If I put a link to it, you won’t go and read it.  So here it is, in all its goodness.  Listen to Jesus speak about his Church, and think about the new name we have in Christ.

Zion’s New Name

¹ For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
for Jerusalem’s sake I will not remain quiet,
till her righteousness shines out like the dawn,
her salvation like a blazing torch.

² The nations will see your righteousness,
and all kings your glory;
you will be called by a new name
that the mouth of the LORD will bestow.

³ You will be a crown of splendor in the LORD’s hand,
a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

⁴ No longer will they call you Deserted,
or name your land Desolate.
But you will be called Hephzibah, ['My delight is in her']
and your land Beulah ['Married'];
for the LORD will take delight in you,
and your land will be married.

⁵ As a young man marries a maiden,
so will your sons [or 'Builder'] marry you;
as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,
so will your God rejoice over you.

⁶ I have posted watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem;
they will never be silent day or night.
You who call on the LORD,
give yourselves no rest,

⁷ and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem
and makes her the praise of the earth.

⁸ The LORD has sworn by his right hand
and by his mighty arm:
“Never again will I give your grain
as food for your enemies,
and never again will foreigners drink the new wine
for which you have toiled;

⁹ but those who harvest it will eat it
and praise the LORD,
and those who gather the grapes will drink it
in the courts of my sanctuary.”

¹⁰ Pass through, pass through the gates!
Prepare the way for the people.
Build up, build up the highway!
Remove the stones.
Raise a banner for the nations.

¹¹ The LORD has made proclamation
to the ends of the earth:
“Say to the Daughter of Zion,
‘See, your Savior comes!
See, his reward is with him,
and his recompense accompanies him.’ ”

¹² They will be called the Holy People,
the Redeemed of the LORD;
and you will be called Sought After,
the City No Longer Deserted.

One of the biggest problems when dealing with the Old Testament is not knowing where you are. Dipping into, say, David and Goliath and wondering what is going on. Or reading about the temple being rebuilt and thinking it’s about church building projects.

Think of the Bible as this: a story with commentary.

A story that begins with Creation and ends with New Creation.

In between these fixed points we have Noah, Abraham, the Exodus, David, the Exile, Return, Incarnation, Cross, Pentecost, Us, Return of Christ.

And we have commentary. Prophets are, by and large, commentary on the state of Israel during the Kings following David. They are also commentary on how the Story is going to develop.  The Psalms are poetic commentary on life within this Story.  In the same way, we might think of the Epistles as commentary on the nature of the church following Pentecost and before the return of Christ.  The Epistles help us live as those incorporated into God’s Story.

If this is the case, before dipping into the commentary we need to know the Story.

3 songs have been turned into videos.  This first, “Cast All Your Cares on the LORD” (Psalm 55:22) is my favourite and has entrenched this verse in my mind!  You can find more videos at their YouTube channel, but I’ve embedded the 3 songs here (2 are after the break).

Here is 1 Timothy 4:12

And here is Philippians 4:6-7

How to memorise verse

1. Read the poem to yourself. Then read the first line out loud. Look away from the page and say the line again. If you made a mistake, try again. Repeat the procedure for every line in the poem.
2. Go back to the beginning. This time, read the first two lines out loud, look away and repeat them out loud. If you made a mistake, try again. Go through the whole poem two lines at a time.
3. Repeat the process three lines at a time, then four lines, five and then six. “By the sixth pass, no matter how long the poem, you will have memorised it.”
4. Recite the whole poem just before you go to bed at night.
5. The next day, after a peep at the first line to kick-start your memory, you should find that you can recite the whole poem.

Tips from Daisy Goodwin, in The Week (25 October 2008) page 38.

Or instead, maybe 2009 can be a year of spiritual joy as you engage with God’s Word more than ever before.

Make 2009 the year when you read the Bible lots.  Not just little nuggests, pulled from some spiritual pic’n'mix (now that Woolies has gone and you can’t get sugary pic’n'mix any more). Read it through. Big sections at a time. Enjoy the story. Discover Jesus.

Here are some good resources to get you going:

The ESV has 10 Reading Plans, including the BCP Daily Office Lectionary! (Great if you want to read the Psalms every month).  Justin Taylor explains a few of them here.  Whatever form you require – RSS, web, iCal or good-old-fashioned print-off-a-pdf, you’ll find them here.

Ron Frost was a big help to me when I read this article encouraging people to read through the Bible fast (ideally with someone else).  Do go and read it. Now. If you just want to start with Genesis and gallop through to Revelation, you’ll find reading plans (what to read each week) with a view to finish in 3, 4, 6, 9 or 12 months.

As he says on his blog:

Second,
we read the Bible boldly because it’s the best way to see how brilliantly God shows himself to be “wonderful”—that is, “full of wonder”—throughout the collective books. If we only nibble at the Bible or cherry pick our favorite books and verses, this God of wonder almost never shows up. It would be like watching an epic movie in limited daily doses of four or five minutes. The story line would only become evident after many months, with most of the important early parts largely forgotten by the time the climax is offered. But once we read the Bible in flow—in very big chunks—we start to see the same sort of miracle that the infant Jesus represented. Both the written Word and the living Word appear through humble people, in humble circumstances, and in unpretentious forms. But, over time, both the Scriptures and the Son come to be unveiled as brilliant  self-disclosures of God’s heart.

