What’s your reading plan for 2024? The Bible should come first, above all other books, for God’s Word makes wise the simple. It rejoices the heart. It converts the soul. It’s a true and unchanging witness that is sufficient for all of our needs. As such, it should take precedent in our personal study, as well as in what we read aloud to our families. 

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by Church and Family Life Technical Lead Colton Neifert, discuss Journey Through the Bible. This daily Bible reading plan began as a book, but is now available as an app you can take with you anywhere. Great for personal study and family worship, it includes a daily Scripture reading, so you can read the Bible in a year. But there’s much more! For each book of the Bible: (1) read the outline and overview; (2) listen to the summary audio message; (3) sing a hymn on the theme; (4) ask important study questions; (5) memorize key verses; and (6) learn top 5 facts to remember. As you start 2024, read God’s Word and saturate your family with it! 

Learn more and download The Journey Through the Bible app here. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. We've got Colton Neifert with us, long-time employee here, and we're here to talk about reading through the Bible and Journey Through the Bible and our Bible reading app that we have. But really, we're here to really encourage you to read the word of God and saturate your family with it. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Colton, almost six years ago we created a website to help people read through the Bible and a year using all the Journey Through the Bible stuff turned it into an app about five, six years ago, and have been developing it all along.

We want people to read through the Bible. We want people to saturate their families with the Word of God, to give their families the whole counsel of God every year. So I wrote a book called Journey Through the Bible and it started with a web app and now it's an actual app that I use every morning. I used it this morning and it's really, really neat. So what do we want to do?

We want to encourage the people to read the Bible. Yeah, absolutely. We're all about proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture, and it's great to know that Scripture is sufficient, but if you don't know Scripture, it doesn't do you a lot of good. You know, just This week I'm reading a book, a really heartbreaking book by a feminist who talks about just the devastation of her feminism and her lesbianism and then her transgenderism taking on a man's name and just the absolute lostness her whole life. Cause she did not have the word of God to tell her who she is and how to operate in this world.

And people need the word of God. They need God and reading the word of God is how you know God. So we just, every year we issue an urgent call to read the Bible and we've created this app and book and web app. You can have it on your computer. You can have it on your desk.

You can have it in your pocket. And so let's just, let's just talk about, you know, how, how do you, how do you use it? You got a bunch of little kids in your house. The ages of your kids, you know, most people would say, well, you can't really, you know, read through the Bible in a year, read four chapters a day. Well, I think there are two things to say about that.

On the one hand, I'm gonna say yes, you can, because I've done it. But also, there are ways that you can read through the Bible as an individual or as a couple and not have your children have to sit there while you read four chapters. So let's just talk about that. Yeah. Yeah, I think just speaking to the book, I think it's a very helpful resource in terms of, you know, we have each book of the Bible laid out there with an overview, a hymn to sing, you know, for the Old Testament stuff we have, hey, here's Christ in this book, here's how you can see Christ in this book.

You know, we have study questions that really help you engage your kids. I think it's an incredible, incredible resource. And then we have the app that goes along with it, which, you know, is encouraging you to read through the Bible in a year. And that can be really hard, you know, with little kids, especially if you've got really young kids, because it's a lot of reading. But especially for you personally to go through the Bible and then maybe deliver some of the nuggets that you found in your reading today to your children.

Yeah. In our family worship, I had to take a step back and say, you know, I'm pushing just to kind of get through it with my kids, you know, and it's a great opportunity to teach them to sit still and listen, but at the speed that we're going through, we're not really getting... They're not getting much and just trying to consume this vast amount of Scripture. And so I had to take a step back and say, okay, I'm gonna try and make sure that I'm going through the Bible with my kids, but in a way that I'm breaking it down and digesting it for them and giving it to them in a way that they can appreciate and understand. Yeah, no, I love that.

Okay, so I would just encourage a husband or wife or an individual, you know, if they have kids, read through the Bible, use the app, use the book, use the web app, whatever, use those resources. But if you have little kids, pick one really amazing thing out of this section. And even maybe just read a little bit and tell them just about the goodness of God. You know, in short form, you do the long form, and then you deliver something golden. Yeah.

