The Why and How to Developing a Daily Bible Reading Habit

Many Christians grow up in a church culture that places a heavy emphasis on developing a daily Bible reading habit. However, few churches adequately train their members how to do this in practice, or even why they ought to do this in the first place. I do believe it’s important for Christians to develop a daily Bible reading habit. But I also believe there is some deconstructing and reconstructing to be done in this area in regard to our motivation behind reading the Bible and our practice of reading the Bible.

So, why is a daily Bible reading habit important? And how exactly does one go about developing this habit? This may sound like the introduction to a simple, frilly blog post where I give you ten surface-level steps that you could have come up with yourself. If that’s the post you’re looking for, you may want to go ahead and smash that back button and find a different blog post. But if you’re looking for depth, you’ve come to the right place. Go ahead and grab yourself a cup of coffee and settle in.

Since this is going to be a lengthy post, let me give you a lay of the land ahead of us. In the first section of this post, we’re going to talk about why we should develop a daily Bible reading habit and why we shouldn’t. This is where we’re going to be doing a lot of deconstruction. If you can make it through that first section, the second part is going to be much less controversial. That’s where we’ll talk about the how. Here we’ll talk about what I think the best method is for developing a daily Bible reading habit.

But before we jump into it, here’s a small disclaimer. While I will walk you through some of the practical steps that have worked for me when developing a daily Bible reading routine, your mileage may vary. What works for me won’t necessarily work for you. That said, this post is going to be principle-heavy. In other words, we’re going to talk a lot more about the theory than about the practice. My hope is that in doing this, I’ll be able to help you discover your own practices and routines for developing a daily Bible reading habit that works for you.

Got your coffee? Great! Me too. Let’s go.

The Why of a Daily Bible Reading Habit

This is a painful topic for me. In all honesty, I’ve procrastinated writing this blog post for a while now. The Bible is near and dear to my heart. I was that nerdy kid asking for Bibles for Christmas. When I’d get in trouble, my mom would have to ground me from Bible study. When I went to college, the only thing I could think to study was the Bible, a course of study which continued through grad school.

And yet, I’ve grown up in an unhealthy relationship with reading the Bible. As have many evangelical Christians. To this day, I struggle with a lot of baggage when it comes to reading the Bible. A lot of it stems from the fact that I burned myself out toward the end of my M.A. program. But the vast majority stems from how I was taught to read the Bible. More accurately, why I was taught to read the Bible.

• The Bible is God’s Living Word
• The Bible makes us better people
• The Bible is a manual for living a Christian life
• God wants us to read the Bible
• God speaks to us through reading the Bible
• Reading the Bible is how we get to know God’s heart

There is an ugly bottom line here. We can shroud that line in as much religious language as you want to. You can dress it up in its Sunday best, but you can’t hide its fundamental message.

The emphasis the evangelical church has placed on reading the Bible teaches churchgoers the dangerous lie that reading the Bible makes you a good Christian; not reading the Bible makes you a bad Christian.

Note that I’m specifically calling out the evangelical church here because that’s my own tradition, and it’s the only tradition I’ve experienced. I know not all evangelical churches share the same vices, and I know it’s not an issue that affects only the evangelical church. But I can only write about my own experiences.

I’ve had to do a lot of deconstruction and reconstruction in my own brain. And yes, it’s an ongoing process. I’m not sure if it’s a process that will ever be finished. But I believe it’s an important process. The church as we know it is full of people who, whether they realize it or not, have an unhealthy relationship with the Bible. How we teach people how to read their Bibles, how we teach them why to read their Bibles, matters.

But before we can talk about why we should read our Bibles, we must first ask the more fundamental question… should we even read our Bibles at all?

Should We Read Our Bibles?

Before you get too nervous, don’t worry. I’ve already shown my cards by creating a website devoted to helping people read the Bible better. Yes, I think reading the Bible is important. That’s an assumption of mine. An assumption we’ll examine closer here in a bit. But that’s not the question of this section. Here I want to focus on the word should.

Should we read our Bibles? Should we read them every day? Every week? Once or twice a month? If you grew up in a similar tradition as me, you were taught that the answer to that question is “Yes! Absolutely you should read the Bible every day, or as close to every day as possible.”

But no matter how you frame it, this mindset implicitly creates a culture of guilt and shame. If I should be reading my Bible every day, what happens if I skip a day? What happens if I skip three days? Or a week? Or a month? What happens if I go a few years without opening my Bible?

