Are you one of those people that goes to church, but is just too busy to read the Bible during the week. You've got a job. Kids. Family. Booster club. Grocery shopping. Always a long, long to-do list, and no time for recreational reading.
Are you sure you don't have time? Let me share something with you I learned this week:
The average American watches 4 hours of television every day. There's an average of 12 minutes per hour of commercials on television. That's 48 minutes a day the average American spends watching TV commercials!
Now lets look at the Holy Bible. It takes about 19 hours to read the New Testament, and about 52 hours to read the Old Testament. So you could read the entire Holy Bible in about 71 hours.
In the time you spend learning which car insurance is the cheapest and which underwear has the most comfortable waistband, you could read the entire New Testament in just three weeks--just picking it up during the commercial breaks!
But the Bible isn't one book--it's 66 books. Just reading while the commercials are on, you could probably read the gospels this week--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John! You could read all of James during the commercial breaks of one hour-long television show. In fact most of the books in the New Testament can be read in less than a hour--there's four or five chapters in the New Testament that you can read in 10 minutes or less!
We all have time, we just lack the interest--and most of us lack the interest because we lack the enthusiasm because we don't view it as something we'd enjoy. We think it would be too hard to read or that we wouldn't be able to understand it. That's a big misconception! There's all kinds of translations of the Bible, many in plain English, and no shortage of great study Bibles with notes that will help you if you do run across something you don't understand. But the Bible was written to be read. God wanted us to understand what He was sharing with us, so the concepts and the ideas, and the stories are things everyone should be able to relate to.
Believe me, reading the Bible isn't a chore. You'll soon find that time you spend reading the Bible is something you begin to look forward to. That's what I learned anyway. I've been reading it almost every day for a long, long time. The more you read the Bible, the more you want to read the Bible, and the more you want to read the Bible the more you want to study the Bible. That's just how it works.
And there's so much there. There's so much in the Bible that will enhance your life given the chance. So much there that can comfort us during difficult times. There's so much wisdom there that if we apply it can give us peace. It's the owners manual for the human soul . . . a long letter written to us by God our creator telling us what it's all about. It's our roadmap to salvation and eternal life. And we are absolutely wired to receive that message, and it's there for us if we look it.
You have time. Spend it in God's word. You'll get a lot more out of the scriptures than you'll get watching pizza commercials.
Just pick it up and open it--you've got at least three minutes before your show comes back on.
~Todd E. Creason
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