Our Advent Reading Plan
Scripture Readings for December 2024
Hi friends,
Below you’ll find the Scripture readings for the month of December, which are geared toward the season of Advent. If you’ve been looking for ways to deepen and re-embody your faith, today’s a great day to start. I invite you to join our community in committing to five simple practices, one of which is reading Scripture together.
Wait, What Is Advent? (Get it…)
Advent means “coming.” Traditionally, the church has devoted this season to waiting on our Lord in two particular senses. First, in the season leading up to Christmas, as the days grow darker and colder, we put ourselves in the spiritual place of Israel, who waited expectantly for the Messiah to arrive. Second, since we know that Christ has come, we set apart this season as a special time of preparing for and expecting his glorious return to judge the living and the dead. As I have written elsewhere:
The Advent tradition has an already-not-yet structure to it. We sing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” in a minor key, imagining ourselves as Israel long ago, waiting for the king to arrive. But that longing is also truly ours, since we still await the day He will come again and wipe every tear from our eyes. We sing, “Joy To The World, The Lord Is Come,” knowing that he did come 2000 years ago, yet also imagining and enacting the day when He will come again and make all things new. As our communion liturgy declares:
Christ has died Christ is risen Christ will come again
The Plan
The readings for this month are as follows. If you’re the analog type, you can access the reading plan here and print it out or bookmark it on your phone or computer. We also have a personalized plan on the Dwell app (FREE for you!), which automatically loads each new day’s Bible passages. You can read or listen right on the app. It’s pretty awesome. You have to create an account to get started, but once you’re in, it’s free thanks to VB Fellows footing the bill (we welcome your donations to help keep it going).
Why These Readings?
Most months the readings don’t skip around this much. We generally read from one book in the OT, one in the NT, and one Psalm. This month is a bit different. First, I have scaled it back to only two readings per day, just to give an easy in-road to newbies. Next, I’ve chosen all the Psalms which I think give the strongest taste of the coming Messiah. This includes all the proper “Messianic Psalms” as well as a few others that I think speak clearly and beautifully of the coming Christ. For the other readings, I mostly used the traditional Advent readings which the church has read for hundreds of years during this season. This also includes the main “Christmas” readings from the Gospels and some key Christmas and Advent passages from the New Testament epistles, which are mostly about the Second Coming. Traditionally, those should come before Christmas, but that was too much, so I figured they’d fit well in between Christmas and New Years. Some of the readings this month might seem a bit difficult or obscure. My advice: let each chapter be a little Easter Egg hunt. Ask, “Where is Jesus in this?” He is there, I guarantee it.
Bonus: 3 Quick Tips On How To Read The Bible
How To Not Quit: Ours is not one of those reading plans that takes a big time commitment. Again, we like baby steps. We have purposely kept it short and simple, so that it can be sustainable for a lot of people with different rhythms and attention spans to consistently do it together. Even still, some of us will fall off and miss a few days in a row. That’s okay. Don’t give up. Don’t feel like you have to go back and catch up. Just pick up on the new day and keep going.
How To Get The Most Out Of It: As I have mentioned before, I recommend saying a short prayer as you begin, then reading or listening to the two passages, then ruminating on some small part of the reading the rest of the day. Also, it’s good to have a couple of other people in a group chat who are also committed to read with you. Then you can share encouragements and questions about whatever stood out to you from the day’s reading over text. So, if you begin tomorrow, don’t do it alone. Invite one or two friends to join you.
How I Read The Bible: A number of people have asked me how I approach the Scriptures. I won’t answer that here. But a couple of thoughts: 1) Rumination: When I was young, I would get so excited when I came across any part of a passage that I thought I really understood. And then (nobody told me to do this, but…) I would ruminate on that little nugget of light for the rest of the day. “How can I use that key to unlock other doors in the Scriptures? How might that key unlock doors in my own life?” Etc. It helped me a lot. Now that I’m a 40 year-old geezer, I tend to get more excited about the bits of Scripture I don’t understand. I’ll take those dark, mysterious nuggets where Jesus says something seemingly incomprehensible, or where two back-to-back stories in a Gospel reading seem to have nothing in common—e.g. “Why on earth did Matthew place these stories next to one another?”—and I’ll chew on that the rest of the day. Rumination is a major, though somewhat hidden, theme in the Bible. Some truths can only be seen if you wait, stay awake, and keep your eyes on the seemingly invisible prize. So…ruminate. 2) Images Over Words: A big breakthrough for me was realizing that the Bible is made up more of images than words. Through our modern lens, words tend to be more important. We like things to be precise and technical. So when we see a certain word recurring, we want to give it a precise and technical definition. “Justified…what does that mean?” [Google what the experts say.] “Oh, now I understand. Ok, sanctified…” [Repeat the process.] Don’t get me wrong, you can learn good things that way. But ultimately, it won’t go deep enough. When Paul, for instance, uses the terms justification and sanctification, he’s not merely using technical terms. Justification is an image from the world of the law court. Sanctification is an image from the world of the temple. When he uses these terms, he doesn’t just want you to cognitively understand. He wants you to step into the picture he’s painting. To come into his world. This is why Jesus speaks almost entirely in images or parables. Even the actions he takes—healing a blind man, feeding 5000, pulling a coin from the belly of a fish—are more like living parables (like the dramatic acts of OT prophets) than mere factual occurrences. Once you see that, the Bible comes alive in a new way. Across the Old and New Testament, images hyperlink to each other far more effectively than mere words. Once you see the images, you begin to see the connections. Another way to say it: the words on our Bible’s pages are simply not the words of the original text. They are translations from at least three different languages. Specific words themselves may even be debated. But the images remain transcendent. The words are there to express the images, and the images are there to express realities that go far beyond words. In a possibly apocryphal story, Hemingway was once asked how he managed to write so simply and briefly. His response was, “I would use no words if I could.” Hemingway didn’t want his readers to get caught up in the means of narration itself. He wanted them to feel like they were living in the pictures he presented. He wanted them to taste and see, not merely to define and understand. In this, I think he was accidentally imitating Jesus.
Much love and blessed Advent!
— Ross