If you read our interview with OS Hillman yesterday, you know that there’s a new daily devotional on Bible Gateway. TGIF: Today God is First was born when Hillman, a successful Atlanta businessman, suffered a long string of setbacks that left him desperate for spiritual help:

I went through a seven-year crisis that began in 1994 in which I lost $500,000 through a “Bernie Madoff” type of scam and lost 80% of my business when a client left and stuck me for $170,000. My wife left me at the same time and my vice-president left and took my second largest account. This ushered me into a seven-year season. I began writing TGIF: Today God Is First during that season in an effort to find answers I desparately needed at the time.

You can find TGIF: Today God is First here on the Devotionals page on Bible Gateway. But while you’re reading TGIF, you might also want to note a new set of features we’ve added to our devotionals: subscription and reminder options.

Subscribing to a devotional on Bible Gateway is a way to keep track of how far you’ve read in that devotional, get email reminders when a new reading is ready, and never miss an entry or “fall behind” on your reading. It’s a new feature that we’re launching in conjunction with TGIF. When you visit TGIF or any other devotional on Bible Gateway (you can choose from our full list of our online devotionals here), you’ll now see a new subscription panel at the top of the daily reading. It looks like this:

This panel lets you subscribe to a devotional that you want to follow. Subscribing to a devotional makes it easier for you to keep up with your devotional reading by allowing you to:

• Have reminders sent directly to your email when a new devotional reading is ready
• Chose your own starting date, and track your reading progress
• Pause a devotional at any time, and easily catch up with readings you’ve fallen behind in

To subscribe to a devotional, you’ll need to be logged into a free Bible Gateway account. (You can follow most of these steps if you’re not logged in, but you’ll be prompted to log in before you complete the process, and may not see all of the options until you’ve done so. Here’s more info about Bible Gateway accounts.) To subscribe to a devotional, visit one of our devotionals and click the Subscribe button on that panel. This will open a calendar view you can use to select the date on which you wish to start reading the devotional. You can also opt to have email reminders sent to you whenever a new reading is reading by selecting the Send reminders to… checkbox:

Choose your start date and (optionally) check the email reminder box, then click the Start button. (You must be logged into a Bible Gateway account in order to subscribe to a devotional; if you aren’t logged in at this point, you’ll be prompted to log in or create a free account when you press the button to subscribe.) Now that you’re subscribed, Bible Gateway will remember where you are in that devotional. Anytime you visit that devotional page, you’ll be presented with the next reading.

You can manage your subscription to a devotional by clicking on the little calendar icon above each reading:

The panel that opens up gives you the option to pause or restart the devotional, start or stop email reminders, unsubscribe from devotional, or “catch up” the devotional by marking all previous entries as “read”:

Once you’re subscribed to a devotional, you’ll want to visit it regularly to do the readings. Most of our devotionals have a new reading either weekly or daily. You can bookmark the individual devotional page, or find it in our big list of devotionals. If you checked the box to receive an email reminder when a new reading is ready, you’ll get an morning email on the appropriate days containing a link to the devotional.

That’s a very cursory introduction to our new devotional subscription feature—and we’ll be working to improve it as we receive feedback from visitors like you, so the details may change a bit. But if you’ve been frustrated in the past by a lack of customization options for our online devotionals, we encourage you to visit our devotionals and try out the new subscription feature (and to let us know what you think)!