Audio Transcript

Happy New Year — 2025! — as we launch this podcast into year thirteen. What an amazing ride — all made possible by the grace of God and by your involvement in listening and sending us your questions and praying for us. Thank you for your role in making it all happen.

For many, this new year comes with a blank, fresh Bible-reading slate. I have a new one on my desk right now that I just printed out — 1,200 empty boxes to check off this year, four readings per day for three hundred days, about fifteen minutes of reading per day. Pastor John and I will again be using the Navigators Bible Reading Plan in 2025, the same plan we used last year.

And this is our invitation to you to read the entire Bible with us in 2025. For some, this will be your first attempt. Welcome along! If not, welcome back! You can find the Navigators Bible Reading Plan online by searching for it. Find the printable PDF of the schedule, print it off, and join us in 2025. On the podcast this year, we have a couple dozen interesting questions lined up to ask Pastor John that coincide with the day’s reading. You don’t have to read the Bible with us to be blessed by those episodes, but if you do, I think you’ll find extra benefit.

So, here we are on the second day of January, setting out to read the entire Bible in 2025, something you have done several times, Pastor John. So what challenges lie ahead of us? And what blessings can we expect ahead? These are the questions being asked by a listener named Mike. “Hello, Pastor John! I have been blessed by your ministry for many years. In the year ahead, I hope to read my Bible from cover to cover for the very first time, using the Navigators Bible Reading Plan that you use. I feel a little excited and a lot intimidated and enormously unprepared for the year ahead. I’ve never done anything like this before. What’s your advice for me? And what obstacles must I expect to overcome to pull this off in 2025?”

Well, amen and praise God for what Mike is resolving to do. I just — what, an hour and a half ago — was reading my reading-plan reading. So I’ve been on this system for — good night, what, 20, 25 years? I don’t know. I love this system. I try other things, and I generally come back to it. So good, Mike, you should be excited, and yes, you should be intimidated. You are in significant ways unprepared. Me too. That’s why we’re reading. Paul said it’s all inspired precisely to make us prepared, “that the man of God may be complete, equipped” — or we could say prepared — “for every good work,” including Bible reading (2 Timothy 3:16–17). So you’ve got to read to get prepared to read, right? So that’s okay to be intimidated by reading the Bible.

So, what should you expect? Let me give you three negatives to scare you off and nine positives to suck you back in.

Three Enemies to Bible Reading

1. Expect opposition. Satan hates the word of God and will disincline you, blind you, distract you, bore you. He will fight with all his might to keep this from happening. So pray and fight and ask God to make all four of those things that Satan tries to do to backfire, to blow up in his face as you become a stronger warrior against him — your heart inclined, your blindness removed, focus instead of distraction, excitement instead of boredom. So, expect opposition.

2. Expect to be shocked. The outrage of sin and its graphic descriptions and the horrors of God’s judgment and the failures of God’s people are appalling in the Bible. The Bible is stunningly graphic in its description of both our outrageous sin and God’s breathtaking judgment on sin. You will want to throw up if you have any kind of sympathetic engagement with the Bible at times when you see what God ordains against sin in this world. So, expect your views of man and God to be blown up — in a good way.

3. Expect to be confused for three reasons.

First, God conceals many things that we’d like to know. Deuteronomy 29:29: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do [his word].” So there are things you’re going to want to know, and God says, “Nope. That’s my business, not yours.”

“Expect opposition. Satan hates the word of God and will disincline you, blind you, distract you, bore you.”

The second reason why you’re going to be confused is that what he revealed is often hard to understand. Peter said that flat out in 2 Peter 3:16: “. . . as [Paul] does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in [Paul’s letters] that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” There are some things in Paul’s letters that are hard to understand, which we should not expect to find easy. So, we’re going to be confused at times.

And the third reason why you’re going to be confused is that Christ has given teachers to the church. Have you ever thought about that? In the New Testament, he didn’t just give a Bible and say, “Now we don’t need any teachers because we’ve got the Bible. We’ve got the Holy Spirit. So, no human beings need to be teachers in the church.” He didn’t do that. He said that in every church there should be elders. Those elders must be apt to teach (1 Timothy 3:2), which means people need explanations for what they see in the Bible, and teachers are called to figure things out and help the others. So, unless you’re one of those teachers, and unless you’re God, you’re going to run into confusing things in the Bible that you need help understanding from other people.

So, the implication of those three is this: pray for illumination. Do whatever digging in study helps you. Put things together that you can put together, and what you can’t figure out, put on the shelf for later attention and keep on moving. If you get bogged down with what you can’t understand, you’ll never finish the reading for the day.

Nine Benefits of Bible Reading

Those are my negatives. Here are the nine positives. I’ll just tick them off really, really quickly. These are things you can expect.

1. Expect your faith to be deepened and strengthened, because Romans 10:17 says, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Or, almost the same, expect your hope in God to be made more unshakable, because Romans 15:4 says that everything in the whole Bible was written for your hope.

2. Expect God to do serious liberating work in your life, because Jesus said, “You will know the truth. When you read my Bible, you’ll know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (see John 8:32).

3. Expect new power in war with Satan, because that’s the way Jesus defeated him in the wilderness. He quoted Scripture to the devil, and the devil could not stand before it. He won’t stand before you either. He’s a liar; he’s a deceiver. He can’t abide the truth. You’re filling your head up with the truth. You’re going to be a valiant warrior more than you dreamed against Satan.

4. Expect a deep sanctifying work in your life, because John 17:17 says, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”

5. Expect to become a more loving person to those around you, because Paul in Philippians 1:9 says he prays that our “love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment.” And he said in 1 Timothy 1:5 that the goal of his instruction — that is, the goal of the Bible — “is love . . . from a pure heart.” So you’re going to find love for people growing in your heart as you immerse yourself in the whole sweep of Scripture.

6. Expect that even though you are now saved in a decisive way, you’re going to go on being saved by the Scriptures. Most people don’t think about this. “Pay close attention to yourself and your teaching [the Scriptures]. Persevere in these, for as you do this you will save both yourself and your hearers” (see 1 Timothy 4:16). The Bible is the means of God by which he goes on saving us.

7. Expect joy — great joy, unshakable joy that the world does not know — because Jesus said, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). So, send the roots of your mind and your heart down into the whole Bible, and your joy will become indestructible.

8. Expect to meet God — meet God, not just truths about God. Expect to meet God, because it says in 1 Samuel 3:21, “The Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel by the word of the Lord.” He revealed himself “by the word.” And he does that. He does that. Expect to meet him.

9. Finally, expect to see the glory of Christ. “We all [we believers], with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Now, how do we know that happens in the Bible? Because if you follow the flow of Paul’s thought from 2 Corinthians 3:18–4:6, he refers to how we see the glory of Christ. Namely, we see it in “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). And the gospel is the written narrative of the stories or the events — and their meaning — of the death and resurrection of Christ.

Great Resolve

So, Mike, I will pray for you what Paul prayed in 2 Thessalonians 1:11. He said this: “To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every good resolve and every work of faith by his power.” This is a great resolve before you. You’ve got a great intention on your heart. Be valiant. Make a vow to the Lord to keep it, and you won’t regret it.