The Bible in 90 Days
How many years have you spent thinking about reading the Bible all the way through? How many times have you tried to read the Bible through and you never quite made it, even though you thought you could do it in a year? I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today and a program called, “The Bible in 90 Days”. Yes, you heard me right. We’ll be joined in a few minutes by a former Agnostic who came to faith by challenging God and reading God’s Word. Stay with me now, Ted Cooper from Houston joining me here on this special program where you and I together can make it through God’s Word.
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This is Haven Today and the program is called, “The Bible in 90 Days” and I have on the line with me from KHCB Radio in Houston, one of America’s premier Christian radio stations, my brother in the Lord Ted Cooper. And Ted, I want to welcome you to Haven Today.
TC: Well, thank you Charles, I’m just awfully pleased to be here and thank you for inviting me.
CM: You and I have been on the phone numerous times in the last year. When I first heard “The Bible in 90 Days” I said to myself and then to someone in Zondervan Publishing, “you’ve got to be kidding.” Because there are many people who’ve never read the Bible in a year or 10 years or in a lifetime, much less 90 days. Ted, you actually have a ministry called, “The Bible in 90 Days” right? And how long has that been going?
TC: That’s correct. Well, the ministry itself has been going since the latter part of 2002. It grew out of my own personal experience.
CM: Alright, I knew there had to be a story here somewhere. Just go ahead and tell us what was happening in your life and how in the world you decided you needed to read the Bible in 90 days.
TC: Well, Charles actually the reason I was going to church though, because we had 3 children that were teenagers and we thought that they needed to be exposed to God’s Word so that they could make up their own mind. My wife and I were Agnostic at that time but being Agnostic we understood that our children needed to go through life with their own understanding. So we were at church only because we were taking out children to church. being there we felt like, well we might as well kind of see what’s going on and we went and heard the sermons and were very happy with what was being preached and thought well, it was very entertaining and that sort of thing. Then there was a Discovery 101 class that we thought, well we’ll go take that for 4 weeks. And the pastor there, a guy by the name of Carl Hamilton would just say something every once in a while at each one of the classes that would just hit me. I didn’t know what it was but it kind of made me mad because I had decided years before that I was Agnostic, I would always be Agnostic because you know, let’s face it, we’ll never know for absolute sure whether there’s a God until we die. And so in my reasoning process I thought well, I won’t waste my time wondering about it. I’ll just go ahead and live my life not worrying about it. I’ll save all that time. I won’t go to church, I won’t do this that and the other. So it was with great horror frankly, that I was sitting in these classes once a week and having this sense that, wow, maybe there really is a God and maybe I better find out more about him.
CM: Well, what happened?
TC: My children were learning about Christ and I didn’t know anything. And I thought, Gosh, I could sit here for 30 years and listen to these great sermons by Vic Pensk and never know whether or not there’s a God. And to me the question was always, I didn’t have a problem with Christ if in fact there was a God, so for me the litmus test was is there a God and how do I find out and how do I be fairly efficient in this process?
CM: What was going on in your life Ted? I mean, were you very depressed you know? Were you standing on a cliff thinking you were going to jump off and life wasn’t worth living? What was going on in the Cooper home in Houston, Texas?
TC: Well, actually I wasn’t standing on the cliff. I was actually I was a harried business man. I had my own business and I was in the process of firing my business partner. So I had lots and lots of things going on. We were building an addition on our house and we had decided that we would move in with our in-laws for 4 months and that 4 months of course became 12 months. And we were meeting on a daily basis with the contractors, and I was doing not only my work but my partner’s work, and meeting with lawyers to dissolve the partnership and we had 3 young children that required a lot of attention as well.
CM: Been there done that on the building part. OK, alright, you were a busy guy! So why in the world at this point did you decide that you needed to figure out whether you should remain an Agnostic or whether there really was a God much less than leading you to Jesus Christ?
TC: I wish I knew. It wasn’t really a welcome question, and as you can tell it really wasn’t the right time to try to answer it, but I had this strong desire and strong pull that for some reason this was the time to do it, and in the midst of all these things this was the time for me to discover the Truth.
CM: OK, OK. And if you’ve just joined us this is Haven Today. The program is called, “The Bible in 90 Days”. We have Ted Cooper on the phone with us, actually on the line in studio with us by satellite from KHCB Radio in Houston, Texas. Alright Ted, you were in the computer business. What does a guy in the computer business do here? You threw down a gauntlet to God. What did you do?
TC: Even then, even without having a lot of interest in this and never having had any interest in reading the Bible before, it was a question of, if I’m going to discover the truth, probably the most effective and efficient way of doing it would be to go to read the book.
CM: OK
TC: Seemed reasonable enough to me.
