What Is Your Favorite Bit

Stew has done every plan going and Bry stopped him with a question at a kitchen table.

Nineteen years. He came to faith at twenty-eight and he has been serious about it from the first month, and he is not a man who does things by halves.

Chronological, twice. The one where you do the whole thing in a year and it hands you four passages a day. The ninety-day sprint, which nearly finished him. The app, which he has had a streak on twice, once for four hundred and eleven days. The one his church did together in the autumn where everybody was on the same chapter. The one with the questions at the bottom of each page.

He has read the whole Bible, at a rough count, three and a half times.

And Bry, who is a friend of about twelve years and who was not making a point, said, over toast, "What is your favorite bit?"

And Stew said, "How do you mean?"

And Bry said, "Like, your bit. The one you go back to."

And Stew found, with some alarm, that he was reaching for things a plan had given him. The passage from the autumn one. The chapter that everybody says. He got as far as saying "Psalm 23, I suppose," and heard how thin it sounded coming out of a man who has read the whole thing three and a half times.

Because the honest answer is that he does not have one.

He has been where he was sent. Every single time, for nineteen years, he has opened it at a place somebody else nominated, on a schedule somebody else set, and he has been faithful about it in a way most people are not, and he has never once in nineteen years opened that book and gone where he wanted.

He said it out loud, eventually, looking at the toast rack. He said, "I do not think I have ever just read it."

Now let me ask you the same question, and take the same length of time over it.

What is yours? Not the one you know you should say. The bit you go back to, that nobody assigned you, that you found.

The word is delight

The first psalm describes a person and uses a word that most reading plans cannot generate.

But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night.Psalm 1:2

His delight. Not his discipline. Not his practice. The word is about pleasure: about the thing you would go to anyway, the way a man goes back to a piece of music or a road he likes driving.

He meditates day and night. And the word underneath meditates is a strange one. It is used elsewhere of a lion growling over its prey and of a person muttering to themselves. It is not a scheduled activity. It is a thing somebody does under their breath, repeatedly, because they cannot leave it alone.

So hear this said over you, at a kitchen table with the toast going cold. You are allowed to have a favorite, and nineteen years of faithful obedience has somehow never included one afternoon of freedom with the book. That is written into the first psalm in the collection, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who makes a page live, and He is entirely capable of doing it on a page nobody assigned you.

Now let me guard this hard, because this article could be misread as a swipe at something good.

The plans are not the problem.

Read that twice, because Stew has read the whole Bible three and a half times and that is not nothing, and a person who has done it once has material in them that will surface at three in the morning in twenty years. Structure is a gift. Most people who abandon plans do not replace them with freedom, they replace them with nothing, and I have no interest in talking anybody out of a discipline that is working.

And nothing here is against being taught. The autumn one where everybody read the same chapter was a good idea and it did good.

The point is narrower.

You have had one of the two relationships available and not the other.

There is the assigned relationship: faithful, structured, comprehensive, and it builds something in a person over decades that nothing else builds. You have that. Most people do not.

And there is the other one, which the psalm is describing, and it is closer to how you are with a place you love than to how you are with a syllabus. You wander in it. You go back to the same eight verses for a month because you want to. You read something and then sit and look out of the window.

That is what nineteen years has not had a single hour of.

You are able to open it and go where you like. It is your book and the Word says His delight is in it, and it uses the language of pleasure rather than of duty, and the Spirit of God makes a passage live where He chooses, which includes a page you turned to for no reason on a Saturday morning.

There was a movement five hundred years ago that built schools across a whole country so that ordinary children could read this book for themselves. They were the most rigorous people alive about study and about structure and about being taught properly, and they were also perfectly clear about what the schools were for. Not so that everybody would complete something. So that a plowman could go home and open it where he wanted.

They were not building a syllabus. They were handing over a key.