5 Reasons I Could Never Finish The Bible (Until I Found This One)
For twenty-something years I never made it out of Genesis. This year is my fifth time through the whole thing.
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." I have prayed those words my whole life, and for most of it I never truly understood them.
I grew up in church. I went to a Christian school. And I still spent more than twenty years trying to read the Bible cover to cover, getting lost in the long lists of names and laws and quietly closing it somewhere in the Old Testament. Every single year.
I figured I was just bad at this, that everyone else understood something I never could.
I was wrong about why I kept failing. Here are the 5 reasons this Bible finally carried me all the way through in a year. It started the moment I noticed one small mark on the page.
Open to Psalm 23. Beside the verse you will see a small asterisk, which means it is a promise from God. Follow the arrow down the page and there is a short note from Dr. Stanley that explains the verse in plain English.
Here is the one for the shepherd line. David spent his whole life keeping sheep, so he understood that no one protects you, provides for you, or leads you better than God does. With the Lord as your shepherd, you already have everything you will ever need.
I had read that psalm a thousand times and never once understood it like that. Notes like it are scattered throughout, alongside a series called Life Examples, and together they turn the verses that used to go over your head into the ones you look forward to.
Once I saw it could be this clear, I finally understood why it never had been before.
Think about how you were taught to read it. Start at page one in Genesis and push straight through to the end. So you do. You get through creation and Noah and Abraham, and then you reach the long stretches, the names you cannot pronounce and the laws about things that have nothing to do with your Tuesday, and you lose your footing. Right about there, every year, you quietly stop.
That is not a willpower problem, it is a design problem. An ordinary Bible was built to be a reference you look things up in, not a book you read from front to back. You were handed the wrong tool and then blamed yourself for it.
The one that finally worked for me was built the opposite way. Here is what a single morning looks like.
This is the Charles F. Stanley Life Principles Daily Bible, a devotional Bible, which means the hard part is already done for you. There is no app to open and no plan to print. You turn to today's date and read four short pieces: a little Old Testament, a Psalm, a Proverb, and some New Testament.
- Open to today's date, with nothing to catch up on
- A little Old Testament, a Psalm, a Proverb, some New Testament
- About fifteen minutes, and your morning is done
Because every day is a mix instead of one long march through Leviticus, you never hit that wall. The morning you always used to quit simply never comes.
It turns out I was far from the only one it carried across the line.
More than 400,000 people read this Bible, and most came to it the way I did, as people who had already given up. They were not more faithful or more disciplined than you. They simply ended up with the right book, and it carries a 4.9 out of 5 across more than 4,368 reviews.
Read these and tell me they do not sound like you.
If you have quietly carried that guilt for years, you can put it down today. You did not fail at faith. You were handed a reference book, told to read it like a story, and made to feel small when it did not work.
This is the one that is meant to be read. Fifteen minutes a morning, one date at a time, until the day it hits you that you have gone all the way through the Bible, likely for the first time in your life. It is 50 percent off today, down from $79.95, while the summer sale lasts.
Read The Whole Bible This Year, One Quiet Morning At A Time
The same Bible that carried 400,000 readers across the finish line, now half off while the summer sale lasts. Your first morning can be tomorrow.
