About our reading plan

What’s special about the Digging Deeper reading plan?

 It is important to consider what plan to follow in reading the Bible! I find I can't share about this without telling my age and sounding like I am boasting, so here goes: I will soon be 66 and have read the whole Bible yearly for the last 46 years. I know from experience that some reading plans are not fun to follow. That is why I designed this plan to be practical and doable— taking only 20 minutes per day to finish the whole Bible in a year. And these things make the DBRP plan unique and interesting:

• I like a plan that gives you something from the New Testament every day. I have arranged the New Testament books according to chronological and thematic considerations and with the Gospels spread out during the year. My goal was to help the reader see correspondences between the Old and New Testaments and follow themes in the New Testament. For instance, the Gospel written for the Jewish audience— Matthew, is followed by NT letters directed to the same audience.
• In the first half of the year, the DBRP plan tells the Old Testament story in its logical and chronological order— which is also the ordering given in the Bible. In the second half of the year, some retelling of history (starting with 1st Chronicles) is mixed in with the major prophets of Jeremiah and Ezekiel— so that correspondences between what was foretold and the fulfillment are more easily seen.
• Each day there is a reading from Old Testament poetry, and those books are taken in Bible order starting with Job and ending with Isaiah.
• Cohesion and Seeing Correspondences: The DBRP plan begins the year with the Bible's oldest book (Job), plus the story of the beginning of the world (Genesis), and the earliest written Gospel (Mark). At the end of the year, stunning correspondences can be seen between the minor prophets, Isaiah, and the book of Revelation. If you listen to the podcasts, I give brief introductions to each reading— reminding you of what has gone before and pointing out correspondences that show the amazing unity in God's Word.
• Convenience: The integration of our Digging Deeper Daily reading plan in the YouVersion Bible reading app makes it easy to keep track of your reading progress using any smart device. Our own DBRP podcast app for Android and Apple devices makes it easy to automate listening to the podcasts. See how to get the DBRP app for your device by scrolling down on the landing page of this site. The Bible app and the listening app make it easy to do what you want— whether that be to just read the plan, just listen to the podcasts, or do both at the same time.

You can listen to the DBRP using two translations.

I (Phil) read the  Good News Translation (GNT) for the 2016 podcasts. This is one of my favorite translations and it has excellent scholarly backing. The GNT New Testament  translation was first published under the name of Today's English Version in 1966— when I was 16. This translation meant a lot to me in my teenage years and after, and I want to share this with my grand kids. The GNT has been very helpful in my own translation work in Indonesia, and it has influenced every other Bible translation published since 1970. In the podcast readings, I have made minor changes to the GNT based on my Bible translation experience, and these are documented in the episode notes. The GNT series of podcasts have file names like this: DBRP_001.mp3 (for the first episode). There are several GNT in YouVersion. The one I am reading from is the USA version, GNTD.

In the 2014-2015 podcasts I read the New Living Translation (NLT). The NLT translation is my all-time favorite. It conveys the meaning of the original texts in modern, clear, and natural language. In the NLT podcast series, I made minor changes to the NLT based on my Bible translation experience, and these are documented in the episode notes. If you listen to the NLT podcast series, the file names are like this: 2015DBRP_001.mp3 (for the first episode).

Both the GNT and the NLT are meaning based translations, which makes them easy to understand for podcast listeners. For more information about how the GNT and NLT compare to other translations, please see the bottom of the Shovels page.

In 2017, choose episodes that have names starting with GN- for the GNT podcast series. The GNT series have a yellow icon. The NLT series of podcasts have names starting with NL- and the episode icons are dark blue.

 

 

 

 

 

Check out this episode!