If the reason you jumped onto Google and typed “How to read the Bible every day” was because you’re loaded down with a ton of guilt, let me be the first to tell you that it’s okay to not read your Bible every day. Seriously, it’s fine. You’re fine. You’re not a bad person and you’re not a bad Christian. Rest in the fact that we have freedom in Christ.

Some Christians genuinely don’t like reading their Bibles on a regular basis. It doesn’t bring them joy. It doesn’t bring them closer to God. More than anything, it’s a waste of time and source of frustration for these people. It’s okay to be a Christian and to not enjoy reading your Bible. It’s okay to be a Christian and not read the Bible on a regular basis.

In case I haven’t said it plainly enough, let me spell it out for you. Your value as a Christian and your worth as a person is not dependent upon how often you read the Bible. On the flip side, how often you read the Bible does not determine how “good” or “bad” you are. You don’t earn brownie points by reading your Bible more than other people, and you don’t get demerits for reading your Bible less than other people.

To sum up, I want to tell you to take all that guilt and throw it off your shoulders. But this is something I’ve been telling myself for years, and yet I still chastise myself and make myself feel guilty for not reading my Bible more often than I do. Throwing off your guilt isn’t something you can do overnight. But I would encourage you to start the process, whatever that looks like for you. If you haven’t read your Bible today, or yesterday, or this week, or this month, give yourself permission in this moment to not feel guilty about it.

Yeah, it’s not working for me either. I still feel guilty. Alright, that’s enough of that soap box. Don’t worry, I have plenty more soap boxes to pull out in the next section, so let’s keep it moving.

Improper Motivations For Reading Your Bible

Now that we know we should stop saying “should,” let’s take a quicker look at a handful of other improper motivations for developing a daily Bible reading habit. I’ve already listed these at the start of this section, but here I want to explain why these are improper motivations.

The Bible is God’s Living Word

Reading the Bible because it’s God’s Word is an improper motivation for a few reasons. First, it’s just not an accurate statement. I know that might ruffle your feathers, but hear me out.

No where in scripture does scripture refer to itself as God’s Word. Scripture does have a lot to say about God’s Word, but that Living Word is Jesus himself. The ultimate revelation of God was in the incarnation of Christ, not the inspiration of scripture. The Bible is an incredible resource that points us to his Word. But in and of itself, it is not that Word.

Second, this is an improper motivation because it’s external. If the Bible is God’s Word, then the Bible only gets its authority and its gravitas from God. There is nothing inherent to the Bible to draw you into a daily Bible reading habit. Only the pressure from an outside force: God.

The Bible Makes us Better People

False. The Holy Spirit makes us better people. The Bible is a book. This is an improper motivation because you’re seeking to get something out of the Bible for your own personal gain. It’s a transactional approach to reading scripture. If every time you approach Bible reading you expect to get something out of it and to grow into a better person, you’re going to be disappointed much of the time.

Now, I do believe reading the Bible on a regular basis does help us grow and develop, but over the course of our lives. Not in a single reading session. And this should not be our motivation for reading the Bible, because it’s not necessarily even something that we’re going to notice.

The Bible is a manual for living a Christian life

The Bible is a lot of things. It’s a library of many different genres. It’s literature. It’s poetry. It’s story. It’s drama. It’s comedy. It’s correspondence. It’s legal contract and wisdom literature. But it is most definitely not an instruction manual for living a Christian life.

Are there instructions for how Christians are to live? I mean, if you gathered them all together there would probably be enough to fill up a couple of pages. Even then, these are specific instructions given to specific people in a specific time and culture and relating to specific circumstances.

Again, if you read the Bible with the mindset that you’re going to find instructions for how God wants you to live, you’re going to be largely disappointed.

God wants us to read the Bible

I’m not comfortable putting words in the mouth of God. I don’t recall God or Jesus ever claiming this to be one of God’s desires for his people. God wants us to stand up against injustice, to feed the widow and the orphan, to love our neighbor as ourselves, to love God with everything inside of us. I honestly don’t think God cares if we read the Bible on a regular basis.

This is an improper motivation, again, because it’s external. If we’re only reading the Bible because we think that’s what God wants us to do, then there’s nothing inherent in the Bible drawing us into a daily Bible reading habit. We’re either trying to earn brownie points or trying to avoid demerits. And again, that’s not what the Bible is about.

