¹² Then they returned to their country by another road, since God had warned them in a dream not to go back to Herod.

This scripture speaks of the wise men. After they visited the Christ child they had to go back to their home. But they decided they needed to go back another way. The new year is here. It’s time for us to go back through the calendar. We’re going back through the seasons. We’re going back through the same routines we have repeated so many times before. Upon us now is the New Year’s season. This is when we make promises to our self. Some call them resolutions, and some swear they will never make a New Year’s resolution. But yet still, most of us make promises to ourselves of new behavior.

The one new behavior I always ask you to consider, read your Bible daily this year. And most of the time, there are a lot of you that will agree. You will get a reading plan, hopefully you’ll use the one I have given you. And you will agree to read scripture every day. Somewhere around the second week of January, you start missing days. And you try to make up the missed days. By February, if you make it that long, you are behind and this simple task has become an unbearable load. I hope you will go back to this habit. But perhaps it’s time you go back a different way.

What if we heeded the lesson of the mana? Manna was a gift from God to make bread. It came every day. You couldn’t eat yesterday’s manna today because it would spoil. Today’s manna was good for today only. And Jesus reminded us that we “shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” What if you go back to reading your Bible every day, but you go back in this new different way.

Recognize that when you’re reading scripture, you are spending time with God hearing what he wants to tell you today. If you miss it, that’s your loss. But keep going forward tomorrow, don’t go back and try to pick up yesterday’s leftovers. Don’t try to read ahead and get tomorrow’s stockpiled in the cupboard. Just enjoy the sweet precious time with God as you read his word today.

But won’t we miss a lot of scripture that way? Yes. But not nearly as much as we will miss by trying to burden ourselves with a task we’ve proven we’re not mature enough for yet and thus quit a month in to it. Scripture reading is not a task to complete. It is not a chore to mark off your list. It is a gift from God. For 2022 let’s recognize this gift and partake of it as a sweet precious present of God’s presence.