In this episode, Nate discusses ways to adapt the M'Cheyne plan into your Scripture practice for the Common Rhythm. He draws on comments Damein made in his most recent sermon, as well as the questions from the All of Life Guide, to discuss how to integrate a Bible reading plan like this into your routine.
As mentioned, there are many episodes that go into detail about chapters we've read so far in 2024. You can find the Bible book overviews here:
In addition, we have recorded several other discussions about specific chapters we'll be reading together:
As always, we look forward to questions and ideas to help drive our future conversations. You can contact us at podcast@newcityorlando.com
In this episode, Nate discusses ways to adapt the M'Cheyne plan into your Scripture practice for the Common Rhythm. He draws on comments Damein made in his most recent sermon, as well as the questions from the All of Life Guide, to discuss how to integrate a Bible reading plan like this into your routine.
As mentioned, there are many episodes that go into detail about chapters we've read so far in 2024. You can find the Bible book overviews here:
In addition, we have recorded several other discussions about specific chapters we'll be reading together:
As always, we look forward to questions and ideas to help drive our future conversations. You can contact us at podcast@newcityorlando.com
Welcome to another episode of the All of Life podcast. I'm your host, nate Playborne, and today we're talking about the McShane Bible reading plan. My plan is that we would actually do this every Tuesday moving forward. I'm sure there's going to be Tuesdays that we miss, but, generally speaking, the goal is for every Tuesday to have a kind of recap podcast that looks at some of the reading that we've done. In this particular case, though, we're still I think we're still trying to get into this plan and still trying to get used to. If you're doing it for the first time, maybe you're still trying to get a rhythm, trying to hit your stride with it. So we're just we're going to take advantage of the fact that on some of these, these particular books, and then also on these particular chapters, we've already recorded several deep dive podcasts, either an intro of the book or on a specific chapter. So just to point you to those, if you are, I put them in the show notes as well, but if you look in the new city app, in the section that we have on Bible reading, you'll see that we have introductory podcasts on the book of Genesis, the book of Matthew, the book of Ezra, nehemiah and Acts, and the reason for that is, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, going back to the summer of 2019, which I think for some of us might feel like a lifetime ago that was when this particular podcast feed really started and began producing regular content, and the main thing that we did was we would record a introduction to a Bible book anytime we started that book in our CBR plan, and I think we got through most of the books. What we'll probably do this year then, is we'll record the missing ones as we start new books in our McShane Bible reading plan. But as a result of that, we already have a lot of content, just kind of giving you good overviews of these particular books of the Bible, and kind of just some context, maybe some insights.
Speaker 1:In addition to that, after we had recorded a lot of those intros, there was a stretch there where Ben and I were recording episodes called how to Read the Bible, and we did some deep dives on specific chapters of the Bible, and a lot of them are from well, not a lot of them, but several of them are from Genesis, matthew as well as Acts, so I'll link to those as well. You can also find them in the app. But we did a podcast on Genesis 1 and 2. I think I actually did that with Mike Allen. We also did one on Genesis 12 through 26, just kind of an overview of Abraham's story for back when both we were reading through it in CBR but also we, you know, we preached through that section of Genesis.
Speaker 1:We have, if you want to go back and listen to. We have podcasts on Matthew, chapter one and two, kind of the. There's lots of things you could talk about when it comes to the importance of Jesus' birth story, but we kind of get into some of the stuff with the genealogies and just the way the narrative is told and looks back to the Old Testament in a podcast that we did on Matthew one and two. We also did a podcast on Matthew six Acts, chapter eight, and then two chapters from today's reading. So if you're doing the reading and you're doing all four chapters, today's reading was Genesis nine and 10, which, just as a side note, every now and then one of those columns is going to have you read two chapters. It's usually when one of the chapters is really short. That wasn't quite the case with Genesis nine and 10. Those are two pretty standard sized chapters. So every now and then that's going to happen, but don't worry about it. The biggest thing, at least to me, that's annoying is the. The chapter numbers were lined up with the dates and now that's not going to be the case starting tomorrow. But in any case, if you read this morning or at any point today, genesis nine and 10, matthew chapter nine, ezra chapter nine and then Acts, chapter nine, we have individual podcasts on Acts, chapter nine and on Matthew, chapter nine, if you want to pull those up. So as a result of that, I figured today's time was better spent talking more about the nature of the reading plan, the nature of habit building, the nature of kind of the way we're approaching common rhythm, rather than more specifics about the chapters. But in future podcasts we will talk more about some of the specifics from our reading. So you can find those in the show notes or in the app.
