If you’re looking for a fresh and unique way to read the whole Bible through, then this might be for you, as it was for me this past year.
This version takes the entire New Living Translation of the Bible and reorganises it thematically into 365 readings. The books of the Bible are divided into three groups: story, teaching and wisdom. Each day consists of three readings, one from each group. The story and teaching sections mostly go through whole books of the Bible, whereas the wisdom group (particularly when it is from Psalms or Proverbs) will jump around from chapter to chapter in order to better fit the daily theme. Doing this means that you are reading a consistent theme each day. Although it achieves this more successfully some days than others, it makes it a very different experience in reading the whole Bible through.
There were lots of other aspects that made this a fresh experience for my daily devotions. For one, I’ve never read the New Living Translation before and enjoyed using it. The team behind this also chose not to include verse and chapter numbers in the text itself and although doing so would be difficult in other contexts, as a devotional tool it was actually quite helpful not to have this distraction. The formatting helped highlight which group you were reading by its corresponding number of columns. I also appreciated that the length of the readings was approximately consistent every day, which means you know how much time to set aside. The only downside for me was that it uses red lettering for Jesus’s words.
