Join us as we show you how to read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation next year, using the "Journey Through the Bible" method of Church and Family Life. Visit read2022.com for more information.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and this is our last podcast in 2021. And we're here to encourage you to read the Bible through in 2022. We're here to encourage you to take the Read Through the Bible Challenge. And we're going to give you tips on how to do it, and we're going to walk you through some reasons that you should do it.

And so we're just really here to encourage you to read through the entire Word of God. And I have the pleasure of having with me my fellow elder, Pastor Trent Moody. Hey, Trent. Hey, good to be here. Good deal.

This is really nice. One time I called one of my daughters and I said, hey, I was getting ready to go preach at a father-daughter retreat. And I said, what was the most helpful thing that I did as a father? And she said, oh, Papa, it was when we would gather in the morning and read the Bible. That was the most helpful thing we ever did as a family.

And so, you know, it's high-impact kind of stuff. And we want to encourage families to start January 1st and push, you know, push through the year. And, you know, there are lots of reasons to do this. The most important reason is that the law of the Lord is perfect, and God uses His Word to sanctify and encourage and help His people. And what's the value of giving yourself and your children an understanding of the whole council of God, the depths of the gospel from Genesis to Revelation, not Jesus loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, but 500 different data points about how that looks in all of the contours of history and problems that people have.

So I want people to have a deep understanding of the gospel and reading through the Bible gives you a deep understanding of it. So our challenge here is to read through the Bible with your family next year. And one issue needs to be resolved. Can your children handle it? Absolutely, they can handle it.

I know they can handle it because I've seen them handle it. And you'll find that they'll understand more and more as the years go by. They'll understand a little teeny bit, and then a little bit more, and a little bit more. And if you read the Bible several times, they'll have a really good understanding of the flow of history. So, yes, they can handle it, absolutely they can.

You know, Timothy was taught since he was a child. In Nehemiah, you had the babies being brought to hear the Word of God. There's a reason for that. So, resolve that issue. The children can handle it.

So, how do you navigate this? Absolutely. I think it begins with us preparing a heart of gladness. That's something I found in the lives of my children, is when I'm excited about something, they are excited about something. And what should excite us more and what should give us more a heart of gladness than the Word of God?

You know, Jesus, you have the words of eternal life. These are the words of eternal life, and it should produce gladness in our hearts. Yeah, delight spreads. And you wanna spread delight for the Word of God, for sure. Amen.

So you also need to choose a method. How are you going to do it? You don't want to just kind of flip open the Bible. You want to have a method. And I'm here to recommend using the method that we use in Journey Through the Bible.

This is a book that I wrote for, particularly for families to read through the Bible with really quick, practical tips to understand what's in that book. And so, I'd like to tell you what I do. This is what I do every morning. I have it on my phone. I have this website on my phone.

And as you can see there, you have an overview. We're in the overview page right now. You have today's reading, and there are various webinars that we've done on the chapters of the Bible. You can take notes. So here's, I'll just show you what I do.

So today is November 23rd on this screen, and the reading is Ezekiel 31 and 32. So that's the Old Testament reading. And you can go to the New Testament reading as well. And it typically nets out at two to three chapters in the Old Testament and one chapter in the New Testament. If you're reading something and you want to understand it a little bit more deeply, all you do is highlight a section and look what pops up.

Well, over here, as you can take some notes or you can even ask a question, but over here is one of the neatest parts of this. And you want to hear what Matthew Henry said about it? Click on it. It'll take you right to that chapter. I use this almost every day.

Or you can find out with John Gill. John Gill has a commentary on every single verse of the Bible, and you can just go find that exact verse. And then, you know, you're there on the website. This is a page in James, and of course, there's a chart of when the book was written along the sands of time of history. There's a theme, faith that works.

James is the author. He writes it in 42 to 49 A.D. If you want to, as a dad, try to get a grip on this book, you know, when you're driving to work, you can listen to this audio, an audio message that's there. And what that'll do is it'll tee you up to know a lot more about that book for your children. There's a memory verse.

This one is James 1, 2 through 4. And then there's an overview. It's a quick overview. I wrote these to try to help a dad just have a really quick acquisition of what this book is about, so he can read this in probably 30 seconds, And he can tell his children about it, or he can just read it to his children. But it gives a man a quick tool, not a long theological treatise, but just a quick tool for how to understand what's ahead in that book.

We also have a hymn for every book of the Bible. We found hymns that declared the basic message of that book. And so here it's, Faith is the Victory, Faith of That Works is dead. And so the hymn is there. You can sing that together as a family.

And then there are other things to help you. If you wanna use them... I mean, when we read through the Bible as a family, we read the Bible. But these questions have really come out of my reading the Bible with my family. After doing this for over a decade with my family, I ended up with about 400 pages of notes.

That's where this book came from. And so there were questions that I would ask my children, and some of them are here, and the explanation of the theme, and who's the audience, and key verses that are in that book, and particular lessons to learn. I mean, a dad can just say, hey, here's some lessons in this book, and they'll discover more. And then an outline of the book. So a few study questions if you want to do that.

