Tag: devo

plinko vs. the Bible

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bible plinko

Who doesn’t like the Price Is Right? If you were on the game show, which game would you want to play? If I were on the Price Is Right I would love to play Plinko. You get the little puck, stand on the platform and try for $10,000. It’s a complete game of luck. It really doesn’t matter where you put the puck. It’s all in the bounce.

Sometime I treat  quiet time with God a lot like Plinko. “What should I study today?” I open the Bible and bounce from passage to passage without a plan and hopefully I will luck out and win big “truths” for the day. I admit there are times when I come to God like this!? Sure God might bless my efforts, but God wants me to approach His Book with a bit more respect and purpose than “drop the puck and hope for luck” approach.

There are some great plans out there for reading the Bible with a purpose. Even for ADHD people like me who do not have long attention spans. Here are a few for starters:

  • Study a theme. i.e. love in 1 John, one another in the letters of Paul, kingdom in Matthew, etc.
  • Look at how a particular book of the Bible describes God.
  • Discover how OT books picture Christ. Be careful not to read into the text too much.
  • Trace the hymns of Revelation and write God a new song for the day.
  • Start a quiet time journal that tracks promises, commands and truths.
  • Read the same book over and over from 5 or more translations and note similarities or differences.
  • Read a psalm a day for 5 days a week. You can go through the Psalms twice in a year this way.
  • Read a chapter of Proverbs a day for an entire month. There are 31 chapters and works perfect for some months with the same number of days.
  • For the heavy reader, read through the Bible in a year. At a pace of 4-5 chapters a day you can read through the entire book.

Be creative. There are an endless amount of ways to study the treasures of God’s Word. God wrote it for a purpose, shouldn’t we have a purpose in studying it?

Deuteronomy 6:4-9, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”