CM: Alright.
TC: Now I knew enough about people who had tried to read the Bible that many were unsuccessful. And frankly the notion of spending a year or even 5 years on this was just way beyond me. I just recognized that I had too many things pulling on me to be able to stick with it. I was going to need something that was a shorter time frame. I also knew that if in fact there was a God and I started to read his book he was going to want me to finish it. So I really spent about 3 weeks going and trying to determine what would be the right Bible to read that would allow me to be successful in reading the whole thing.
CM: So you actually went and got a Bible and I’m sure like every good American, even though you were an Agnostic American, you had a few sitting around, didn’t you?
TC: Yes we did. We had some big, fat family Bibles sitting around. We had, we had some others as well.
CM: A lot of dust there except on the kids’ Bibles I’m sure.
TC: Absolutely
CM: OK, so you just divided the Bible up into sections and started. Where did you start, Genesis? Did you start in John? Matthew or…?
TC: You know I didn’t know any better Charles, I though you just read the Bible like you read any other book. That is, you open the cover and you start at the first page and you read straight through till the end. And I didn’t learn till later that that’s not really how you should read the Bible according to many people, so not knowing any better I started at the beginning and read straight through to the end. And I determined with a few days reading that really 12 pages of reading this particular Bible was just a good, comfortable, it was a bit of a challenge, but it was a comfortable amount and 12 was a nice biblical number so it just kind of worked out. And the fact was that if I read at a pace of 12 pages a day I would be finished in 3 months and I thought well, now that works our pretty well too.
CM: How did you do that? You have gone through telling us everything that was going on in your life. how busy you were, young kids, struggling there with concerns in business, living with your in-laws, a home building program going, how in the world did you have time for even 12 pages a day?
TC: I just had to set some priorities and make a few changes. I read a little bit less of the Wall Street Journal each day, stayed up a little bit later at night, sometimes getting up a little bit earlier in the morning. Some Sunday afternoons when I had to make that choice, am I going to go play catch with my boys, which I think was a very important thing, or am I going to be doing this reading, and so I really found, that for that period of time I just made it a priority. And in doing that, I will tell you, I didn’t know how it was going to work but I found that things just opened up. We really had a situation, as an example, at work, I recognized after reading for several days that maybe this thing that I was doing of working 7 days a week really wasn’t the right thing. There’s a little bit, there’s that thing called the Sabbath in the Old Testament and I thought well, you know, maybe I ought to give this a try. I didn’t see how, given all the things we were doing, that I could do that, where I could really take a day off. And I experienced it when I did, when I took that leap, that one first week and I took that day off the next Monday morning I got a call from a client – and this never happens – I got a call from a client that said, “You know that project we needed a month from now? We don’t need it for 6 months, so back off, don’t do it.” You know most clients wouldn’t ever tell you, they don’t need it for 6 months but they wouldn’t tell you that. And so I just had that and that was sort of an, a little bit of an “ah-ha” for me right there.
CM: OK. So, you’re reading and something happened along the way, not only that you had the time to do it, something, well can I use the word mystical, can I use the word spiritual? What happened?
TC: When I started this there was that challenge and the challenge was this: I said, you know, I’m going to read this Bible as if I believe it and then see if I actually do. And you know, there were some things, particularly at the beginning that just were difficult to believe, difficult to understand and yet I read it as if I was believing it and when I recognized, somewhere in Isaiah or Jeremiah, I can’t tell you which, I recognized in fact, I was believing.
CM: Wow
TC: And at that point, and it was such an odd and it was a very quiet moment for me, a quiet realization that I believed. And I had never believed and never wanted to.
CM: And what was happening with your wife, a fellow Agnostic at the same time?
TC: Well, one of the advantages of being an Agnostic, an aesthetic and a skeptic is that you know how forcefully somebody might react if you start to push this on them. And so my tactic with her a little bit had been, I know I’m going to have to let her go at her own pace. And the thing that I did to sort of introduce this whole thing to her was, as I, the first 2 or 3 nights that I was reading the Bible I didn’t even let her know I was doing it. I, you know, I sort of hid and slinked around and about the 3rd night, you know it was just kind of hard to do. And I decided, you know we’ll make a game of it. And I started reading to her some of the horrors in Genesis and we’d start laughing. “What do you mean that woman was cut up in 12 pieces?” And it sort of made it so there was a little commonality there, but after a while I just, I wasn’t laughing about it quite so much, the approach that I took at any rate, was, I was changed by reading God’s Word, I thought she was going to be too. So she could certainly notice some things different about me. It was probably about 1:00 in the morning when I had read and understood and in my mind I became a Christian at that moment, because my question was never about Christ. That was an easy thing for me if in fact there was a God. And I knew enough about, I knew enough about Christ and his sacrifice that that wasn’t really the question for me. so here I am in the Old Testament, 1:00 in the morning and I’m realizing, hey I really believe this. And I went to sleep and I probably had the soundest sleep I’d had in a long time. Woke up the next morning and I thought, should I tell Becky about this? Well, fortunately that decision was sort of, you know, made for me because of course we get up and she’s off this way and I’m off that way and I really didn’t tell her for a few days. What I discovered Charles for me, that was the big difference was, I had always been one of these guys who very mistakenly thought he controlled a lot of things. I’m in charge of this. I’m in charge of that. And the big change and the thing that I knew the next morning was, wow, I am not in charge. God’s in charge and I’ve got to rearrange my life in such a way that I’m doing what he wants me to do.
