I’m aware that suggesting McCheyne was wrong feels provocative, even irreverent. He was a godly man who loved Scripture and wanted others to love it too. But we’re not required to believe that every spiritual discipline from the past, no matter how well-intentioned, is above criticism or improvement. We’re allowed to ask whether a particular method actually achieves its stated goals or whether it might inadvertently produce different results. We’re allowed to notice that something can be good in theory but problematic in practice.

It’s the first of January and so attention is drawn inevitably to Bible Reading Plans. You’ve gone for “stretching”, hoping you’ll do better than last year. January was good, February was patchy, March was tokenistic and April was too busy. The mantra keeps going around in your head that, “good little Christians read the whole Bible in a year, every year”. 66 Books, 1,189 chapters, 31,102 verses, 757,000 words, daunting but surely possible. You’ve even bought a new journaling Bible, highlighters, sticky labels, bookmarks and an artisan motivational propelling pencil. And so, Genesis 1:1, ‘In the beginning…’, so far so good. But in all honesty you know Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are just over the horizon, lurking like a Bible reading traffic calming measure ready to slow you to a standstill. The Robert Murray McCheyne Reading Plan card all shiny and laminated lures you in with Genesis, Psalms and Matthew but you know even if you traverse the Pentateuch, 1 Chronicles, Jeremiah and Isaiah are waiting to pounce. They’ve tripped you up before even in your good years.

So I want to ask the question, was Robert Murray McCheyne right? Is he not just setting people on a trajectory towards guilt-laden defeat? Is reading 4 chapters at break-neck speed doing anything for you except encouraging you to legalistically skim the surface? This cannot be the optimal way to engage with the Bible, can it? Isn’t it time someone just torpedoed this age old practice that has failed more people than it has helped?

At this pivotal time of the year, please read the below to maybe hear a transformative way to read the Bible in a joyful, nourishing and transformative way. A way that may serve you well and free you from guilt, duty, tickboxes and the Sisyphean Task that your personal Bible reading has regularly become.

The name Robert Murray McCheyne commands immediate respect in evangelical circles, and rightly so. His devotion to Christ, his pastoral heart, his early death at twenty-nine after pouring himself out in ministry. These facts alone secure him a place among the great saints. His Bible reading plan, designed in 1842 to take believers through the Old Testament once and the New Testament and Psalms twice each year, has become one of the most widely used spiritual disciplines in Protestant Christianity. Millions have attempted it. Most have failed. And here I must say something that feels almost sacrilegious: I think McCheyne was wrong. Not about the authority of Scripture. Not about the necessity of reading God’s word. But about the method. The mysticism that good Christians read their Bible cover to cover each year is an unhelpful myth that burdens people unnecessarily, defeats them repeatedly, and puts far too much pressure on January.

Let me be clear from the outset. Reading God’s word is absolutely essential. No Christian worth the name would dispute this. Scripture is God-breathed, profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness. It is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. It is the means by which the Spirit sanctifies believers, the lamp to our feet and light to our path. Without regular engagement with the Bible, our faith withers. Our prayers become aimless. Our theology drifts toward whatever winds of doctrine happen to be blowing through our culture at any given moment. The question is not whether we should read Scripture. The question is how.

McCheyne’s plan emerged from genuine pastoral concern. He wanted his congregation at St Peter’s in Dundee to know the whole counsel of God. He wanted them immersed in Scripture daily. These are good desires. Laudable desires. But somewhere between McCheyne’s original intention and our contemporary practice, his plan became less a helpful tool and more a spiritual metric, a way of measuring devotion, a badge of serious Christianity. You meet someone at church and mention you’re doing the McCheyne plan. Their eyes light up with recognition and respect. You meet someone and admit you’re not following any particular plan, just reading a bit here and there. The response is more muted. Less impressed. There’s an unspoken hierarchy at work.

This is where the burden begins. January arrives with its customary promises of renewal and fresh starts. Believers purchase new journals, sharpen pencils, download apps, and commit themselves once more to getting through the entire Bible in twelve months. For approximately three weeks, things go well. Then February arrives. Life intrudes. A sick child. A work deadline. A bout of flu. Suddenly they’re five days behind. Then ten. Then they’re still slogging through Leviticus in March while the plan says they should be in Judges.

What happens next is drearily predictable. Guilt sets in. The voice of condemnation whispers that real Christians, serious Christians, committed Christians don’t fall behind. They don’t skip days. They don’t find the genealogies tedious or the ceremonial laws bewildering. For real Christians every ‘quiet time’ is exhilaratingly refreshing. The believer tries to catch up, reading multiple days’ worth of chapters in one sitting, eyes glazing over as they race through passages, desperate to tick boxes rather than encounter the living God. Eventually, many simply give up. They abandon the plan entirely, often abandoning consistent Bible reading altogether, defeated by a system that promised blessing but delivered only frustration.