Or even, I'd say for me, we're kind of going through the Bible with the kids, Genesis to Revelation, but I'm condensing it and I'm skipping over some things just to try and give them kind of the whole landscape of Scripture without getting too hung up on the details that they didn't understand yet. But at the same time, I'm personally going through the Bible in a year kind of a thing and consuming larger amounts. And the nuggets from those sessions of scripture reading get brought up in kind of the walk-along, talk-along stuff where I'm with the kids at the table and I say, hey, I read about this today and isn't that so neat? Yeah, hey, that's how I'm doing at my house at dinner. I'm gonna talk about what I read in the morning.

Hopefully, every time we have dinner together, but sometimes I don't. But, and I'll take a small, because I'm not going to read four chapters while we're all sitting there. But I'll take a section and something that hit me and talk about that, not to belabor it. But I think when you have little kids, it's especially helpful to do that. But okay, but in the app, in the web app, in the book, there's a sermon on every book of the Bible.

There's a hymn to sing that captures the theme. There's a statement about that book of the Bible, which is just a quick study for you can tell your kids about what this book is about. It just gives an overview of it. And then there are some study questions. And like you said, where is Christ in this book?

And there's a timeline. Yeah, like what's up on the screen right there, you know, where is Genesis? Oh, it's right at the beginning, right, of the timeline. But all the books of the Bible are plotted on that timeline so that you and your kids can see when it happened historically. Also, what's the theme of it in Genesis?

It's beginnings. And it's the beginning of almost everything. And what about the author? These are just tools that are on the app. But one of the things that I use whenever I use it every day is I can click on a chapter and it will open up a menu where I can read what Matthew Henry or John Gill said about it and what's said about it in some of the other outside resources, including Ligonier and Desiring God.

But I hit Matthew Henry and it's astounding. If there's a verse in there, I really want to hear from Matthew Henry, I'll look for that verse because Matthew Henry is very systematic. He just goes through the thing verse by verse. Or I might read the entire thing, which takes a long time to read four chapters of Matthew Henry's commentary. But it's very, very enriching.

So anyway, That's how I use it. What I do is I read the, here's what I do. I get up in the morning, I put my ear pods on immediately, and I start listening to it, because you can listen to it in various voices, okay? I listen to Simon Bubb, you know, he's a Brit. He has a great voice.

So I listen to it first while I'm getting my coffee, and then after I get my coffee, I sit in my chair, and then I read it. But I've already, it's nice because I've already heard some of the language and I'm thinking, oh wow, I gotta go look at that verse, you know? Yeah. And then I'll just write down one thing from that chapter or from that section that I want to take with me through the day. And I put it in my notes in my phone and I can look at it.

And I'll use it typically in the evening at the dinner table. That's what I do. That's really neat. Yeah. Hey, it's a great tool.

Anything else to say? Anything else we want to say about this thing? Yeah, so I just had a thought about reading scripture in general, and I was recently reading through Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes 12, 11 and 12 says, The words of the wise are like goads, and the words of scholars are like well-driven nails given by one shepherd. And further my son be admonished by these, of making many books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh." And What I got from that was just I can often feel guilty, you know, I have a very busy schedule, you know, four little kids, and it's hard to keep up with everything.

And feeling guilty that I'm not reading other theological books. But It just kind of struck me that I need to make sure the main priority is that I'm reading scripture. And so just trying to be in scripture every day. And another thing along those lines is I think I often got held up maybe not making good use of the time when I'm in the car or whatever and thinking, I shouldn't just be using this kind of off time to prioritize scripture. Like I need to give it more prime time from my life.

And what I found is when I'm diligent to take advantage of those times, then I have more interest and more prime time is made available for studying scripture. Amen. Yeah, yeah, prioritize the Bible over all other books. If you do that, there'll be a lot of books you won't have time to read. Praise the Lord.

The Word of God is true. It makes wise the simple. It rejoices the heart. It converts the soul. What a wonderful treasure God has put in our hands.

Absolutely. Okay, so hey, let's go read the Bible. Sounds great. Good deal. Okay.

And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you can join us next time. I hope this resource was a blessing to you. It's our desire to equip a generation to walk in the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life.