God Speaks To Us Through Reading the Bible

Now this is one that I do agree with. I believe God speaks to us through the Bible. But it’s definitely not the only way God speaks to us. God can and does speak to his people through various media, including but not limited to scripture. If you read the Bible every single day, God will find a way to speak to you. But if you go your entire life without ever reading the Bible (not something I recommend, just to be clear), God will still find a way to speak to you. He’s not limited to words on a page.

The reason this is an improper motivation is because this, too, is transactional. We read the Bible because we’re seeking some kind of spiritual experience or some divine word.

All of these improper motivations are similar in that they tend treat the Bible as a means to an end. It’s a way to grow, or a way to tap into God’s will, or a way to avoid divine punishment. I would say that this single concept is at the root of all of our inappropriate and unhealthy relationship with scripture. We believe the Bible is a means, maybe even the means, to a particular end. And if we don’t read the Bible every single day, if we don’t do everything we can to ride the means, then we will never make it to the end. We’ll never be good Christians. We’ll never please God.

We need a mindset shift away from this understanding of reading scripture. I think the answer is to understand the Bible not as a means to an end, but as an end. To find value and worth in the act of reading scripture. Not to ascribe some external value to it.

With that, our deconstruction has come to an end. The painful part of this post is out of the way. Go ahead and get yourself a refill on that coffee, because now we can get to the fun part: reconstruction.

The Purpose of the Bible

It’s important to keep in mind that the Bible is a collection of ancient literature that was written and compiled by a community for a community. The concept of locking yourself up in your bedroom to read the Bible all by yourself is actually a relatively new concept. For the vast majority of history, Jews and Christians didn’t even have access to their own individual Bibles. For centuries, the main purpose of the Bible has been community development and formation.

Multiple times a week, Jews and Christians come together to read their scriptures together, to listen to the words read aloud. Over a set period, these communities would read through entire corpora of sacred texts together. Over several years and over a lifetime, these communities would have read through their scriptures so many times that they would be ingrained in their brains, shaping the entire community into the people that God intended them to be.

Somewhere along the line, our western individualistic ideal hijacked this communal aspect of scripture. While we still read scriptures together in our church services, a much heavier emphasis is placed on the sermon, the explanation and individual application of the scripture, than on the scripture itself. For the most part, Bible reading has become a responsibility of the individual Christian. This is unprecedented throughout the history of the church.

I’ve already talked about the damage that this has done to our relationship with the Bible. We’ve turned it from something good, something communal, something world-changing to a source of guilt, a manual for Christian living, and a series of shallow personal and individual applications.

If the purpose of the Bible is communal, does that mean we shouldn’t be reading the Bible individually? Not at all. Church services don’t place as much weight on Bible reading as they did a few centuries ago. So if we want to experience the shaping power of scripture, if we want to let scripture work on us and form us the way it was intended, we’re going to need to do some supplemental reading on our own.

But we can still develop a daily Bible reading habit with intrinsic motivation. That is, reading the Bible for the sole act of reading the Bible, and not as a means to an end. Not because of pressure from some outside force, like God, or our pastor, or our own guilt-laden mind.

I think the best motivation for wanting to read the Bible on a daily basis is wanting to read the Bible on a daily basis.

I think of the poet who wrote Psalm 1. There is beauty in meditating on scripture, a concept which in Hebrew means to mutter the words of scripture under your breath over and over. There is something that happens to us as we read these texts. We are shaped over time into the people that God intends us to be. Yes, individually. But I think the corporate shaping of God’s church is closer to the heart of what the Bible is and always has been intended to be.

If you don’t find beauty in reading the words of scripture over and over, in meditating on these words, in enjoying them for what they are and not for what we want them to be, that’s okay. I would encourage you to try reading the Bible for no other purpose or ulterior motive than just reading the Bible. Set aside all expectations, all guilt, and all external pressure. Just enjoy reading scripture for scripture.

If your motivation for reading scripture daily is to grow a deeper appreciation for the beauty of these books, to develop a love for their artistry and their depth, to have your mind molded and shaped over time into the kind of person who thinks, talks, and acts like the people God intends us to be, then I want to help you develop a daily Bible reading routine to help you attain that goal.

If your motivation for reading scripture daily is to get something out of it for yourself, to absolve yourself of guilt, to be a better Christian, I can’t help you.