And, you know, in each book of the Bible is, you know, where is Christ in this book, and you know, various things like that. So that's what I do. I get up in the morning, and I look at my phone, and I click on there, and I know exactly what I'm going to read. And I love it. I use it all the time.

It's helpful to me. Yeah. You know, what you're saying just reminded me that is how Matthew Henry got all the information for his commentary was through his father, teaching him, you know, through the same type, type principle here. You know, I think the main thing is that we keep it simple, that we don't get overwhelmed with the task and think that we need to be this tremendous theologian or pastor to be able to do this. This is what God has required every father, every head of household to do, is to open God's Word and to bring it to their family.

So don't... I think the greatest part for me has just been to remember, keep it simple. One is for me, but it's also for my children. And you'll also be amazed at what they pick up. And I was amazed just last night with one of my children, I asked a question that I didn't think they would know, and they immediately, one of the younger ones immediately answered that question.

Isn't that funny? And it was a beautiful thing. So yeah, keep it simple. Yeah, and I would just say, focus on the words. You don't have to give a sermon.

You're not giving three-point sermons. You want them to love the words. And so focus on the words. I also, I found it very helpful to have a consistent time and place to read. That's what we did.

We went into our living room at seven o'clock in the morning. Why? It teaches us the number of days that we might present a heart of wisdom. Everything in life wages war against doing this. The devil doesn't want you to do it.

Some of your friends don't want you to do it. A lot of times your kids don't want you to do it. And, you know, so you just need to pick a time where you do it. And I would just say, you know, don't decide every day whether you're going to do this. Decide one time.

You're going to do it every day. It's your life. The Word of God is my life. So, but pick an unbreakable time. It's got to be an unbreakable time or it's gonna get broke.

Now, sometimes you get behind and we would sometimes catch up by getting an audio version and listening, or sometimes we would read more chapters just to catch up, you know, to try to do that. You're gonna get behind. Stuff is gonna happen. Don't worry about it. Don't sweat it.

It's going to happen. Just figure out how you're gonna catch up. Sometimes we didn't catch up, we just skipped forward. Okay? So, you know, but the thing is, make a consistent time.

Right. Yeah, there's all these things to fill our time. But you know, a challenge for dads that I like to give is to be a good tour guide of the Bible. Use this time to show your excitement, but also to bring out... Sometimes as I'm reading the Bible to my children, I'll turn to the maps And I wanna show them where these things happen and kinda give them an idea of where was Jesus walking when he said this?

And he was by the seaside or he was in the mountains or in the garden. And so bringing those things and bringing these pictures to our children can be a helpful aid in that. And so, take ownership of this as dads. Again, back to what we thought, or what we said earlier, keep it simple, but also it's important. So let's be good to our God of this journey that we're making through the Bible.

Yeah. And one of the things that we did is we had our kids read, everybody read. If they could read pretty good, everybody read five verses, and we would just go around, around and around, around. If they couldn't read, we might have them read three words or something like that, or coach them to say words, three, five, whatever like that. Kind of repeat after me sometimes.

Yeah, repeat after me. And you know, your kids will learn how to read better doing that as well. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the things that you have on this app or on this webpage here with the journey through the Bible that I love is the hymn.

We have a hymn. So we need to sing about the doctrines of grace and the truth of God's Word, and it's such an aid. One, it's an aid in our worship, but it's also an aid in memory. It helps us to remember the truths of Scripture, and it shows that we have joy in what we are doing. There's nothing more beautiful than to have a house full of singing, especially singing the truths of God's Word.

So I really appreciate that part of what you have there on that website. Yeah, and of course, isn't it idyllic, your family is sitting there, reading the Bible, everyone is perfect, everyone's acting perfectly. Right? Pete Slauson Always was in my house. Pete Slauson Oh, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, sometimes, you know, Bible reading time means there's going to be some discipline, there's some bad attitudes, you know, people are kicking against the goads, you know, in your house, maybe, who knows who it might be, but you might have to deal with an erring child. So don't worry about that. That hasn't destroyed the reading. Now, it might slow down the reading.

It did in my house. Sometimes I'd have to go and take a child and deal with them in some way. But It's helpful for a family to deal with the problems that bubble to the surface, and that might slow you down. And it's showing proof of God's Word. I mean, it's showing the depravity of the heart, and it's also showing us a great opportunity to preach the gospel to our children and remind them of why they need Christ.

Yeah. Amen. Well, okay, so this is the Read Through the Bible in 2022 challenge. We hope you take it up. Are your children ready for the trials ahead?

Will they have the Word of God embedded to hold them up? They'll probably face difficult times. The older you get, the harder it can get. And You want your children to be prepared. You want them to know God.

You want them not to know a silly little God. You want them to know a mighty God. So we encourage you to read through the Bible with your family. Do it every day. Catch up as you have to catch up.

Now, you can go to a website and get, and have this resource that I've been talking about. It's at www.reed2022. Hope to see you all there. Hey, thanks for listening, And we'll see you next year on the Church and Family Life podcast. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast.

We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to churchandfamilylife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.