Anxiously Awaiting On Everything Eternal…

A Challenge

We played a show this weekend at House of Prayer in their new Family Life building. The thing was huge. The show was for HOP's annual Bible Camp--which we play at almost every year. It ended up being a pretty darn good show, and BTB's first appearance as a 4 piece. After our initial 4 song introduction, the speaker for that week--a man named Chip, hopped up on stage. Unfortunately he was kinda boring, but once I looked past the boredom and got to the meat of his message it was actually pretty cool. The two points that I took from his talk:

"I do not believe what I say I believe; what I believe I do." This is actually pretty obvious, but I like the prose.

Read your Bible.

He told us a story about a guy that told him a story (confused yet) involving an old scottish dude that read the Bible over 4 times a year. Seeing as how there are approximately 929 chapters in the Old Testament and 260 chapters in the New Testament you would have to read (1189 * 4) / 365 = 13.03 chapters per day in order to meet that goal. Note that this calculation doesn't take chapter length into effect, so maybe a verses per day estimation would be more accurate. Shall we? There are around 31,103 verses in the new and old testaments plus 137 or so unnumbered verses.

( 31,103 * 4 ) / 365 = 340.85 verses per day.

Again, this estimation doesn't take verse length into account, nor does it factor in some of the verses not included in some Bibles (like Matthew 18:11). But regardless of how you package it, the fact remains that that is one old dood who reads alot, and when I heard that story I was convicted. I average less than a chapter a week, which is pretty pathetic. I could probably count the number of times I have read completely through my NASB on my hand. Again, pathetic. Naturally I cite business as my excuse, but it really comes down to laziness. I'm so busy that I'm too lazy to make time in my schedule to sit down and read a chapter or two of the greatest piece of literature ever written. The original reason I decided to start writing these posts was to self document my quiet times during the week, and the only thing I have seen from it so far is my enormous need for a quiet time.

All of this reinforces what happened at 7:22 a week ago. Louie was giving a talk, and at the end he called for people to stand if they weren't in the right place and they knew they should be. I stood. Not because I have some deep dark sin in my life that needs to be revealed--we all have those, but because I knew that I needed to make it public that I needed help with this spirituality thing. Like an Alcoholic and going to an AAA meeting, so was standing that night to me. It was a public confession of my need for prayer and to simply be uplifted.

So to sum it all up, I accepted Chip's challenge. I am going to try and read through my Bible twice (Hey, baby steps) this year starting August 1st. I would challenge someone who reads my blog to follow along with me, mainly because I will need accountability. Right now accountability is something that is completely void in my life. I get the feeling that this is probably the source of a lot of my problems. Someone like me thrives off being self-sufficient, independant, and a loner, but that also opens up doors for secret sin that can eat me alive if left unearthed and unchecked.