Speaker 1:But as we were thinking about this reading plan, we talked last week about how you don't actually have to do all four chapters to really benefit from doing the reading in community with other people in your community or in your circle or just people that you know at New City. So if you were in that New City, you could, like we said, you could just pick one column, pick one of the ones that starts with a New Testament chapter, whether that's the Acts column or the Matthew column and you'll read through the entire New Testament and the book of Psalms in one year by just doing a chapter a day If you do the first three columns. So if you did the Genesis column, the Matthew column and the Ezra column, you would read through the entire Bible this year, I think as well as the book of Psalms twice, maybe just once. And then, if you do all four, you get through the New Testament twice and you get through Psalms twice. There's different ways you can approach it, but one way that we could think about it is it really is the importance is the habit itself rather than the particular reading plan, and so we're really pushing this particular reading plan as a default and if you don't follow this one, it's you can follow a different one.
Speaker 1:But the goal is to really have a plan of some kind and it's really to reduce friction for your Bible reading time when you sit down to do your plan or sit down to do your reading. If you don't have a plan, then you're going to have to spend time figuring out what are you going to read for the day, or it's going to be kind of a haphazard random. You just sort of open the Bible and read whatever. On the one hand, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with doing it like that, but you'll get more out of a coherent plan even if it's just going through an epistle, a paragraph a day, rather than just a little bit in peace here and there. One of the things you could do you, we can pull up the all of life guide and we can see we would turn to page. I'm looking at page 46 in the all of life guide and that's where it gives us some ways to think through how we would approach the scripture practice here. God's voice in scripture before any others. And so in the plan stage it's really significant to think about what type of reading you're going to do first, and so by using the McShane plan we've kind of moved.
Speaker 1:You could do. Let go Davina with that. It would take a little bit longer. If you're going to do it with all four chapters, you can meditate on portions of it. So you could do, and this is what I would actually suggest read through all four chapters slowly but then focus in for meditation on one part of one chapter and it doesn't matter which is just really whichever one you feel the spirit drawing you to that particular day Could be because it's interesting to you. Could be because it's something you've never seen before. It could be because you feel like it's something God is using to really speak to something going on in your life in this particular time. So that would be my recommendation for the way you just generally approach your reading is that you're reading, reading through some section, meditating on a smaller section. You get some of the benefits of just the slow engagement with God's word, a reading level, and then you get some of the added benefits of the just sitting with a smaller section and just kind of chewing on it for a while.
Speaker 1:In the All of Life Guide though it really pushes you to think about what time you're going to read. It says morning is recommended, and I think that's probably true for most people. I will put an asterisk on that and just kind of tell you what I do. I used to, so I've done this plan for a long time. My custom used to be I would get up, get dressed and leave and drive to Starbucks which, for most of the time I was doing this, the drive to Starbucks was five minutes or less and get to Starbucks, get my Trenta Cold Brew, take a few sips of it, open up my iPad and start my reading, and so in that sense, it was literally the first thing I was doing every day that was in any kind of cognitive engagement, but one of the things I found there's something to be said for waking up to reading scripture, but there's something else to be said for getting more woken up and alert and then being able to be more intentional and focused in your reading. And so I would say, by doing the reading very first thing in the morning, the way I did it for a long time, a lot of it was really fuzzy reading that I was just getting through, to get through and then moving on to other things the way that I'm approaching it now is a little bit different.
Speaker 1:Like many of you all, I would imagine the pandemic rewired a lot of my habits, just some by necessity, some by just the way it shook things up and you kind of had to reevaluate a lot of things, and so I had never been a person who went to the gym first thing in the morning. I remember a brief time where I tried to get up at 4 am and go to the gym, when we lived right by a planet fitness, and I think it lasted a week, maybe Just one of the. You know, I'm pretty. I think that week was the first week of January, so it was one of those New Year's resolutions that sounded great in principle and just did not work very well in practice.
