Read Through The Bible as a Family {Printable}

There are a few things that I’ve felt God nudging me towards with greater urgency in recent years.  One of those is the absolute importance of the Word of God in our life.  It has the ability to teach, to encourage, to correct, to build our faith, and draw us near to the Lord.  As I look towards my young family, I want to be intentional to cultivate time where we are all saturated with the Word.

A year or so ago, I was introduced to the book, Together: Growing Appetites for God, by Desire over at When You Rise.  I’ve read through the Bible before in various ways, but had never really considered the idea of reading through the Bible as a family.  While I haven’t actually read that book yet, I was so intrigued by the idea that I went and put together a pamphlet to help us keep track of what we’ve read together as a family.  For a while we were reading a chapter every night at dinner, but then we started baseball and evenings became crazy and well, you guessed it, we sort of stopped.

But this last fall, the Lord started laying this on my heart again.  Through my interaction with The Seed Company, I was introduced to the concept of Bible Poverty.  They have a campaign to #EndBiblePoverty through raising funds to speed up the translation of Scripture into new languages.  My heart leapt.  Bible poverty.  There are whole people groups out there who don’t have access to the Bible.  They don’t even have the option of reading God’s Words in their own language.  Our family has embarked on helping to raise money for this cause.  In fact, I’ve dedicated a part of the proceeds from my ebook towards this vital ministry as well.

And all of this got me thinking about the Bible poverty we experience right here in America – the land where we have the freedom to worship God as we please and have easy access to the very Word of God.  We can read these life-giving words and yet the American church is more Bible illiterate now than ever.   We need to be seeped in the Word.  It feeds our soul and grows our faith.  And so I picked up our checklist again and began reading aloud.  My middle is still working through some of the used Abeka readers that we found (and I LOVE). For Xander, however, I’ve also started having him read to me straight from the Bible each day.  It is a great way for him to get good reading practice, introduces him to wonderful vocabulary and draws our hearts to the Lord throughout the day.

We’ve been talking of late about how reading the Word is like going on a treasure hunt.  The search itself is immensely satisfying and the reward is beyond comprehension.

“I rejoice at Your word as one who finds great treasure.” Psalm 119:162

So we pick it up and begin methodically pouring over the Word together.  Sometimes we pause to talk about something.  Sometimes, we get side-tracked…  In all of this, I’ve reminded myself that this is not some grand race.  While we like to see the growing number of check marks, there is no timeline on our goal to read through the Bible together as a family.  The beauty is in the journey itself.

A Subscriber BONUS!

So today, I decided to share our family checklist with all of my wonderful subscribers.  If you are looking for an easy sheet that you can tuck into your Bible and use as a guide in your family reading, be sure to subscribe to download your own checklist!

Bible Reading Checklist!