“Read a book of the Bible in one sitting. There is value in Bible-reading plans that divvy up the readings so that each day you read one chapter from two or three or four different books of the Bible.
But if that’s the only way you read the Bible, it will be difficult to understand key literary features and the theological message of whole books of the Bible.
Have you ever read the Gospel according to Matthew straight through in one sitting? Or Romans? Or Revelation? If not, you’re missing out. That’s how the authors meant for you to read them.
For example, when you receive a letter or even a relatively long e-mail from a friend or family member, you don’t divide it into sections and read the first part on day one, the second part on day two, and so on. You read the whole thing straight through.
That’s the way to read letters. You may go back and look more carefully at certain parts of a letter to make sure that you correctly understand it. But your first pass through a letter is from beginning to end in order to get the big picture.
When you read it straight through, you see connections between various parts of the letter that you wouldn’t see if you broke it up into pieces and read it on different days.
A letter lands on you differently when you read it all in one sitting rather than breaking it up. And the more carefully an author crafts a letter, the more important it is that you read it in one sitting.
Don’t simply snack on the Bible. Feast on the Bible.
First Corinthians takes about an hour to read aloud. So does Romans. Ephesians takes only twenty minutes. Figure 7.2 is a full list of the approximate times that it would take to read each book in our English Bible. (I use an ESV audio Bible as a benchmark.)
You might be thinking, “There’s no way I could possibly find time to do this.” But don’t you do other activities for prolonged periods? Do you read other books for a few hours at a time?
Do you ever spend an hour watching a TV show or two hours watching a movie or three hours watching a football game? Why not prioritize lengthy, undistracted time in the life-giving Word of God?”
–Andrew David Naselli, How to Understand and Apply the New Testament: Twelve Steps from Exegesis to Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2017), 195–196.
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