Written by ktmom15 on January 8, 2017

Cover to Cover Challenge 2017 (Day 7)

Yesterday was a fun day at our house. We got some new Bibles. Jeremy and I have been wanting to get new Bibles for the kids for school use, for a while. But it wasn’t a necessary item, as we have lots of Bibles in our home. We have our school Bibles that the kids use for lessons and copy work. Currently, we use New American Standard Bible (NASB) as our school Bibles. We also have several English Standard Version (ESV) Bibles, that we use when we work with Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF). We have one or two copies of King James Version (KJV), New King James Version (NKJV), Complete Hebrew Bible, Holmes Version, the Hallelujah Bible, The Scriptures, and maybe a couple other versions. So buying new Bibles seemed a bit frivolous. Even so, we wanted to get the kids new school Bibles as the ones they had were starting to fall apart. They were paper bound Bibles and the daily use has caused them to wear out. We also had a desire to switch our school translation from NASB to NKJV. We have found that both these translations are a good solid English translation, but we wanted to give the kids a chance to study using a the NKJV for a while.

So… when we received a gift of money for our family this past month we used a portion of it to order new Bibles.

Whenever you get a new Bible, it is good to become familiar with it. As we began our Bible reading time last night we passed out Bibles, and then we took some time to look closely at them. We read the copywrite, we read the preface, we looked at the table of contents, we looked at the glossary, we looked at the maps. We looked at how each Bible reported footnotes.

Then it was time to read for the evening. But instead of reading with our timer set on 30 minutes we did something else. Yesterday was our weekly Sabbath. Each Sabbath our family reads the Torah portion. Torah portions is the name for a yearly Bible reading cycle of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Jews and Torah Observant Christians read these portions weekly to remind themselves of the foundation of God’s Word. At our house we read the entire portion as a family on Sabbath.

Yesterday it just so happened that the Torah portion was Genesis 44:18-47:27. So we had read the entire portion in the morning. So rather than time our reading we decided to read from where we left off until we got to the Torah portion. We read Genesis 39-44:17.

Torah Portions

AS a family we read a total of Genesis 39-47:27. That is a lot more than just a 30 minute reading, but since it was Sabbath we had the time to read together and discuss the passages. If you are trying to read with us, please don’t rush through these scriptures. It is a beautiful story of how God used Joseph to save His people, and it is a picture of what Jesus (Yeshua Messiah) did for us as well.

Keep reading and don’t give up.