Spotlight on Woodrow Kroll

July's author of the month was Woodrow Kroll. I read (or reread) three of his books this month: Taking Back The Good Book, How To Find God in the Bible, and Read Your Bible One Book At A Time. (I didn't write a new review of Taking Back the Good Book though I did reread it, but the other two were new to me.) His books inspired me to write quite a handful of posts:

Taste and See: Eating a Balanced Diet
So What's Your Excuse
Looking for Answers?
Taste and See: Redeeming the Time
Christ in the Pages of the Bible
Without a Bible...
Ten Reasons Why Family Devotions Are Important
Five Questions From Taking Back the Good Book

From Read Your Bible One Book at a Time:

If you wanted to read one book of the Bible--the whole book, beginning to end--which ones could you read during the same time it takes to watch It's a Wonderful Life? Hold on to your hat. You could read any book of the Bible except twelve. Only a dozen books of the Bible take longer to read than watching that classic Christmas movie. Nearly forty books of the Bible can be read in an hour or less. Half the books of the Bible can be read in less than thirty minutes. And twenty-six books can be read in fifteen minutes or less. That's pretty amazing for a book that many people think is too massive to read. When you think about it, time really isn't the problem when it comes to reading the Bible. It's a good excuse, but not good enough. How much we read of the only book God ever wrote depends mostly on how much of it we want to read. Reading God's Word is less dependent on our schedule and more dependent on our desire and discipline. (12-13)

From How To Find God in the Bible:

Don't fail to read the Bible simply because you have difficulty relating to the translation. Find a version you do understand. I'm often asked which version of the Bible I think is the best, and I always respond, "The one you read." It doesn't matter if you are convinced your version is the most accurate there is. If you don't read it, you won't connect with God. Hurdle the language barrier by choosing a Bible that is comfortable for you. Then read it for all it's worth. (61)

I have often said that if Christians blew the dust off their Bibles at the same time, we'd all get killed in the dust storm. If you are to benefit from God's Word, you're going to have to read it. It's how you connect with God. (173) 

From Taking Back the Good Book:

The most common excuse for not reading the Bible is our busy lives. We don't seem to have time to do the things we need to do. There's work and school, running to the store, soccer practice, dinner--life is just a bit harried. Who has time to sit and read?
You do. Here's why: time is a set quantity. It's not elastic. We all have sixty seconds in every minute, sixty minutes in every hour, twenty-four hours in every day. Time may fly, but it doesn't change. You have 1,440 golden minutes in every day and so do I.
The issue is never about time; it's always about what we choose to do get done in the time we have. Is reading God's Word, meditating and benefiting from it, something you wish to take the time to do or not? If not, the convenient but pathetic excuse is to say, "I don't have time."
A couple of years ago, I took a stopwatch with me everywhere I flew. I would read my Bible while in flight and time how long it took to read each book of the Bible. Once when I was returning from Frankfurt on a flight to Chicago, a flight attendant saw the stopwatch and asked, "Are you timing our service?" I chuckled and said, "No, I'm timing how long it takes me to read my Bible." Puzzled, she asked why someone would want to do that. I said, "Because everybody tells me they would read their Bible but they don't have time. I want to know how much time they don't have."
Did you know that you can read half the books of the Bible in less than thirty minutes each? You can read twenty-six of them in less than fifteen minutes. The whole Bible, cover to cover, can be read by an average reader in less than seventy-two hours.
Maybe it's time we rethink our reasons for not reading the Bible and just call them what they are--excuses. Take another look at these "Top Ten." How many of them have you used with God as an excuse for not reading his Word? If you can see through the excuses so quickly, imagine how easily he can see through them.
The Bible is read by people who choose to read it. Bible reading is neglected by people who choose to neglect it. It's just that simple. No excuses. Just honesty. (76-77)

We typically think of tithing in monetary terms, but have you ever thought about tithing your time? Suppose you spent 10 percent of your day with God? What would that mean? Mathematically, there are twenty-four hours in a day, which equals 1440 minutes. If you gave the Lord 10 percent of that time, he would receive 144 minutes every day. That's over two hours. Is that how much time you spend in reading the Word and in prayer now? Probably not. But let's be fair. You have to work and sleep each for eight hours. You can't really tithe that time. So we're really talking about tithing in terms of your third eight-hour period in the day. That's 480 minutes, and a tithe of 480 minutes is forty-eight minutes daily. If you gave God forty-eight minutes daily, you'd be giving him one-tenth of one-third of your day. Does that sound reasonable? But how are you going to find forty-eight minutes in a day? You start here: instead of tacking God onto your schedule where you can, instead of watching your third reality show of the night, turn off the television, shut out everything else, and spend forty-eight quality minutes with God. If you do that, you could actually read the Bible through four times in one year--pretty amazing! (160)

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible