As we begin the New Year we tend to make all sorts of resolutions that we stick with for a few weeks and then abandon them. This year why not adopt the habit of daily Scripture reading. There are many aids to make this easy to include having the Scripture emailed to you each day.
I came across this essay, 6 Tips to Cultivating the Practice of Reading Scripture and it is a good place to start. Each new thing that we do requires preparation to Scripture reading is no different. Here is a taste of the essay.
When Jesus criticizes two disciples on the Emmaus Road for their failure to believe what the prophets had spoken, the problem was not their inability to hear the prophets or take them seriously. Jesus asked, “Wasn’t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:26, CEB). “Of course it was necessary!” we might say. But the question remains, which prophets actually document this necessity? “Isaiah 53,” we might respond, but we would then need to acknowledge that we can say this only because we have learned to read in just this way. After all, Isaiah 53 never mentions the Messiah, and Jesus’ contemporaries were unaccustomed to thinking of Isaiah’s Servant as a suffering Messiah.
The problem faced by Jesus’ disciples was their lack of the cognitive categories required for making sense of the Scriptures in this way. They needed more than a commonsense reading of a biblical text. That Isaiah spoke of Jesus was something they had to learn. Accordingly, Luke records: “Then he interpreted for them the things written about himself in all the scriptures . . .” (Luke 24:27, CEB).