Do you need some more inspiration? Look no further than 3 excellent talks on the Power of God’s Word by Mike Reeves. I listened to them this last few days. Fantastic!  Heart-warming, Jesus-focused and very very listenable.

Finally, is this the “World’s Best Bible Reading Plan“?  Dan Edelen’s excellent piece encourages us to take a book of the Bible, read it and read it and read it, then put it into practice.  I’ll leave you with an extended quote, but read it all:

Here’s how The World’s Best Bible-Reading Program works:

1. Find a quiet, undisturbed place to read. Start in the New Testament since the New Covenant is necessary for perspective on the Old Testament. [Err, not quite, have you not been reading Christ The Truth? - Tim] Might as well begin with Matthew.

2. Read through one entire book in a single sitting. Obviously, the first five books of the NT are going to require some time. But do it. (You’re eternal. Live like it!) These books are whole units and are meant to be read as such. We need to experience their coherence. Trust me; the Holy Spirit will bring the entirety of the book to your mind in the future in a way you’ve never experienced before.

3. When you’ve read the book once, don’t move on! Read through it again. For the first five books, if you must break them into chunks, go with five or six chapters—whatever maintains the arc of the narrative.

4. Re-read that one book. Note the way the narrative and themes flow. Commit those stories and themes to memory. Note where they exist in the book.

5. Re-read that one book. Pay special attention to the way the Lord is portrayed.

6. Re-read that one book. Examine the relational aspects of the book, God to Man, Man to Man, Man to God.

7. Re-read that one book. Note the Lord’s redeeming and salvific acts within the greater arc of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration.  (This first pass through the NT assumes you have a modicum of OT understanding. After reading the OT through, the second pass through the NT will clarify things further.)

8. Re-read that one book. This time around, note all the Lord’s commands and how we’re told to practice them. Consider how they might work practically in your daily activities.

(By this point, you’ve read the same book seven times. Depending on the length of the book, it may have taken seven days or seven weeks. It doesn’t matter. This is about changing your life and relationship with Christ. This is about sixty years of discipleship. It’s not about getting through the Bible in a certain length of time.)

Now comes the hard (and controversial) part…

9. Take everything you’ve learned in this book and put it into practice. Take a month (*see comments below) to do nothing but concertedly meditate on what you’ve just read by making it real in your
own life. It might mean that the only Bible you read this month are the parts of this one book that you still aren’t getting and must re-read. Doesn’t matter—do it. (If you absolutely have to read something every day that isn’t part of this program, consider a few Psalms or a cycle of Proverbs. They’re the most suited to broken-up reading patterns since they are collections of wisdom and less unified than a book like Romans.)

10. After your month, take stock of all that you’ve learned by reading and practice. Make a mental assessment of the themes of the book and how they apply to your discipleship. If you’re confident
you’ve read and practiced this book, move on to the next one. Once the NT is finished, move onto the OT. (I realize some of the OT books are daunting in length for a single read-through. Make a concerted effort to read them in one sitting. Failing this, some of the OT books are narrative, which allows for breaks in the story. Psalms and Proverbs are easily segmented, as noted above. All prophets must be read in one sitting the first time through. A book as enormous as Isaiah is hard to partition, so consider reading it on a weekend day.)

Repeat these ten steps for the rest of your life.

With the building of the tabernacle, a new stage of God’s dealings with his people arrives. It’s like a new world – which is why there are “sevens” everywhere and why the tabernacle is like Eden in many ways. And at this point God has come to live nearer to his people than before – which is both wonderful and dangerous. Leviticus is, therefore, a book of house rules for God’s young children at that stage in history and it teaches them how to keep clean and tidy and how to grow in character like their father.

…

The uncleanness laws of chapters 11-15 relate to death and the curse. It is not that uncleanness is itself sin but rather that God gave his children a picture system to teach them how to make distinctions. This would help them grow to be like their Father who also makes distinctions (as in Genesis 1). Clean animals, in chapter 11, are those which keep away from death and curse-dirt by wearing shoes and by digesting their food extra-thoroughly. Chapter 12 talks about childbirth and chapters 13 and 14 about ‘leprosy’. Chapter 15 shows that what comes out of us is death until we are made new in Jesus.

Ephesians is possibly the book to read to get a fantastic vision of the Church. Time would be well-spent simply pondering the different titles and descriptions we are given, such as ‘saints’ or ‘God’s household’.

A verse that continues to amaze me is Ephesians 3:10 -

God’s intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms…

It takes a bit of digging around Ephesians to work out what this means, but basically it is saying that as the church demonstrates the unity we have in the Spirit (a unity of different races and backgrounds) God’s wise plan (of bringing all things under Christ, see 1:10) is made known to the evil spiritual rulers and authorities (see 6:12). Go here to read a sermon by John Piper on this verse: it will transform the way you understand the purpose of church!

But here’s a pdf with a great idea by Ron Frost for reading the whole Bible through in 3-4 months with others!

The rules are simple. We selected a date for completing the project (in this case, four months from our commencement). We meet Tuesday morning for an hour. We chat for about 15 minutes and then begin to read verses that weíve underlined in our reading for the week. Each of us has 15 minutes to review as much as he can ñ thereís never enough time for all the verses. Then we share requests and pray. It may not sound dramatic, but it is the highlight of my week.

There’s no need to keep pace with others – in fact, if one goes at a different rate it means together you go through the Bible twice! It also means you can meet other people without having to prepare separate studies for each one. What a great way to simply enjoy God’s Word together.