The problem is not laziness. The problem is not lack of devotion. The problem is that the Bible does not yield its treasure to hasty enquiry, to rapid coverage, to the kind of superficial engagement that treating it like a checklist inevitably produces. Scripture is not a book to be conquered, a mountain to be summited so we can plant our flag at the top and feel accomplished. It is a library of sixty-six books, written over fifteen hundred years, in three languages, spanning multiple genres, addressing countless situations, revealing one magnificent story of God’s redemptive purposes in Jesus Christ. This kind of literature requires something other than speed reading.

Think about how we approach other great books. Suppose you wanted to understand Shakespeare. Would you read all thirty-seven plays in a year, racing through one every nine or ten days? Or would you take a single play, perhaps Hamlet, and read it multiple times? You’d read it once for the plot. Again for the characters. A third time for the language. A fourth time noticing the themes. You’d read scholarly introductions. You’d watch performances. You’d memorise soliloquies. By the end of this process, Hamlet would be inside you. Its phrases would surface in your mind unbidden. You’d understand not just what happens but why it matters. You’d see connections and patterns that completely escaped you on first reading. The play would have become part of your mental furniture, shaping how you think about revenge, madness, mortality, duty.

This is what I’m proposing for Scripture. Better to pick a single book and get massively familiar with it through repeated, consistent reading. Choose Philippians, for instance. It’s four chapters. You could read the entire letter in fifteen minutes. Now read it every day for a month. Then for another month. Then for a third. What happens? Initially, you notice the basic content. Paul is in prison. He’s writing to a church he loves. He’s joyful despite his circumstances. But keep reading. You start noticing the structure. The recurring themes. The way Paul deals with conflict. His theology of suffering. His Christology in chapter two. The warning against false teachers. The personal notes about Timothy and Epaphroditus aren’t just filler but wonderfully instructive. His own testimony about counting everything as loss compared to knowing Christ.

Read it for three months. Now you’re noticing tiny details. The way Paul uses specific words. The Old Testament echoes. The grammar. The flow of argument. The pastoral wisdom in how he addresses problems without crushing people. You’re seeing how the rejoicing he commands isn’t superficial optimism but something deeper, rooted in confidence about God’s purposes. The famous passage about joy and peace isn’t a mere pep talk but emerges from a carefully constructed theological vision. By now, you know this letter. Really know it. You can close your eyes and recall whole sections. You can quote verses in context. You understand not just the words but the world behind the words.

And here’s what else happens. This deep, repeated reading enables believers to see, understand and comprehend things that simply never occur from superficial skim reading. You notice that Paul’s imprisonment isn’t incidental to the letter but central to its message. You see the structure more clearly: the thanksgiving, the prayer, the narrative section, the exhortations. You grasp how the hymn in chapter two functions within Paul’s argument about unity. You understand why the warning in chapter three is so sharp. The letter stops being a collection of isolated verses and becomes an integrated whole, a coherent argument, a window into apostolic Christianity.

Moreover, something remarkable happens in your mind. The book becomes so familiar that it starts working even when you’re not actually reading it. You’re in a difficult situation at work and suddenly you’re thinking about Paul’s words on considering others more significant than yourselves. You’re facing opposition and you remember the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus. You’re anxious about something and before you even consciously recall it, the words about not being anxious but presenting requests to God are shaping your response. This is Scripture doing what it’s meant to do, not merely informing your mind but transforming your heart, not just adding to your knowledge but shaping your character.

The McCheyne approach, for all its good intentions, rarely produces this kind of deep familiarity. How could it? You read Philippians once during the year, probably split across several days’ readings mixed with other passages, and then you move on. Next year you’ll read it again, but twelve months is a long time. The details have faded. You’re essentially starting over. You gain breadth but sacrifice depth. You can say you’ve read the whole Bible, but have you really encountered it? Has it gotten inside you? Or have you merely passed your eyes over the words?

There’s also the tyranny of the calendar to consider. McCheyne’s plan puts enormous pressure on January. It’s the time to start fresh, to begin again, to get it right this time. But this means that failure in January can poison the entire year. You fall behind early and spend eleven months feeling guilty. What if we abandoned this tyranny? What if we recognised that in the Christian life, we have multiple Mondays on which to begin again? Every morning is a new mercy. Every day offers a fresh start. Miss a day of reading? Simply pick up where you left off. No guilt. No frantic catching up. No sense that you’ve ruined everything and might as well quit. No suspicion that you might not be a real Christian because you have a bad month of May.

This approach is both more realistic and more grace-filled. Life is unpredictable. There will be days when you don’t read your Bible. Sick days. Crisis days. Days when you’re so exhausted that you fall into bed without even thinking about your Bible.

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