I’ve sort of wanted the Wesley Study Bible ever since I started getting pre-order offers for it late last year. It was officially released in February.

I have several study Bibles, although in the past few years I’ve left them at home and used them for sermon preparation but taken a smaller, more portable hardback Bible to church or what have you. My current such small hardback is a parallel Bible with both the TNIV (a translation) and The Message: Remix (a paraphrase). It’s a great combination, but it’s a small book, and so in order to include all of both those versions it is in quite small print — smaller, frankly, than I’m comfortable reading these days. I have to take my glasses off, and although I can read the print, it’s not comfortable.

I liked the somewhat-controversial TNIV, but it was recently announced that the version will be discontinued in favor of a slightly-tamer revision of the NIV.

My father and others who have bought the Wesley Study Bible (which is based, like so much United Methodist literature, on the New Revised Standard Version) have praised it, and I like what little I’ve seen of it. I figured now was the time to spring for one, so that I can take it with me to my advanced lay speaking course at the end of the month. Today was payday, and I got on the Cokesbury web site this morning. Fortunately, they still have the Bible on sale, and even though their shipping is more than Amazon it balances out and I ended up paying less at Cokesbury that I would have paid at Amazon. (Frankly, I so associated the WSB with Cokesbury that I didn’t even think to look at Amazon until this evening.) Naturally, I went for the cheapest possible shipping, since the book will probably be shipped from Nashville, an hour’s drive away.

I looked at my father’s copy tonight while waiting to go to the service. The unique two-tone binding is really nice; they recently introduced a more expensive leather-bound edition, but I think the basic edition binding feels like leather. I need to buy a Bible cover an protect it (some of the pages on my father’s Bible have gotten curled under).

Listen to me. I’m being covetous about a physical possession, even though it’s one which contains divine scripture. I just hope maybe the Bible will be an incentive to make me a little bit more faithful to some spiritual disciplines in which I’ve become lax.