Ask · The Church & Christian Life

How do I actually read the Bible every day?

The short answer

Pick a small, fixed portion, read it slowly in context, and respond to God about what you read; consistency with a little beats ambition with a lot. The Bereans examined the Scriptures daily, and the Psalms bless the person who meditates on God's word day and night. A workable pattern: same time, same place, one chapter or less, read, note, pray. Missing a day is a reason to resume, never to quit.

The fuller answer

Make the unit smaller than your ambition wants it to be. Most daily Bible reading dies in February under the weight of a plan designed for a monk: five chapters, two testaments, a psalm and a proverb, abandoned at the first busy week and then abandoned altogether out of guilt. Choose instead an amount you could keep on your worst ordinary day: one chapter, or half of one, read in one book at a time from its beginning. Context is the quiet benefit of this approach: you meet each passage where its author put it, and the Bible begins explaining itself, passage by passage, the way its own people in Berea searched it, daily and in sequence.

Then read in a way that hears. The public reading in Nehemiah's day came with explanation, and the sense was given so the people understood, which is still the goal; a good modern translation, read aloud where you can, with a notebook for the verse that stops you, serves it well. Joshua's charge joins meditation to the word being in the mouth and to doing what is written, so end each reading with two plain questions: what does this show me about God, and what, concretely, does it ask of me today? Carry one sentence of it into the day. One sentence retained and obeyed outweighs five chapters skimmed and forgotten.

Finally, remove the guilt machinery, because it is the main thing that kills the habit. Attach the reading to something that already happens daily, coffee, breakfast, the commute, and keep the book or app where that happens. When you miss a day, and you will, do not double up in penance and do not restart the plan in shame; simply read the next portion at the next time. You are not maintaining a streak for an audience. You are keeping an appointment with a person, and the appointment is still there tomorrow, with the same welcome it had today.

Luke's compliment to the Bereans is the closest thing the New Testament gives to a method, and it is worth copying exactly: they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Eagerness and examination together. They did not read to have read, or to confirm what they already thought, but to test teaching, even an apostle's teaching, against the text. Bring that double quality to your own reading: glad to hear, slow to assume, willing to be corrected by what the page actually says. A Bible read that way, daily, in small portions, will do its work.

Sources

• Berean Standard Bible (BSB)

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