Deepening Your Daily Devotional Readings
With TW4
Costas has nicely designed a Daily Devotional reading tool to augment and supplement
your scripture Reading Plan. Just like you would expect from a daily devotional reading,
these readings are tied to calendar days. While they may differ based on who built
the individual modules, they will usually be 2-
Costas’ implementation of these daily devotionals work right on the desktop. It’s easy to deepen your daily readings by accessing all of your study tools while you are reading your daily devotional. Take a look at this screenshot:
This particular layout has three columns and five windows:
- The right column has two windows: the daily devotional reading on top, and a book search window below it.
- The middle column is my Bible. Notice that the window has both cross references and commentary links. They can easily be toggled on or off, depending on what I want to see.
- The left column has two windows. The top window is a book view that is currently displaying my commentaries. The lower window is a Bible search window.
Here’s what it will do:
- The daily devotional module is tied to the date; but it obviously can look at any date of the year, not just “today’s date” (more on that in a minute)
- See a word in the devotional window you want to search on? Right click the word in
the devotional window and choose “find” (the purple book icon) -
the search window immediately goes active and searches your entire library with whatever filters you want applied. Cool! - Of course all of the scriptures in the devotional window are tooltipped -
just click them and the Bible window jumps right to that verse. That immediately gives you access to all of the cross referenences and the commentaries for that verse (via the commentary links). - When you mouseover a commentary link in the Bible window, a nice popup appears. When you click the link, the book view (from the left column) goes straight to that commentary entry.
- If you see something in the devotional that makes you think of a Scripture that is not listed, but you’d like to read it, just use the Scripture search window to find what you’re looking for.
This is really nice software! It allows you to go so much deeper when reading your daily devotions than what has been previously possible.
The Daily Readings Dialogue Box
The “Daily Readings” dialogue box is a nice way to manage all of your daily readings: not just your scripture Reading Plans, but your daily devotionals, too. Here’s how:
1. Click open the Daily Readings dialogue box from the “Tools” menu.
2. Click “Choose Devotionals to Read Daily” – This dialogue box lets you see every daily devotional module you have properly installed. Just select the one(s) you’d like to see every day. Also, make sure the “Daily Readings” dialogue box has the “Startup options...” set to show: once a day, or if there is an unread scheduled reading, or every time the program starts. (Once a day is enough for me....)
3. Once that is set up, just click on any of the “Devotional Readings for today”
(there are two in the above screenshot -
The Devotional Module
Moving around from date to date in the actual devotional module itself is a breeze.
Did you notice the “devotional calendar” button right there on the module bar (see
the red frame in the picture)? Clicking on that button will take you to a calendar
to select any day’s devotional reading. Clicking on the month at the top of the calendar
will allow you to see every month for the year. Clicking on the year allows you to
see a range of years. Cool stuff!
Clicking on the drop down box (right next to the “devotional calendar button”) is
another quick way to see the calendar entries. By the way -
EXAMPLE: Type “m” in the drop down box, and the calendar date will move straight to “1 March.” Nice feature indeed!
REMINDER: you can click on the scriptures in the devotional to move your Bible widow to that reference; and you can search your entire module library (or filter for specific searches) on any word in your devotional module.
TW4’s integration of the Daily Devotional Readings is a great extension of an already powerful Bible program. It gives a depth to your devotional life not possible before. Give it a try and enrich your spiritual life!
Daily Devotional Modules Ready For Immediate Downloads
These modules are “pay” modules -
Paul Enns -
Kenneth Osbeck -
And there are even more free third party devotionals to choose from, by authors like: William Jay, John Henry Jowett, F.B. Meyer, Charles Spurgeon, Alexander Maclaren & Harry Ironside. To see the free daily devotionals currently offered for TW4 here at DDT, click here.
