article on the website PCA Polity, that you may find helpful: The Biblical Foundations of Parliamentary Procedure:
I want to argue a controversial idea: if we were to tease out all the principles that the Bible teaches for resolving our disagreements in the church, we would end up with a system that looks very much like what we call parliamentary procedure. Rather than seeing parliamentary procedure as arbitrary or arcane, and far from seeing parliamentary procedure as a hindrance to the work of the church, I want to argue that parliamentary procedure reflects the Bible’s own teaching for how to make decisions as a church.