A daily devotional, too, can function as a helpful companion and guide.
D.A. Carson’s For the Love of God (Volume 1; Volume 2) and Nancy Guthrie’s Discovering Jesus in the Old Testament are two excellent options.
3. Don’t Just Do It Whenever In The New Year
Every morning we awaken to a fresh deluge of information.
We’ve now reached the point where, I’ve heard it said, an average weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than Jonathan Edwards encountered in his entire lifetime. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure makes me think.
It is imperative, then, to set a specific time each day when you will get alone with God. Even if it’s a modest window, guard it with your life.
Explain your goal to those closest to you, and invite their help. Otherwise, the tyranny of the urgent will continue to rear its unappeasable head. What is urgent will fast displace what is important, and what is good will supplant what is best.
If your basic game plan is to read your Bible whenever, chances are you’ll read it never. And if you don’t control your schedule, your schedule will control you. It’s happened to me more times than I care to admit.
4. Don’t Live as if Paul Lied
Did you know Leviticus and Chronicles and Obadiah were written to encourage you? That’s what Paul believed, anyway: “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15:4; cf. 1 Cor. 9:10; 10:6, 11; 2 Tim. 3:16).
What a sweeping word! Paul is going so far as to claim the entirety of the Old Testament is for you—to instruct you, to encourage you, to help you endure and to give you hope.
Few of you will conclude Paul is simply mistaken here.
