I just finished working on a 4 day a week 40 week Bible reading plan. I want to share it with anyone who is interested in reading the Bible in a year.

I started this project earlier this year and it is finally done in a useable format. I made the chart into a foldable bookmark. It would probably print best in landscape layout on legal size paper, but prints ok on standard letter size. Make sure you use Landscape layout. Portrait layout will make the words too small to be useful.

How to read the chart: Along the left side is indicated each of the 40 weeks in the plan. Then each colored column represents one day of the reading week. Each day there is an Old Testament reading, a Psalm reading, and a New Testament reading.

To download the chart: right click (off click) on the image, and choose “Save Image As” to download it to your computer.

The idea behind this program was to allow time for when life gets busy, and holidays demand extra planning time, and other things cause life delays, to make it possible to keep up (or catch up) with the readings and be able to accomplish the goal of reading the Bible in a year. The inclusion of both Old and New Testament readings each day is to help avoid the slog of reading through all the Law and the history of the Hebrews, before getting to the Good News of Jesus. This way there is a balance of both each day.

There was a kind of divinely fun thing that happened while making this chart toward the end. The data sets I had found that already had all the numbers of books of the Bible and number of verses in each chapter counted out for me were slightly different. The New Testament version has a column of data showing me a preview of how many chapters were in each book, that the Old Testament dataset didn’t have (or maybe I edited it out and forgot, I don’t remember at this point). So I was going along filling out the little chart trying to keep the number of verses to be read within a comparably similar range, and realized I was going to run out of days available before I got through Revelation. And as I looked more closely, I realized it was saying some of these books had only one verse. I knew that not to be true, so I studied my spreadsheet closer to figure out what the problem was. Only the book of Matthew was missing that first “Number of Chapters” column. I had gotten all the way through James adding an extra non-existent chapter of reading through for every book after that. I had to go back and edit the whole thing. I took a break for a few days once I found that disappointing bit of news. When I came back to it, I was kind of trying to rush through it to get it done while waiting for my students to be ready for school that day. I got through all the edits through Jude and then counted out how many days were left to fit in the chapters for the book of Revelation. 11 cells were left. Then I looked at the chart. There were 22 chapters in Revelation. EXACTLY enough cells with no more, no less, to perfectly complete the chart.

I hope this 40 week Bible reading plan bookmark is a blessing to you. Feel free to share it with others. Freely you have received, freely give. God bless you.