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The NewCity Orlando All of Life Podcast
The All of Life podcast, hosted by Nate Claiborne, provides weekly episodes that help further our mission to call, form, and send disciple-makers. At NewCity, we want to see Orlando flourish by filling it with people who say "Follow me as I follow Jesus in all of life."
The NewCity Orlando All of Life Podcast
Introduction to the M'Cheyne Bible Reading Plan
In this episode, Nate Claiborne explains more about the M'Cheyne Bible Reading Plan that NewCity is doing in 2024. There are different ways to approach it for your Bible reading, and it is ultimately a tool for communion with God, not a project to complete and check off our to-do lists.
You can find more info about the background of the plan here. The website that Nate mentions with the daily readings on it, as well as the devotional by D. A. Carson is accessible here. If you want a print version of Carson's devotional, you can find it here.
You can find the Logos Bible Software app in your phone's app store, or visit this link to create a profile and access several Bible translations and other free resources in the basic version.
And, as mentioned in the episode, if you have any questions, send us an e-mail at podcast@newcityorlando.com.
Welcome to another episode of the All of Life podcast. I'm your host, nate Claybourne. Hope you had a very merry Christmas and a happy new year yesterday. Today, I wanted to talk to you about the McShane Bible reading plan that we are starting this year at New City. You've heard some from Ben and Damien about it in various ways over the past few Sundays, so I just kind of want to add to what they have been saying and give some personal reflections on how I've used it over the past several years and some encouragement for how you can best make the most of it this year.
Speaker 1:So the first thing to note, though, is there is a lot of continuity with the McShane plan and the CBR plan that we had been doing up until 2023. In both plans, you're pretty much reading from the Old and New Testament every day, which is different than the way the Read Scripture plan worked last year, where you were just starting in Genesis and you were reading three or four chapters a day, working your way progressively through the Bible in its canonical order. The McShane plan, though, is different than CBR. With CBR, you were reading a chapter of the Old Testament, chapter of the New Testament Monday through Friday and a Psalm on Saturday and nothing on Sunday. And in this case, as we have noted, it is a four chapter a day reading plan and it's every day, not just Monday through Friday, and so for some of us that may be a lot of reading to try to do every single day. For other people it may be overwhelming because it seems like something that it's not just really reading. There's sort of a desire to study, and to study four chapters every day is a tall task indeed, and so I just wanted to underscore that it really is for the purpose of reading, reflection and communion with God. And a byproduct of that might be that as you read through the chapters each day, you don't necessarily take the time to stop and linger and look at study notes and tread and necessarily answer every single question that may come up as you're working through it.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that has helped me relieve some of that tension is realizing, unlike other books, that I might read where you know I would say the goal if I'm reading a book I'm not necessarily ever going to come back and read that same book again. I might, but it's very much the first time through this book. I need to kind of glean all the details. I can make sure I understand all the twists and turns of the author's argument. And while to some extent that is true with scripture as well, you're also really committing to a lifetime of sitting in scripture and reading it on a semi daily basis, and so you might not get everything out of any given chapter this particular read through. So if you think of it as this is a plan that you're not just doing this year to read through the Bible and then get on with your life, but it's a tool that you can use to read through the Bible this year and in the years to come, it you know. If you miss a chapter here and there, it's less of a significant deal. So far as I know, we're not giving out awards in late December of next year for everyone who successfully reads all the readings every single day and never falls behind, and so I know for some of us there can be a little anxiety around.
Speaker 1:If there is a plan, I have to stick to it and do it every single day. But I mean, I'll even be honest, I did not. I have been doing this plan for years and years and years and years. I guess I'm not that old to say it that way, but over a decade, and I actually didn't do any of the readings last week, but I caught up on them yesterday, which meant I did a week's worth of readings on Monday morning, you know. On the other hand, it's a holiday, I didn't have to be at work, so there was a little more time. But that just kind of shows that my personality, at least, is well, I have to do all the readings, but I couldn't just let myself make a fresh start yesterday with Genesis, acts, ezra and Matthew. So some of you might be like that, some of you may be comfortable. If you miss a chapter here and there, you just jump into what the day's readings hold. Now, one thing you could do you could even as we're getting started not commit to reading all four chapters every day. The way McShane designed this plan is, when you look at it, it's gonna show you. If you look at the schedule that we printed, or if you go to the TGC website that refreshes every day with the chapters on it, it's gonna say for today, it's gonna say Genesis 2, matthew 2, ezra 2, acts 2.
