5 Reasons Christians Who Always Found The Bible Boring And Confusing Can't Put This One Down
It was never that you were not smart enough. It was never that you were not faithful enough. It was the Bible itself. In this one, Dr. Charles Stanley explains the hard verses at the foot of the same page you are reading. ★★★★★
There Is A Star And An Arrow In The Margin. They Change How You Read.
You read a line. You do not quite understand it. And you keep going.
Everybody does that.
Do it enough times and reading the Bible turns into pretending. That is where most people stop. And it has nothing to do with your faith.
So Dr. Charles Stanley put two small marks in the margin of this one.
A star means the verse you just read is a promise from God.
In an ordinary Bible, a promise from God is printed in the same size type as a list of names. Nothing tells you which is which. One small star, and the page sorts itself out for you.
An arrow means look down.
At the bottom of that same page there is a block headed LIFE LESSONS. That is where Dr. Stanley takes the verse apart and explains it in plain words.
Not a commentary you have to go out and buy. Not the back of the book. The page you are already on.
Here is one. Psalm 23. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
There is an arrow beside it. And underneath, Dr. Stanley writes this. We cannot always see goodness and mercy ahead of us. But when we look back, we can see all the ways God has helped us.
You can hear that verse read at funerals for forty years and never once have somebody say that to you.
You are not just reading the Bible. Dr. Stanley is teaching you while you read it.
"I read a verse, then read what it actually means right there on the same page, and for the first time it stopped going in one ear and right out the other."
Every Other Bible Hands You One Book At A Time. This One Hands You Four.
Here is why Leviticus ends people.
An ordinary Bible gives you one book at a time. So when you reach a dry one, that is your whole reading life for two and a half weeks. Seventeen straight days of sacrifice law, with nothing else on the page to carry you.
Open a hundred Bibles that stopped getting read. The bookmark is in almost the same place every time. About an inch in.
If this were willpower, people would stop at random points. They do not. They stop where the layout stops working.
Same New King James text. Same Word of God. What is different is that every day gives you four different places in Scripture at once.
- Old Testament. The longest part of the day
- A Psalm
- A Proverb
- New Testament
So on a Leviticus morning you still get a psalm. You still get a proverb. You still get something from the Gospels.
The dry parts get carried by the parts that are not.
And it is not only Leviticus. Most people get through Leviticus. They stop in Numbers, halfway through a census. Some stop at Revelation, and that one is different. Revelation is not dull. Revelation is unexplained.
A passage feels boring when you cannot follow it. Boring is the symptom. Not understanding is the cause. And the cause is what this Bible was built to fix.
You find the date. You read four short things. You close it. About fifteen minutes. No phone, no app, no plan to keep up with.
And because it is laid out by the day, the choosing is already done for you. You never sit down in the morning and wonder where to start.
Today is already there, waiting.
"I have started other Bibles and quit by Exodus every single time. This is the first one I actually could not put down."
You Already Know This Format Works. You Have Been Sitting In It Every Sunday Of Your Life.
Think about what happens in a sermon.
A man reads a passage out loud. Then he spends twenty minutes telling you what it means, and where it touches an ordinary Tuesday.
Passage, then explanation. It is the oldest teaching structure the church has. It is why you walk out on a Sunday understanding something you could not have reached on your own on a Wednesday.
Nobody ever put it in the book.
That is all this Bible is. The passage, then a man explaining it, on the same page. Page after page after page.
And the man explaining it is Dr. Charles F. Stanley, who pastored First Baptist Atlanta for close to fifty years and taught on In Touch for four decades.
You were never missing the ability. You were missing the second half of the Sunday.
Every Verse You Know, Somebody Else Chose For You.
You are not somebody who does not know the Bible.
You can finish Psalm 23 from memory. You know the Christmas story and the Easter story. You could sit down and tell a child about Noah, and Moses, and the lions' den.
So here is a question worth sitting with. Who picked those?
A pastor picked most of them, over twenty years of Sunday mornings. A Sunday school teacher picked a few more. Your mother picked one and wrote it inside a card. Every one of them was choosing.
So your Bible knowledge has the shape of other people's favorites. It does not have the shape of the book.
A woman on a Bible forum put it better than anybody. "I'm only comfortable quoting about 8 out of hundreds that could help in any situation."
That is not ignorance. That is forty years of Sunday mornings, and the pieces never joined up.
Dr. Stanley explains what you read. He does not choose what you read. The date does that, and the date has no favorites.
Here is one almost nobody has ever been read from the front.
"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God."
An instruction for telling whether the person beside you is genuine. And grown adults meet it for the first time in their forties. People raised in church. People who went to a Christian school.
Nobody hid it from them. There are sixty six books, a sermon is twenty minutes, and no pastor alive can read you all of it from the front.
This one is laid out by date, all the way through. So across one year, your eyes reach every page. Including the pages nobody would ever have chosen for you.
That is what people mean when they say the year changed something. Not that they read more. That for the first time, nobody else was doing the choosing.
"I have had mine for years and this is my fifth time all the way through. I grew up in church and in a Christian school and there are still verses I meet for the first time."
What Happens The Moment You Get Stuck
All four are the same Word of God. What changes is what the page does when you need help.
Only one of them was built for somebody reading it alone, with nobody to ask.