Speaker 1:What I started doing during COVID, though, was I did get up and go to the gym, but it was partly because my schedule would only allow for me to go to the gym first thing in the morning. So, instead of going to Starbucks first thing in the morning and doing my Bible reading, I was getting up and going to the gym, and you know, to be honest, I will say, for a stretch there maybe for a year or two that actually also meant I really was not doing a Bible reading plan at all. So I replaced the Bible reading plan with a gym plan, and that was almost a couple years stretch that I just wasn't wasn't really doing anything, because in in my mind, I was like oh well, I'll go to the gym and then, after the gym, I'll get to it at some point later in the day, and with that as a plan, it never actually never actually worked out. Some point later in the day never really came, and so I just found that I had to have a very specific planned time, probably earlier rather than later, and so the way I've been approaching it recently and what I you know, to be even more specific, what I'm doing right now is still getting up and going to the gym, but then I have time blocked off on the backside of the gym before the workday really starts, and that's when I'm doing my scripture readings, some praying, some journaling, some other reading that I need to do for just my own intellectual growth development, but also because I have PhD classes starting next week, and so morning is recommended. I don't know that necessarily needs to be very first thing in the morning, but it almost has to be before the workday really gets started.
Speaker 1:Now I could also note here and we could take a tangent and talk about morning people versus night owls, and some people it's actually probably their energy is peaking later in the day, and so maybe that's when it makes more sense to do their scripture reading. I think there's something to that and that's just something you're going to have to know about yourself. I know for me I am best in the morning, so I peak mentally usually long before lunch comes and then I have another peak later, later in the afternoon, evening, but invariably other stuff has come up at that point. So I try to use my sort of first I've just first morning peak, I've gone to the gym, I'm kind of up and moving, my mind's already kind of the gears are turning. But before I turn my attention into my workday, that's when I try to do this reading plan. And so that you know, knowing when you're going to do it, knowing what you're going to do, that's really significant. Having other people to dialogue about the reading is going to be helpful, the whether those people in your circle or people in your just broader community.
Speaker 1:But before we, before we wrap up, I wanted to kind of I wanted to focus in on something Damien said in his sermon on Sunday when he was kind of highlighting that if you really wanted to weave the common rhythm into your daily practices, it would probably take a year, and I think I think that's probably true, I think that might be optimistic. I think it might honestly take two years. But I think that's a year is maybe best case scenario If there's no major life events, no major life transitions. A year of a normal routine. If you did two practices per quarter, you could probably get to it. And the reason you would pick two is not because it's Panera but because you really don't have the energy to focus on more than two new habits at a time, even if one of them is not particularly new. So Damien mentioned, uh, if you did do a pick two kind of scenario, it's like, well, worship could already be one of them because you're already at worship.
Speaker 1:So really, you're just trying to dial in the habits around the common rhythm practice of worship, which is a little bit if you really look at what's in the olive life God, it's a little bit more than showing up on Sunday. Showing up on Sunday is obviously a prerequisite, uh, but there's more to it than that. And so if we think about you could pick two. Worship could be one we're really advocating this. Scripture reading plan be the other one, unless you already have a really well worn. This is exactly what I do for my scripture reading plan If, if that's not you, we're really strongly suggesting that you lean into this plan, some version of it, work with what's in the olive life guide, to come up with a plan or a system for what we're, what will work well for you. And so if you did that for this quarter uh, the quarter started January 1st, it goes through March 31st, which is very conveniently Easter. So it's really between now and Easter you could really focus on dialing in the worship habit that you're already doing and then the read scripture habit. You could kind of build that ends or the scripture habit, uh, and then in quarter two you could dial in your rest habit. So that's another you know. So you're doing one weekly, one daily. You did worship and scripture for quarter one, then you could do rest and prayer for quarter two, and then by the end of you know halfway point of the year, you've really developed a scripture practice, a prayer practice. You've dialed in your worship practice, which was kind of already there. You've dialed in your rest practice, which was also maybe kind of already there.
