Daily Help

Saturday, January 3, 2026
Bible Reading

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

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(Book Installment)

The Duty of a Man:
Keeping a Family in Jesus Christ and the Bible

Chapter 11: The Textbook of Righteousness

Our teacher in life is Jesus. Our classroom is our home. Our lab is home and wherever else we go that day. And our textbook is the Bible – the book that came together in Jesus Christ.

The Obsolescence of Church

You may be thinking: “But isn’t church the institution God has chosen to teach Christ to the world?” Not anymore. The churches we read about in the New Testament were led by the apostles of Jesus to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ, which was the then imminent coming of the long-awaited kingdom of God. If the kingdom of God came when Jesus and His apostles said it would, why should we act as if it hasn’t?

Even after the kingdom of God came, you could make the argument that churches still had a role to play in preserving the apostles’ writings and teaching from those writings about Christ. But the printing press in the 15th century and the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century made the Bible accessible and affordable around the world. And 21st-century technology has put it on smartphones that we take with us everywhere we go. A man who can read has no excuse for outsourcing his responsibility to keep himself and his family following Christ.

I pastored a church for 15 years. I know how they work. I did my very best to follow the Bible in the church world. It cannot be done for the same reason that Solomon’s temple cannot be reconstituted. Church’s time has past because something greater is here. The kingdom of God is greater than the church by just so much as the church was greater than ancient Israel. Jesus is now king of the entire human race – not a subset of it. He came to bring us Christianity, not churchianity.

The Bible is a book you can and should read for yourself.

The Word of the Lord

In Chapter 8, I described how the Bible came together through Jesus Christ – the Old Testament prophesying of Him and the New Testament describing how those prophecies were fulfilled. Thus the Bible can be called the word of the Lord. But it is much more than just a compilation of prophecies and fulfillments. Among other things it is the textbook of righteousness from which He teaches us how to live as He did.

There are an untold number of books you can read about Jesus and His ways. I have written a few myself. But no book compares to the Bible. The word “bible” means “book” and it is indeed THE Book. It hold the exclusive franchise of firsthand testimony about the Son of God sanctioned by the Son of God Himself.

If we’re going to read the Bible – and we must – we have to come to grips with its scale and scope. Although the 66 books that comprise the Bible do not each compare to an average book in size, the total collection is the equivalent about about 10-15 average-sized nonfiction books published today. Roughly three dozen authors produced this content over a span of about 1,500 years. Not only that, but the individuals texts that make up the collection consistent of multiple genres and styles. Therefore, the Bible doesn’t lend itself to straight-through reading like a normal book. Many a reader has started Genesis with gusto only to give up in the minutia of animal sacrifice that populates Leviticus. You’ll get more out of the Bible by approaching it as the library it is than as you would normally approach a book.

Reading and Re-Reading the Bible

Speaking of being Christ centered, Jesus said we should “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” You know from the two preceding chapters that righteousness is love built on a foundation of faith. Wherever we live becomes the classroom where the Lord Jesus teaches us from His textbook of righteousness: The Bible.

Because the Bible is an ancient text, and because it consists of the word of God brought to us by prophets (in the Old Testament) and apostles (in the New Testament), a lifetime of reading and re-reading it will not be enough to digest all the knowledge and wisdom it offers. If our Creator and Redeemer has spoken, and provided documentation, is it not our duty to devote ourselves to reading and understanding it in order to be able to respond knowledgeably to His instruction and commands?

Summing Up the Duty of a Human Being

Thus we have now defined the duty of every human being – male and female, young and old. It is to live life according to the direction of Jesus Christ as communicated through the Bible – in other words, “to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” This is creatures living life according to their Creator’s wishes…and it’s a beautiful thing.

We will now be able to spend the last chapter of this book defining the specific duty of an adult male.

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