Bible in a year - been there, done that.

Back in August 2009, I bought myself a chronological bible. Over the course of 2010, I religiously (pardon the pun) read it. I did enjoy it, as I can now say I have read the entire bible. So far, so good.

Some things I found a little annoying about this method of bible study was its sheer nature. Lump all evens which happened at the same time together and is can become a bit of a repetitive dialogue. I suppose it did make it a little interesting to note how similar different books of the bible were in terms of their narrative. Generally, I enjoyed putting the events and stories into context and the achievement of reading the whole bible.

So, at the start of the new year, it seemed the most obvious thing I could do was to start at the beginning again. I've managed 1 month. I realised just how much I'd remembered (I tend to be like that with my reading - have to wait years to re-read books I enjoyed). I also realised I wasn't getting any depth to my study. I was just reading it. I wasn't getting background on events or a deeper understanding of how the people and places relate to me. Shocking as it sounds, after a month of re-reading the chronological bible, I became a bit bored with merely reading the bible.

Now, I wonder how to approach my personal bible study. I have bought Tom Wright's Matthew for everyone, so I could work through Matthew. I could use Tom Wright's "For everyone" series for the whole of the New Testament, I suppose, but what about the old testament? What do you do? I'm interested to learn others experiences and things they find helpful and useful for their own bible study.