Gospel.com Blog

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Many Christians mark the season by making a spiritual commitment that helps them focus more on Jesus Christ: giving up a habit or luxury; reading a daily devotional; or doing volunteer work.

One simple but powerful way to prepare for Easter is to spend time in the Scriptures. Our sister site BibleGateway.com has just put a Lent daily Bible reading plan online to help—it walks through all four of the Gospels between today and Easter, so by the time Easter arrives you’ll have read the entire account of Jesus’ life, ministry, death and resurrection.

If you’ve not made a Lent pledge before, daily Scripture reading like this is a great place to start (and involves a relatively light time commitment). Take a look at the Lent reading plan and see it helps you focus your thoughts on Jesus as Easter approaches!

Some exciting news from our sister site, BibleGateway.com: they’ve launched the new Bible Gateway Store beta! The Bible Gateway Store has thousands of books, both digital and print, to complement your online Bible reading and study.

It’s a great way to pick up great content and support the Bible Gateway at the same time. You can pick from a wide variety of formats—in addition to print titles, there are plenty of audiobooks and ebooks for use on your ebook reader or MP3 player. The Store keeps an online library of the digital books you’ve purchased; you can browse your library and download titles as many times as you want, from anywhere with an internet connection.

The Store is in beta while the Bible Gateway team expands its inventory, fixes bugs, and improves the shopping experience for final public release, but it’s fully functional—and even if you don’t buy anything, they welcome and ask for your feedback.

So take a look at the brand new Bible Gateway Store and check back often, as they’ll be adding new products on a regular basis! And don’t hesitate to share questions, feedback, or comments about the Store during the beta testing period.

Two new features were unveiled today at the Bible Gateway, one of them specifically related to Lent (which officially began today on Ash Wednesday). Here’s a quick rundown of the new items:

• A new Lent reading plan. Have you ever thought about making a commitment during Lent to help you focus on the meaning of Easter? Committing to spending more time in the Bible is always a good idea, and a Lent plan that walks you through each of the four Gospels in time for Easter might help you do just that. Read more about the Lent reading plan on the Bible Gateway blog.
• On a somewhat related note, the Bible Gateway now makes it possible to subscribe to a reading plan (such as the aforementioned Lent reading plan) via email, so you can have each day’s Scripture reading delivered to your inbox. It’s still in beta, but if you’re interested, head over to the Bible Gateway to read more about it and subscribe to an email reading plan.

Stop by the Bible Gateway, try out the new features, and let the Bible Gateway team know what you think!

As you may recall, earlier this month we discontinued the old Gospelcom.net website and welcomed Gospelcom.net users to Gospel.com. We also invited you to send us your comments and questions about Gospel.com—and you have done so!

Two user requests in particular have been showing up most frequently in our email inboxes. And we’ve listened! We’ve made two new adjustments to Gospel.com based on your feedback:

1. You can now search the Bible Gateway from the Gospel.com homepage. Many of you told us that you missed the Bible Gateway search form on the old site, so we’ve added one to the top right of the Gospel.com homepage. Just check the “Search BibleGateway.com” option, type in a Bible passage or search term, and you can search the Bible!

2. The Verse of the Day is more prominent on the Gospel.com homepage. The Verse of the Day has been on the Gospel.com homepage since we launched, but it wasn’t obvious where it was. So we’ve bumped it higher on the page so you can see it right away when you visit Gospel.com.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to email us with your requests and feedback! We’re always looking to make Gospel.com more useful to you. We hope you like these additions, and don’t hesitate to send us your thoughts at info@gospel.com.