CM: All I can say is Praise God to that! Every husband, every father who has met Christ after they’ve been married, after – and I’m going to say this for wives too. They’ve had to discover that as well – but I think the heats on the guy here more than the woman. OK alright. So you met Jesus?
TC: Absolutely
CM: Praise God again! I’ll repeat that line again for that. And all of a sudden you knew there was a God and you knew that he had sent his Son Jesus Christ to die for you and for your sins and he did. Wow! How much longer until your wife found the Lord?
TC: Probably a year to the point at which I think she would acknowledge. I think that there was less of a point in time for her where she would point and say, “OK, that’s the point in time.” Really she went through the process and I believe that the, that it was when she later on read, that that was the point at which she came to faith at that point. She didn’t read the Bible until about a year and a half later when I developed the first course.
CM: Wow. OK. We have been listening to the story of Ted Cooper. He’s the founder of an organization called, “The Bible in 90 Days” and we are going to invite you to join me – Ted’s done it – to actually read the Bible in 90 days and we’ll tell you about that in just a little bit. And Ted I just want to thank you for joining me on this program today here on Haven Today and if you wouldn’t mind, would you lead us in prayer because I guarantee you from the number of listeners we have around the world there is a unfortunately, too healthy percentage who actually is in the same boat that you were in some years ago. So would you lead us in prayer that someone else, like you did, would take the 90 day Bible challenge?
TC: Gracious Father, just I want to thank you first of all for the gift that you’ve given us. You gave us the scriptures and far too many of us, both Atheists, Atheists, Agnostics and even the Christians simply haven’t unwrapped that gift fully and many of us haven’t unwrapped it at all. And I just pray Father that whether it be through the Bible in 90 days or any other way that people are attracted to read your word that you will make this invitation that we believe we are making through you, that you will make it loud and clear and that you will honor the process and honor Charles in bringing this to people around the world and inviting them to read all of God’s Word with him in this process, in Christ’s name we pray, amen.
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“The Bible in 90 Days” and thanks to Ted Cooper at KHCB in Houston for sharing how the Lord took him from being an Agnostic and led him to faith in Jesus Christ. How about you? Would you like to read the Bible in 90 days? Would you like to join me and we’ll do it together? Well, I’ll tell you how in just a minute, but first if you’re interested in doing this with a group or with your church we have a special kit available as our thanks for your gift to Haven Today. And if you’d like more information about Ted Cooper’s ministry, we have a link on our home page to his ministry website. Here’s our internet address where you can get a copy of the kit and the link to his website, haventoday.org, that’s haventoday.org. You can also check the blog that we’ve just launched and even send in your thoughts about the Bible in 90 days. Now, will you join me? Will you read the Bible in 90 days? That’s the challenge. Well first you need a plan and we’ve got you covered there. We have an NIV hardback Bible that’s following the same 12 page a day schedule that I’m using and Ted Cooper has used. It’s there on our home page at haventoday.org. We’ll send a Bible to you as our thank you for your gift to the ministry. But if you want to use another version of the Bible besides the NIV or if you want to use your own personal Bible we have you covered there as well. You can download a copy of the plan from our website, no charge and you can do that by going, once again, to haventoday.org. Now, if you don’t have internet access you can call us. Give us a call, give us your address. We’ll mail you a copy of the plan so that you too can begin reading the Bible in 90 days. You can also call 1-800-654-2836 and make your gift to Haven and get one of these hard back copies of the NIV 90 Day Bible. It tells you at the top of the page where you start day 1, where you start day 2, 3, 4 all the way to the end so you get a starting and a stopping point and that’s the Bible I’m using to go through the Bible in 90 days. Our phone number, once again is 1-800-654-2836. I’m Charles Morris and thanks for being with me. Would you come back again tomorrow? Ted Cooper will be back with us and we’ll have part 2 of “The Bible in 90 Days” together here on Haven Today.