Scripture has a power and a beauty all on its own. When we try to take scripture, to claim its truths for ourselves, and to pull out bite-sized pieces of applicable wisdom for our own misappropriation, we’re no better off than Simon the magician, attempting to purchase the Holy Spirit.

If you’re still with me, let’s jump into the proces.

The How

The reason I spent so much time in this first section is because I think it’s important. If you’re trying to start a new habit for the wrong reasons, you’re going to end up frustrated. Especially if you think the habit you’re trying to start is something you should do, or something someone else told you to do, or something that you only want to do because you feel guilty that you’re not doing it.

Without intrinsic motivation, it’s going to be hard to start a new habit. Moreover, it could negatively impact your relationship with scripture and your own perception of your relationship with God.

Now that we have effortlessly cast aside all guilt and all extrinsic motivations, let’s jump into the actual process for developing a daily Bible reading habit. To do this, we’re going to use science and psychology to our advantage. Because starting a new Bible reading habit is just like starting any new habit, good or bad.

The How of a Daily Bible Reading Habit

What is a habit? According to Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit, a habit is a conscious choice that we make at some point in our lives. But it’s a choice that we make so often that it soon becomes unconscious.

Let me give you an example from my work day. At some point after lunch every day, I walk into the break room at my office and grab a breath mint and a bottle of water. I don’t have to think about it anymore. When there are no more breath mints, I feel incomplete, like I’ve been robbed of an experience. For the rest of the day, I’ll feel like something is off.

Habits are rituals that we perform throughout the day, that get us through our days, that build structure around our days, and give us a sense of security. That’s how something as simple as a missing breath mint can have such a powerful negative impact on my day. I’m not just missing a breath mint. I’m missing an integral piece of my day’s structure.

Since habits start as conscious decisions, we have the power to create new habits anytime we want to. We also have the power to rid ourselves of bad habits. All we have to do is hack our brain.

Through the rest of this post, I’ll outline the steps required to hacking your brain for the purpose of developing a Bible reading habit. You need to understand your chronotype. You need to understand your current routine. You also need to have a basic understanding of the habit loop, how habits work, and how to leverage that loop for your own benefit.

What’s Your Chronotype?

I learned about the concept of a chronotype from Dan Pink’s book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. The idea is that scientifically speaking, some people really are “early birds” and some people really are “night owls.” In other words, you and I most likely do our best and most productive work at different times of the day. For instance, as I write these words it’s almost one o’clock in the morning. I have tried time and time again to be the type of person that wakes up at 5am, reads my Bible, writes 500 words, runs three miles, and solves world hunger all before breakfast. And yet, no matter how hard I try, I always find myself doing my best work at night. I’ve always been like this and, despite my efforts, I probably always will be.

There’s a myth that in order to read the Bible on a regular basis, you have to wake up thirty minutes to an hour earlier than you normally do. You should read your Bible first thing in the morning so it sets your day off on the right foot.

This might be true for you, but it’s not true for everyone. If your chronotype allows you to be more productive in the evening, then it may be a better idea for you to read the Bible just after dinner, or right before bed.

Anytime you try to start implementing a new habit, it’s usually a good idea to figure out when your peak hours are and then adjust your schedule to allow you to develop that habit during those hours.

So if you’re a morning person, great. Get up a little earlier and read your Bible as a part of your morning routine. If you’re an evening person, great. Find a good time slot between dinner and your bedtime to fit in your new habit. Are you a late night owl? Awesome. Nothing wrong with reading your Bible at 3:00 in the morning.

So the first step to developing a daily Bible reading routine is to discover what your chronotype is. Not what you want your chronotype to be. Not what someone told you your chronotype should be. But what your chronotype is.

Examine Your Current Routine

Once you know your chronotype, start thinking about your daily routine around your peak hours. If you’re a morning person, for instance, start thinking about everything you do in the morning. If you’re an evening person, what does your current evening routine look like?

Yes, we’re looking for a spot to squeeze our new Bible reading habit into. But there’s also another reason we’re examining our current routine. Our goal here is to identify current habits that we do on a routine basis that we can piggy back our new habit onto.

Do you make coffee every morning? Perfect! That’s a routine habit that you already have built into your morning routine. We’re going to use that to your advantage.

Do you brush your teeth every night? Awesome! First, what’s your secret? Second, we’re going to use that habit to our advantage.

Maybe your peak time of the day is in the afternoon. Do you eat lunch? Do you take an afternoon siesta? Do you have consistent post-lunch bowel movements? Take a look at your current routine and pick a habit.