When Something Is Weighing On You, You Always Know Where To Turn.
Some mornings you sit down with something heavy already pressing on you.
A fear you cannot shake. A phone call you are dreading. A decision you have carried for weeks.
And you have no idea where in the Bible to even look.
So you read whatever is in front of you and it does not touch the thing. Or you close it and do not read at all.
There is a section built for exactly that, headed Answers To Life's Questions. You look up the situation you are actually in, and it sends you to the Scripture that speaks to it.
There are also Life Principles running through the year, a full page at a time. These are the truths Dr. Stanley taught for fifty years.
Here is one. As children of a sovereign God, we are never victims of our circumstances.
Sit with that on a morning when things feel heavy.
For a lot of readers this quietly becomes the first place they go when life gets hard, instead of the last.
"When my husband got sick I did not even know what to read. I looked up what I was going through and it took me right to the verses I needed. That section alone was worth it."
You Were Never Bad At The Bible. You Just Never Had One Built To Help You.
It is easy to believe that people who understand their Bible were handed something you were not.
A sharper mind for it. A steadier faith. Some closeness to God that makes it come easily.
That belief has stopped more good people from trying again than anything else on this page.
The truth is simpler than that. They had help.
A father who explained it at the table. A pastor who taught verse by verse for ten years. Four years of seminary. A grandmother on a Sunday afternoon.
Nobody understands a difficult book unaided. That is not what it asks of you.
So the only real difference between the person Scripture opens up for and the person it does not is who had somebody explaining it.
That is what this book becomes over a year. Fifty years of Dr. Charles Stanley's teaching, sitting right there on the page, in his own words.
You already have the heart for this. What you never had was a Bible built to meet you where you are.
"I grew up in church and still felt like I was on the outside of my own Bible. This is the first time it felt like someone sat down and explained it in a way I could carry with me."
The Real Reason You Quit Last Time, And Why It Cannot Happen Here.
You have quit before. More than once.
So starting again is not really about the book. It is about what it would mean to stop again. Another bookmark in February. Another quiet piece of evidence that something is wrong with you, and not with the plan.
It was the plan.
A reading schedule tracks your progress. Which means it also tracks your debt. Miss a Tuesday and a Thursday, and it turns around and tells you that you are nine days behind.
Being nine days behind is a far better reason to quit than boredom ever was.
There is no schedule here. Open it to today's date, and today is a full day's reading, however long it has been. There is no day to catch up to.
And here is what the year actually looks like, because nobody tells you this part.
- Week one. The marks start making sense and you stop skimming
- Month one. Opening it stops taking a decision
- Month six. You start recognizing verses before you reach the note
- Month twelve. You have read the whole Bible, most likely for the first time
Most people notice something in the first week. Not a lightning bolt. Just a morning where a verse made sense that would not have made sense before, because the note was sitting right underneath it.
And then it builds from there, quietly, for a year.
You do not need a year to know, though. You need one evening. So it comes with thirty days. Read it, and if Scripture has not started opening up for you, send it back and get every cent refunded. No forms and no questions. If it arrives damaged or lost, same deal.
You will not be the first. This Bible is read by more than 400,000 people and rated 4.9 out of 5 across 10,368 reviews. Readers say the same three things over and over:
- "I finally stopped feeling like a failure"
- "It finally makes sense to me"
- "I read the whole Bible for the first time"
The Question You Could Not Answer, And The Person Who Asked It
Most people who buy this can name the moment.
A grandchild asked something about God at a kitchen table. A friend going through something asked what the Bible says about it. Somebody at church asked what a passage meant.
You had the faith. You did not have the words.
That is not a failure of belief. Nobody ever walked you to the verse that answers it. And you cannot hand somebody something you were never handed.
A good many people order two. One to keep, and one for the person who asked.
You Were Never The Problem. The Bible You Were Handed Was.
Getting this far means one thing. You are not browsing for a Bible.
Most Bibles sit closed while another year goes by. This one ends up open, marked and worn, because it teaches you while you read and never leaves you alone on a page you do not understand.
The Charles F. Stanley Life Principles Daily Bible
The verse, then Dr. Charles Stanley explaining it, printed on the same page. One dated reading a morning, about fifteen minutes, until you have read the whole book.
Charles F. Stanley · New King James · Hardcover · 1,800 Pages
- Every day's reading already chosen, so you never decide where to start
- Old Testament, a Psalm, a Proverb and New Testament every day, so no morning is all dry
- A star marks every promise from God, so you know one when you see it
- An arrow points to a Life Lesson on that same page, where Dr. Stanley explains that verse
- Thirty Life Principles, full pages, lined up with what you have just read
- Life Examples, showing a real person in Scripture and what happened to them
- What The Bible Says About, gathering everything Scripture says on one subject
- Answers To Life's Questions, where you look up the situation rather than the word
- The complete New King James text across 1,800 pages, hardcover
- 365 dated readings, so twelve months from now you will have read all sixty six books
- No schedule to fall behind on and nothing to catch up on
- 30 days to send it back, no forms and no questions
4.9/5 • 10,368 Reviews • 400,000+ Readers
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Read it for 30 days. If Scripture has not started opening up for you, send it back and we will refund every cent. No forms, no questions, no hassle. If your order arrives damaged or lost, same deal.
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