The Land of Ozz

The pastor of my church presented part four of a series called Journey to Life. This series is outstanding for Christians at any point in their relationship with God. I encourage you to go the Seacoast Church web site an check out this series. You can listen to an audio of these messages, watch a video, and follow along with the notes that are handed out during the services. All of this is available on iTunes as well. I will provide a link to that later in this post.

Today was one of those days at church when you either got convicted or you receive confirmation on how you are living your life. My wife and I were fortunate that we got more confirmation than conviction on a few things that we have been doing in our life and I want to share them with you today.

The first confirmation was related to obedience to God. As Pastor Greg pointed out in his message today we are to be baptized “…in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” My wife and I both had been baptized earlier in life and that was good as far as our covenant with God. We got baptized again after our First Wednesday service in December of 2003 to show our recommitting our lives to God after many years of unrepented sin since our baptisms. I believe that our baptisms in 2003 were a good step signifying a big change in how we were going to live our lives.

The second confirmation in today’s message was related to our commitment to building family traditions. This is a sound principle that is taught in the parenting ministry that we are part of that is distributed by Growing Families International. A good example of a tradition that I started just yesterday was to start reading the Bible with my oldest son Riley on weekend mornings. He got up yesterday while I was still laying in bed doing my morning reading. He came and sat with me on the bed. He then repeated every word that I was reading from Psalms 19. I thought that this was just the neatest thing. I caught our reading with my mp3 recorder this morning before church. I got to church and received a blessing from the message telling me that this was good stuff. You can listen to my mp3 recording of Riley and I reading Psalms 15 this morning.

The third thing that we received confirmation on doing the right thing was Pastor Greg’s point about how Jesus grew through learning God’s word. He quoted a scripture that I am probably going to post as the theme message to my Godcasts of The Living Bible. I think I will use “…meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.” Joshua 1: 7-8 (NIV) as my theme. My wife Sherry and I have been reading the Bible daily for about three solid months now. We both would had been reading the Bible semi-regularly in the past , but it we were not doing it the way we should. A good friend recommended a schedule published back in 1983 by Fullgrowth Ministries of Tulsa, OK. Here is how that publication recommends you use their schedule:

If you follow this plan devised by Fullgrowth Ministries of Tulsa, Oklahoma, you’ll read the New Testament through twice and the Old Testament once during the next 12 months.

The plan recommends that you do your reading at a specific quiet time each day. If you miss a day, continue with the current day’s reading and catch up when you have extra time. After you finish your day’s reading, mark off that day.

The Old Testament portions are presented as nearly as possible in chronological order. Passages from prophets are included in the historical narrative where they were given, they are often given in a single day’s reading.

You’ll encounter Psalms throughout the year. Frequently, a Psalm that fits a particular passage has been placed with that passage.

As you enter the New Testament, you’ll read Luke and Acts first, then the letters - with periodic passages from other Gospels - and, finally, Revelation. Thus, the story of the life of Christ is constantly related to your Christian life.

I want to add how very important it is that you follow the guidelines given to read the passages for the date given and catch up when you have time. I have tried reading catch up stuff before the current day’s reading after a family crisis took me away from reading for a couple of days and it just didn’t work.

Below I have provided you with the reading for the month of February. The photocopy that I have says that this schedule is copyrighted by Fullgrowth Ministries, but it also says, “feel free to re-print this chart for use in your church, Sunday school, or just to give to friends.” You are my friend if you got this far into this post. I hope this blesses you as much as it has my wife and me. I do plan to post each month’s schedule from the chart before each month begins in the future.

February

Bonus: Num. 25, 26, 27; 1 Cor 13 (This schedule was originally written for the leap year 1984)

This is a fairly aggressive reading plan, but it is well worth the 20-30 minutes per day required to complete the daily reading. There is a link to another Bible reading plan resource on the Seacoast Blog. There are also a couple of other reading plans on BibleGateway.com.

Notes on Seacoast Church and my relationship with Seacoast: I am a member of Seacoast Church. I am not on staff at Seacoast Church and the things I write on this blog about Seacoast should not be taken as official communications of Seacoast Church. Actually, I am not sure that the pastors and staff at Seacoast even know I write about the church here on my blog. You can get official Seacoast information on the Seacoast Blog. If you have iTunes then you can subscribe to the Journey to Life series from Seacoast Church. Seacoast Church has been ranked as the 28th fastest growing church in America, it is in the 30th most influential, and in the 10 most innovative. You can learn more about the church at Seacoast.org.