Now we’re going to expertly weave our Bible reading habit into that current habit that we already have. Make coffee every morning? Great! We can use that habit to trigger our new habit. Every time we make coffee, we’re going to sit down with our Bible and get some reading in.

Every time we brush at teeth every night, we’re going to make some time for Bible reading before bed. Every time we poop after lunch… I think you get the idea.

Now we have our trigger. This is going to be key for us as we move forward. But before we do, it’s important that you understand a bit more about how habits work. Let’s jump into the habit loop.

The Habit Loop

I learned about this concept again from Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit. I’m hesitant to say that he coined the term, because I’m not sure if he did or not. Nevertheless, if you’ve never read Duhigg’s book, it’s an excellent insight into the human brain and our need for structure. If you’re serious about building new habits, I highly recommend diving into his book.

Anyway, the habit loop is relatively simple. The idea is that every habit follows a cyclical pattern: cue, action, reward.

Let’s take my breath mint habit, for example. After I eat lunch, I usually have a stale taste in my mouth. I also start to get thirsty. This is my cue that I’m ready for my habitual trip to the break room, which is the routine action itself. The reward from the action is the fresh taste left in my mouth from the breath mint.

It may sound simple, but this habit loop is so powerful and so central to the way our brains work that you don’t even realize how marketing companies are manipulating you using this habit loop. Seriously, open up Duhigg’s book. It’ll blow your mind.

Let’s break it down and look at each section of this loop individually.

Cues

Habits don’t occur in a vacuum. Every action has a reaction and every habit has a cue. Cues are crucial for building a new habit because this is how we’re going to weave the new routine into our current day to day lives.

We don’t have to spend too much time here, because if you’ve been following along so far, you already know your cue.

I like to do my daily Bible reading in the evening. My cue is washing dishes. It’s something that I do every night right after putting the kids to bed. Once everything is clean and tidy, I stretch out on the couch with my Bible to do some reading.

On the occasions that we eat out and don’t really have a whole lot of dishes, it’s easy for me to go the whole night without every picking up my Bible. I don’t even realize it most of the time. My Bible reading habit is nearly inseparable from washing dishes that it’s hard to remember to go through with that routine when my trigger isn’t there.

Once you have your cue, it’s time to move on to the action itself.

Routine

Here is where we’re going to start building the actual habit. This could be anything, but for our purposes in this post, we’re going to focus in on reading the Bible. Once your cue has happened, whether that’s doing dishes, making the bed, brewing coffee, whatever it might be, sit down right away and read your Bible.

Now we want to make this as simple as possible, because we humans are lazy creatures. If something is hard to do, we’re not very likely to do it. That said, prepare for this step before you actually get to this step.

Have your Bible set out and ready to go in your reading spot of preference. Have a Bible reading plan already picked out so you know exactly where you’re going to start reading when you sit down. If you have to spend time pulling your Bible off the bookshelf and then deciding what you’re going to be reading that day, you’re using up some much-needed brainpower that you could be devoting to actually developing your new habit.

So prepare. Have everything ready to go, so that when your cue happens, you can sit down and start reading your Bible right away.

Every time your cue happens, do the routine. The same way every time. After a while, it will start to become a part of your daily routine and you won’t even really have to think about it. But in order for that to happen, there’s one last piece to the habitual puzzle: the reward.

Reward

Eery habit has a reward. This is what signals the end of the habit loop. The action stops and leaves us with some sense of fulfillment. This reward also lets our brain determine which potential habits to keep and which potential habits to forget about. If the reward is strong, there’s a larger chance that your brain will decide to build the habit on a routine basis. If the reward is weak or nonexistent, it’s not likely that the habit will stick around for very long.

Now there are two types of rewards, and I’ve already touched on this concept briefly when talking about motivations: intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards.

For reading the Bible, extrinsic rewards are the same as extrinsic motivations. Examples of these rewards include the feeling that you’ve pleased God, or the absolution of guilt. Praise and respect from other people is a common extrinsic reward. These rewards are weaker and impossible to control, because they come from forces outside of our control.

An intrinsic reward is the simple pleasure in reading the Bible. The insight and wisdom gained from reading this ancient literature. Growing more familiar with the scriptures and more familiar with how God has worked in history.

Think about the last time you read a book that you couldn’t put down. Or maybe a series on Netflix that you binged in one weekend. What was it that kept you going? A love for the characters? Anticipation of the plot? A fascination for the world? Enjoyment? A combination of all of these?

