Bulletin for November
At the moment I am completely out of my comfort zone when it comes to preparing sermons for the evening service. My usual pattern is to be locked into a series; having made the decision a number of weeks ago to take a break from the shorter catechism I still haven’t decided what to preach through over the summer. In the meantime I have been using the CH Spurgeon method of locating a suitable passage. Once the guests have left on Saturday night I wait for the Holy Spirit to impress upon my heart the text He would have me to use. In all honesty, while it worked for Spurgeon it would never work for me. If I didn’t know what I was going to preach on until Saturday night I would be a mental wreck. I try to settle on the verses by mid-week and these are generally drawn from my own devotional readings or something which has been on my mind.
With no disrespect to Spurgeon, it seems to me that many Christians are not unlike the great man when it comes to personal Bible reading. They don’t know what they are going to read from one day to the next. The tendency is to read bits and pieces from here and there as time allows. There is nothing wrong with reading portions in a random way, but surely we will gain more from a structured approach with substantial content.
Many good reading programs can be found online. Alan Young from Warners Bay has developed his own; here is a part of his blurb:
- 1. There are 182 reading sessions with two Scripture portions per session. When all sessions have been completed once, the Old Testament will have been read once and the New Testament twice. This would take six months at a reading rate of 1 session/day.
- 2. The portions do not always follow the same order as in the English Bible. Survey of the Bible by W. Hendriksen is helpful regarding the ordering & chronology of the books in the Bible. Refer also to Bible handbooks etc.
- 3. Readers can choose their desired reading pace, the order in which the portions are read, and the frequency of reading particular portions.
The advantage with Alan’s plan is that it doesn’t use the traditional calendar format but is organised around sessions. As he points out, you can create your own course within the overall framework; you can break down the quantity of the sessions and take as long as you want rather than six months. It allows for flexibility in a number of ways. If anyone is interested I can email it to them. Oh, and please pray that I would settle on a topic for the evening service soon!