At the beginning of 2003, I was given a challenge by an esteemed Christian brother. He told me that he had just completed a thorough reading of the entire Bible in one long sitting. The sitting lasted the better part of the week. But the experience of reading God’s Word from beginning to end was incomparable to any other experience he had enjoyed in his Christian walk. It was his way of immersing himself in the Word of God for a fresh start to a fresh year.

His vision was clear to me. After all, one gets a completely different perspective — a panoramic perspective — when one reads the entire story of God’s providential history and message for man, as opposed to picking and choosing a verse here and there, or even reading individual chapters. Imagine sitting through a gripping three hour movie epic. Now multiply the significance, the beauty, the power, and the spiritual refreshment exponentially, and you can begin to appreciate the blessing of reading the Bible from beginning to end in one unbroken session.

I admitted to my friend that the thought was intriguing, but that I was simply unable to do that in 2003.

Enter 2004. With thanks in my heart for the many merciful providences of God, and with a keen sense of duty, personal limitations, passion, and hunger to live meaningfully for God in this new year, I revisited before my family the idea that we might accept this great challenge. We concluded that we were unable to commit in one unbroken setting the entire seventy-five hours of reading we estimated to be necessary to complete the Bible, but we could start the process.

Next, I brought it before the brothers in my local assembly. I was shocked and delighted to discover their wholehearted support for the idea, and to discover about thirty of them who would be willing to give up an entire Friday from 8:30 in the morning to about 8:00 at night for a reading of the Scripture.

We decided to focus on the men. Our goal was to give our men a time of firm foundations to encourage them in their leadership and manhood. To God be the glory, about thirty of them, fathers and sons, arrived for what proved to be one of the great experiences of our lives.

Our protocol was to give every person an opportunity to read multiple chapters of the Holy Scriptures to the group assembled. Many of us read from an extremely rare and valuable 1791 family Bible — the first family Bible commissioned in America, the forward of which was written by John Witherspoon, the same Founding Father who introduced into the Declaration of Independence the expression, “with a firm reliance on divine Providence.” Above, my son Justice reads from the book of Exodus.

Reading the Bible aloud was a great blessing for both reader and listeners. All of us followed along in our own Scriptures, making notes as we thought of fresh questions, or noticed exciting new patterns in Scripture which had been previously unnoticed by us.

We actually began our day with the challenge to love the Law of God by reading through the entire chapter of Psalm 119. From there we went straight to the beginning with Genesis and continued to read in chronological order. Reading for more than ten hours was not a chore. It was an absolute delight. We had scheduled five and ten minute breaks at the top of each hour, but oftentimes the men would want to continue.

The happiest part of my day was at the very close of the reading when my son Joshua (pictured above) hugged me very hard and said: “Daddy, thank you so much for doing this with me. It was one of the greatest things we have ever done together.”

Some men were stronger readers than others, but we encouraged each other in the Lord and delighted that each of us could grow together.

At the end of the day, we had only completed a few books of the Bible, but all of us agreed that our expedition through God’s Word had been transforming. We are now working on plans for another full day of reading in February. Our goal is to complete the Bible in about five or six more full day readings throughout the year.