Speaker 1:I think all of us, all of us take a day off. We just maybe don't take it completely off. Uh, in principle, everyone has a Saturday, uh, or even if you work in a non-traditional it's not a nine to five kind of job scenario I would hope you at least have a couple of days off during the week. They might not be the same days every week, but they are days off. So you have a rest practice of some kind already. You're just working on refining it so you could have added two new practices, refined to existing ones, and then in a latter half of the year you could turn your attention to again just two at a time.
Speaker 1:You're not trying to do all four at once. Um, I would probably go if I were thinking about this. I would maybe go feast and then Listen. Try to do those simultaneously. The feast practice you can just add. The easiest thing to do is add it into your Sunday worship practice. It's what you do after church. Sundays you feast with other people or, if you're in a community, you're already doing that regularly anyway. So that's not really that much of an add. The listen practice is gonna take some concerted attention. But then you're also saving the fast and the bless practices for later in the year when all the other practices are a little more solidified, because fasting's probably for most of us, we might say the hardest, because it takes significant planning. It takes an entire day in a lot of cases and then the bless one. Maybe that comes easier for some of us rather than others.
Speaker 1:But really the point would be that you really only pick two at a time. You don't try to do all eight at once. You really you can pair them together in ways where you're using, you're refining one at one point and you're building a new one, but you're never trying to build eight new practices from scratch or eight new habits from scratch, because that's just gonna deplete your energy and it's just gonna be frustrating for you and it's not gonna get the results that you would want or that we would want for you. We wouldn't want this to be a life-draining experience, but a life-giving experience and easing into it. At a look at the pace that you're doing now and sort of accelerate your pace slowly over time makes way more sense than try to do it all at once. We could even apply that to the McShane reading plan and we could say if it feels like too much, just do the one chapter, do that from now to Easter and then if you really dial that in between now and Easter, then, maybe by Easter, you can add in the second chapter Maybe it's so comfortable at that point you add in two or three, but start with look at where you are, start with what's best next, rather than what's the fully formed version of the thing you're trying to do.
Speaker 1:And so, in closing, I do think, when we talk about this reading plan, I know a lot of people have said and can say, it's too much, and too much could mean a lot of things. I think, though and I was reflecting on this with Ben my mind tends to drift to the nuts and bolts, and so when I hear people say too much, I tend to hear that, as it takes too long or I don't have enough time, and I think for most people and I'm guessing, and you can give me feedback to the contrary, if this is not true, but for most people it's not that it's too much time. If you really look at it, it's 15 minutes a day. I think we all have a spare 15 minutes a day, so it's not the time.
Speaker 1:Ben used this acronym Teams, which is time, energy, attention, motivation and spirit, and so I think, if we say it's too much, it's probably not that it's too much time it's that I want to do it well and maybe I don't have enough energy in a given day to read four chapters a day, or I don't have the motivation to do that I'd rather do less or I'd rather do different or it's realizing it does take a concerted amount of attention to read like that. So maybe you just don't feel like you have so many things pulling you in so many different directions. You just don't have the attention to focus on something like that. Or maybe the spirit is obviously a lowercase spirit, but it's just something about it that is not drawing you in at this moment. And so I would say, if you feel like it's, if it is too much, it's just worth reflecting, not so that you can sort things out and get on with it, but so that you can understand yourself better.
Speaker 1:If you feel like it's too much, what is too much about it? Is it the time, is it your energy right now? Maybe it's just not the season for you to try to add something new. I think we all have seasons like that, where a new habit is just not on the table, because there's just other things that are taking our energy and attention and motivation. And when it's all is said and done, there's really nothing left for anything that's new and different, and if that's where you're at, I want you to hear that that's okay, that that's where you're at.
Speaker 1:We're pushing for people to follow this reading plan, but we're also recognizing that not everyone is gonna do it, and some of that is because they just can't do it right now, and I think that's okay. We're gonna keep talking about it, though, on the podcast every week, and so next week we'll do a little bit more about the actual reading coming up. We're finishing the book of Ezra, we're looking ahead to Nehemiah, we're getting a little farther into Abraham's story in Genesis, we're getting a little farther into Paul's story in Acts and it's getting a little deeper into the gospel of Matthew, and so we'll have some things to talk about next week, and we may even revisit some of these things that just are about the reading plan in general and just helping us build a better habit and practice of engaging God's word in scripture. So I look forward to talking with you all again next week.