Speaker 1:Each of these columns, though, is a cycle of readings, and, in McShane's vision for it. The first two columns were for family devotions and the second two were for private devotions, and so you could opt to just do the first two columns or just do the last two columns. You don't necessarily need to do all four To give you an idea what you're committing to, though, if you do split it and only do two columns, you should at least know where those columns are going. So the first column it starts on Genesis 1. It does about a chapter a day, and by the end of the year it goes through Genesis, exodus, leviticus, numbers, deuteronomy, joshua, judges, ruth, and then the books of Samuel, kings and Chronicles, ending with second Chronicles.
Speaker 1:The second column, the one that starts on Matthew. It jumps around a little bit more, so you're gonna read through Matthew, then you're gonna read through Mark, then you're gonna read through Luke, john, and then at the end of John, instead of going to Acts, you're actually gonna go to the Psalms, and then you're gonna work your way through the Psalms through the better part of the spring into the summer it's a nice little preparatory work for summer in the Psalms and then sometime around July you're finishing the Psalms and then you're gonna move to Acts, where you would have gone after you finished John, and then it's gonna go through Acts and then proceed chapter by chapter through the rest of the New Testament, ultimately ending with Revelation 22. So if you just read those first two columns, you're gonna get all the historical books of the Old Testament Genesis, through Chronicles, you're gonna get the entire New Testament and you're gonna get the Book of Psalms just by doing those two columns and not all four columns. If we look at the other two columns, the one that starts with Ezra, it's gonna go Ezra, nehemiah, esther. Then it's gonna go to the Wisdom Literature, it's gonna go Job. It's gonna skip Psalms, go Proverbs, ecclesiastes, song of Songs, and then it's gonna get into the prophets. So in about May you're gonna start the Book of Isaiah and then you're gonna read a chapter of the prophetic books. All the way through the end of the year You're gonna go Isaiah, jeremiah, ezekiel, daniel, hosea, all those minor prophets, finally ending with the Book of Malachi next December.
Speaker 1:If you do the final column, the one that starts in Acts for the beginning of the year, it goes through Acts and then it does sort of what you would expect it goes from Acts to Romans and it works its way through the rest of Paul's epistles, then you get to Hebrews, then you get to James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1, 2 John, jude, get through the Book of Revelation and then it starts in about mid to late June, puts you back in the Gospels and so you get Matthew, you get Mark, then it goes to Psalms. So it gets through the Psalms there. After it finishes Psalms it jumps back to Luke, john and then it finishes with John. So if you just did those latter two columns, you would get the entire New Testament plus the Psalms, and then you would get the part of the Old Testament after Chronicles. So you would get Ezra, nehemiah, Esther, you'd get Job, proverbs, cleasiastes, song of Songs, and then you would get all the prophetic books. So you think of it as you got half the Old Testament in one column, half of it in another column and then the New Testament columns that are active right now. They're gonna get you the whole New Testament plus Psalms. So you really do cover a lot of ground with this. But because of that you could trim it down Realistically. If you just wanted to read the entire Bible this year and we're comfortable reading Psalms twice I think we could, I guess you wouldn't get Psalms twice, you would still just get it once, but if you just read the first three columns, you would get the entire Bible through in one year. So there's just a lot of different ways you can go about it.
Speaker 1:I've always done the four chapters, but, for me, I read fairly quickly, and then I came into this reading plan with a lot of background Bible knowledge from going to Bible school, from going to seminary, and so a lot of parts of Scripture were really familiar to me before I even started reading this plan, and so there's less questions that maybe pop into my mind as I'm going through it. The tendency, though, could be to be a little too familiar or to kind of skip over things because you think you've seen it before. So one thing I like to do is I always change which version of the Bible I'm reading it in every year, so I'll stick with one version all year, but then so like last year, I read through it in the Christian Standard version, and this year I think I'm going to switch back to. I have to look and see what I did a couple years ago, but I think I'm getting into the NIV this year. I may go back to the ESV, but I've got about three or four versions that I just sort of cycle through so that it's not the same text every time. Well, I mean same text, not same translation every time.
Speaker 1:Another thing that I found really helpful is DA Carson has written two devotionals that are tied to this reading plan, and on that TGC website link that you can find in the app it's linked to one of them and I think they just they go through one one year and then they switch to the other one. I think one's odd years, one's even years and what it's, you know, maybe four or five paragraphs long, just sort of a meditative devotional reading. Sometimes it's just on one of the chapters that you're getting ready to read. Sometimes he ties them together in interesting ways, but I found that's just a nice way to sort of intro into the reading itself. I usually do my reading first thing in the morning, so I'm not necessarily as awake as I would like to be, and there's something about the engagement with Carson's little devotional commentary that sort of prepares me for the reading process.
