When I was in junior high school, I had someone come visit my home who was a pastor and he said to me, “I want you to go get your Bible.” So I went and found a Bible. He said, “I want you to turn to a certain passage in the Bible.” I didn’t know where to find it. He said, “It’s in the New Testament.” I did not know the difference between the New Testament and the Old Testament. I had no idea. I was in junior high school, grew up in America, born and raised in what we call a biblically literate age. It was when people used to say, “He’s driving like Jayhu,” and, “That woman looks like Jezebel!” That’s like David and Goliath; we were familiar with Bible terms, but I didn’t know anything about the Bible.
I spent my Sundays as a boy getting up at about 10:30. After a while, I did start going to church and got saved, but as a little boy, we would go down to my father’s beer joint and sweep the dance floor and start playing the juke box (we could sweep better listening to that music.) We would eat all the peanuts and potato chips we wanted and drink all the Cokes we wanted.
It got to be about 12:30 and we would sit on the bar and open the beer cases, because you couldn’t sell beer on Sunday, and we’d wait for the church people to come by. We would go to the back door and open it, and my brother and I would hand the beer to my dad to sell out the back to people coming by with Bibles on their dash and white shirts and ties on their way home from church. When they would pull out, he’d call them hypocrites and low down bums saying that’s why he didn’t go to church.
We would sit there, listening and laughing. Then we would go play the pinball machines, come back, listen to some more songs and wait on some more people to come by. When that was all over we would go home. That was Sunday.
You think that’s a terrible family. Well, it’s just the way we lived; no thought about God’s Word.
When that preacher came to visit me and asked me to find something in the Bible and I couldn’t find it, I was so embarrassed. I considered myself fairly intelligent.
I went back into my bedroom, or the room I called my bedroom (no one really had their own room), and promised the Lord that I was going to read the Bible and come to know what God’s Word actually said. I promised God that I was going to read His Word every day. I made a commitment to the Lord. I was already a Christian, I had been saved, but I knew nothing about the Bible.
I would like to encourage you to make this a year that you will read some portion of the Bible every day. Here is a link to several different Bible reading schedules. Why don’t you prayerfully consider choosing one and commit to faithfully follow it this year?