The Holy Bible: New American Standard Version

I have been a Christian for nearly 30 years, but until today I had never read the entire Bible. On the one hand, this bothered me, since, if the Bible is the very Word of God, shouldn’t I make every effort to know what it says? On the other hand, I believed (rightly, I still think) that I was being faithfully taught by my Pastors, so that I knew what the Bible taught even without having read every word of it.

In 2018, I began praying to want to read the Bible. My flesh was set against doing it. By God’s grace, on May 1, 2018, I began to read, about 2-3 chapters a day, and continued until today (January 12, 2020). Except for a couple of vacations where I intentionally paused my reading, I don’t think I missed a day. To go from never reading it to reading it daily can only be the work of the Holy Spirit, and I thank God that I have now completed it.

I read the 1995 NASB translation, which I gather is one of the most accurate. People say it is not very “readable,” but I thought it was fine in that respect. Mine is the Key Word Study Bible, which has Strong’s numbers for looking up certain words in the back; I used that occasionally, but mainly I just wanted to read, not do a word study. Certain verses have extensive footnotes, but when I read these they were usually pretty terrible theologically, so I just ignored them.