Speaker 1:I also and this is maybe not everyone's preferred way of doing it, but I also do this plan on my iPad and I have a Logos Bible software which you can actually download onto your device, onto your phone, onto your iPad or use it on their web app, and they have a lot of functionality in the free version. So it's not as if you have to spend all this money to build this thing up. You could. It comes with multiple Bible versions to begin with. You could add more if you wanted to. You can add study notes. You have to pay for them, but you can add them and you can also add Carson's commentary. So that's, that's what I have.
Speaker 1:So when I open up my iPad and go into my Logos app, I've got Carson's devotional commentary and then at the top of the commentary there's hyperlinked chapters. So I'll read through his commentary slowly and kind of get into, get into it, get warmed up to some degree, and then when I click on the hyperlinks at the top of his commentary it just takes me over to my preferred Bible and it just opens it right up to that chapter and then I can read it and then I can flip back over to the commentary and then flip to the next chapter, just kind of keep going back and forth like that. That's maybe a little more complicated than most people would like it. Honestly, it would be a lot easier to just have a Bible and you a physical Bible and you put four bookmarks in one at Genesis two, one at Matthew two, one at Ezra two, one at Acts two. But I just like having having the digital companions. So then I know when it makes some of these jumps. You know when you later in the spring you're going to finish John in one of the columns and then it jumps to Psalms. It doesn't just go to Acts. So kind of knowing that that's that's what's happening. It's easier if there's. I've got a device that's remembering it for me. You can also if you get on the ESV app.
Speaker 1:I think this is one of the reading plans that's built into it. It's not as straightforward as I think we would like it to be, but if you need some help with that or if you need help with setting up Logos or something like that, one of the things that we have done is we've set up an email that is tied to this podcast, so you can send an email to podcast at newcityorlandocom with any questions you have about getting set up for doing the reading and we'll do our best to help you figure out what's going to work best for you. I also want to note that email is there as well, because I wanted to actually have a way to field questions about things that come up in the reading. So we really are trying to commit to doing this reading plan together and to going through it day by day, but are also kind of aware of the fact that it's going to generate questions because we're getting into parts of scripture that maybe we're not as familiar with. If you've never done a Bible reading plan like this or even read through the whole Bible before, it just feels like there's going to be opportunity to ask questions, opportunity to learn more about God's word, and so if you have questions about something from the readings that you would like to hear us or just me talk about on the podcast, just send us an email at podcast at newcityorlandocom with questions about the reading either the text itself or questions about how you go about the reading or just anything that would be helpful to you that we could resource and equip you with on this podcast. So I'm excited about doing this plan with other people.
Speaker 1:Like I said, it's the plan that I've been doing for a while. That's not why we're doing it, but we just we didn't really do the best job of doubling down on the read scripture plan last year and we also kind of realized it was better to have a diversity of readings as we go through the year rather than just starting at the beginning and reading straight through. And some of that is because, you'll see, you'll notice this is, if you really commit to this plan and lean into it this year, you'll start to see connections between the readings, and Ben even noted this yesterday. If you started the read, or two days ago, on Sunday, if you started the reading yesterday, all four of the chapters start with the birth of something, and so that's not coincidental. That's partly the design of the reading plan, is that it would start that way. But even as you read further and you're reading in parts of scripture that you wouldn't necessarily think have any connection between them, sometimes you'll just notice things because you'll have just read something in Matthew and then you see something in Acts, or you just read something in Genesis and then you see something in Matthew. That's similar. And that's also where Carson can be helpful as well, because he's devoted his life to teaching the Bible and reading and writing and studying, and so he draws some of those connections together for you. That just gives you a fresh set of eyes as you sit down and engage the text.
Speaker 1:But in closing, though, I do want to underscore the point that Damien made is this is hopefully a tool for your own personal devotional life and communion with God.
Speaker 1:It's not a thing that you need to think of as a checklist or something to complete, and so we really do hope that it is something that will be helpful to you, and that's why trimming down the readings if it's the feeling of too much reading, it gets in the way Just do two of the columns, just do one of the columns.
Speaker 1:It's really something that you take ownership of and make your own, because it's your own private devotional time. But we're hoping that your own private devotional time that fuels your communion with God is something that can actually draw us together more as community, and so we're in community together talking about our own devotional communing experiences with God through reading the scripture plan together. So I'm looking forward to doing these readings again this year and to being able to talk about it on this podcast. Like I said, if there's any questions about the plan how it works, suggestions, comments or questions about the readings themselves. Just send us an email at podcast at newcityorlandocom, and I will be back with you again later next week with a reflection podcast on the readings that we'll have done at that point.
