tomorrowsreflection.com
the personal blog of jeremy jernigan

I recently did some guest blogging for Kevin Martineau on his blog, Shooting the Breeze. Kevin is the pastor at Port Hardy Baptist Church on Northern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He is launching a summer project where he asked nine bloggers to share about a book (or books) that has impacted the person who is writing.

Click here to read what I wrote.

Below I’ve included the schedule, list of bloggers and their blogs. If you’re looking to expand your reading list (and who isn’t?), I’d encourage you to check out Kevin’s site for the next week or so to see what everyone recommends. Also, this provides a list of some new blogs to check out when you get some time.

Tuesday, June 30th – Darren Herbold Unbridled Submission Blog
Wednesday, July 1st – Jeremy Jernigan tomorrowsreflection.com
Thursday, July 2nd – Peter Pollack Rediscovering the Church
Sunday, July 5th – Andy Darnell Andy Darnell’s Mindmap
Monday, July 6th – Jason Stasyszen Connecting to Impact
Tuesday, July 7th – Greg Bolt Oregon Mountaineer
Wednesday, July 8th – Doug Hibbard Doug’s Blog
Thursday, July 9th – Bob Robbins bob’s thoughts
Monday, July 13th – Susan Hetrick The Blending Blog

I’m going to take a moment here and be a proud husband. My wife is featured in an article today from the West Valley View, highlighting her real estate work in Avondale and the program that she works with. It has been so fun for me to watch her excel in an area that I know little-to-nothing about.

Click here to read the article.

If you’re like me, you want to read the Bible regularly but it often seems like a daunting challenge to pull it off with any amount of consistency and discipline. Through the years, I’ve heard of all sorts of reading plans and I’ve tried many of them myself. I will say that a reading plan significantly aids you in the process of reading Scripture regularly, but how do you know which one to try? The most common is the Bible in a year program, which many people eagerly launch into and keep it up for a few weeks until they get to Leviticus and then it ruins them. There is the Bible in 90 days, a difficult plan that only one of my friends has been able to follow through with. Or, you can just open it at random or randomly select a book and hope that it takes you somewhere.

I recently heard about a new plan and I’ve been trying it for a bit now and I love it. It was developed, or at least adapted to its current form, by Grant Horner, a professor at the Master’s College in LA.

Here’s the part that sounds scary: you read 10 chapters a day. Here’s the good news, you fly through it and are constantly building off your momentum without getting overwhelmed by any “difficult” part of the Bible. The plan divides the Bible into 10 lists, and you read a chapter out of each list a day. The first list includes the Gospels, so you’ll always read at least one chapter a day from them. Since each list is made up of a different amount of total chapters, you’ll never read the same 10 chapters in a day from the time you start. The benefit of this plan is that everyday you get an overall picture and feel of Scripture and it allows you to see how they connect together and how one verse sheds light into another verse. Because you are constantly moving from one book to another, it goes quickly and gives you the feeling of progress each day. Another benefit is that you don’t get as discouraged, or behind, if you don’t read a day. There’s no timeline to complete this so it becomes part of your routine and not a task to try and conquer. I’ve never promoted a particular Bible-reading plan before, but I’m officially encouraging you to try this if you are looking to energize your reading of the Bible.

Click here to go to Professor Horner’s page to read the details about the plan and download tools to make it easy for you to read it yourself.

There are a couple of distinctions I would make to his philosophy:
1. I’m less concerned about knowing where passages are on each page than he is. I think it is beneficial every year or so to change the version that you’re reading so that you don’t get locked into one English translation only. The KJV used to be considered the only “holy” version, recently it has become the NIV. If you change it up it allows you to see how different versions offer helpful perspective and is another way to keep it fresh year after year. I recommend the NIV, TNIV, NASB, NLT, and NRSV.

2. It takes me about 30 minutes a day to read my chapters, but that is because I like to go a little slower than he recommends. I’m a believer in journaling about your Bible reading, so I would encourage you to allow time for notes and questions as you go.

I’m two books into my summer reading and I recently finished Niccolo Machiavelli’s famed classic, The Prince. Despite it’s short length, it was a harder read than I expected. That is probably due to it being a translated book. The Prince is known as a “supertext” and it is amazing how many times I’ve seen other books reference it. Machiavelli has become synonymous with dark politics but the book is explaining how to succeed as a ruler if your ambtion/success is the most important goal. It was worth the read and is something I’ll revisit again in future years (I know there is much in there that I didn’t get the first time). Here are some of the ideas that stood out to me:

“The wish to acquire is in truth very natural and common, and men always do so when they can, and for this they will be praised not blamed; but when they cannot do so, yet wish to do so by any means, then there is folly and blame.”

“A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.”

“Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehended; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.”

My friend Mark sent me an interesting website from Chris Harrison. In it, Chris has plotted out different connections in the Bible and artistically rendered them to appreciate graphically. Below I display one of his graphs displaying the 63,779 cross-references in the Bible. This takes a few moments to read (and reread) his explanation and then stare at the image for a bit. If you are a visual person than this offers a helpful perspective on the connectedness of Scripture. He also does connections with names in other graphs on his site. You can view high res versions of the graphics from his site as well which allows you to see some of the connections more specifically.

“The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.”