Or did you just really want to impress your friends or family? Did you feel like you would hurt someone’s feelings by not reading the book or watching the series? Did you feel like you were supposed to read it?

Extrensic rewards may get you to eventually read a book that you never really wanted to read wotherwise no one would ever get a college degree); but it’s going to be very hard to build a consistent and strong habit with this type of reward.

You need to have some type of intrinsic reward to strength your Bible reading habit. If you’re reading this and getting nervous, because you’ve never enjoyed reading scripture. don’t worry. If you’ve read this far, you clearly have a desire to enjoy reading scripture. And your deep desire to develop a love and appreciation for the Bible is a great place to start. Each time you read the Bible, really become aware of your level of enjoyment. Every time you notice yourself falling more in love with the act of reading scripture, allow yourself to feel pride. Celebrate the fact that you’re actually enjoying ancient literature. And if you never get to that point, maybe that just means you need to find a different version of the Bible. Perhaps one more readable and more enjoyable for you. (To see my recommendations for daily Bible reading versions, click here to read my last post.) If you’re still not able to find a deeply enjoyable intrinsic reward to strengthen your habit, then you may just need to take a closer look at why you want to develop a Bible reading habit in the first place. What are your motivations?

Well, we’ve taken a good look at the habit loop. But there’s one final concept before we finish up this post. It’s the thing that drives the habit loop and keeps it spinning: craving.

Craving

There’s a reason that the habit loop is called a habit loop. Once the action is complete and you’ve received your reward, the loops starts back at the beginning. You get the cue again, you complete the routine again, you get the reward again. It’s the underlying craving that keeps the habit loop moving, which is exactly why the strength of the reward determines how solidified the habit becomes. A stronger reward will produce a stronger craving.

The more your brain gets used to the reward, the more your brain will crave that reward. This is exactly how binge watching Netflix works. The more you consume, the more you are rewarded, and the more your brain develops a craving for that reward. This is how books that you can’t put down work. This is why “This is my last handful of chips” or “This is my last cookie” is always a lie. If your craving is so strong that you have to watch one more, read one more, eat one more, you can be sure that your craving is just going to be stronger after your next episode, chapter, or handful.

The craving really is the key to this entire loop, because without the craving there’s nothing to drive the routine. There’s no fuel.

The writer of Psalm 1 had a genuine craving for reading and meditating upon the words of scripture. This was not a natural craving, but likely a craving that came from the act of reading and meditating upon scripture in the first place. The more scripture the psalmist consumed, the deeper the craving became. But that craving never comes from a place of guilt or a place of coercion. It always comes from a deep intrinsic appreciation for the scriptures themselves.

You may be sitting there thinking you don’t have that genuine craving. You don’t have a genuine desire to read scripture. If that’s the case, I know exactly how you’re feeling. I’ve been there. I’ve felt the overwhelming guilt, sitting before God with a posture of obligation, knowing I was supposed to read the Bible on a regular basis but with absolutely no intrinsic motivation. I would always try to develop a daily habit, and I’d always fail. Sure, it might last a few days. Maybe even a couple of weeks. But extrinsic motivation is never enough fuel to drive the craving long enough for an unconscious habit to form.

The best way to develop a daily Bible reading routine is to do it for the pure enjoyment of doing it. The more you read it, the more you recognize the intrinsic rewards of reading it, the more you’ll start to crave it. Weave this habit into your daily routine, piggy-backing onto habits that are already deeply formed in your life. Read more, crave more, and before you know it, you’ll have a strong daily Bible reading habit.

Now just because you develop this habit doesn’t mean you’re going to read the Bible every single day. And that’s okay! You need to have grace on yourself, because there’s no one breathing down your neck to make sure you’re reading your Bible on a regular basis. There’s no external force putting unnecessary pressure on you. There’s no brownie points to win and there’s no punishment to avoid.

And with that, I will bring a close to this very long and rambly post. I’ve had a lot of soap boxes, because this is an important issue to me. But now I’m done talking. I want to hear from you.

What are your motivations for reading scripture? What are your tips for developing a daily Bible reading routine? What rewards and cravings have you discovered that have fueled your habit? And if you, like me, have experienced failure, guilt, and the inability to create a long-lasting habit, what do you think is holding you back?

I’d love to hear from you and talk more about this! Drop a comment below, or feel free to email me at [email protected].