Reading the Bible — A good habit to cultivate for the new year
It’s a few weeks into January— how are those resolutions going for you? I wonder if we might do well to shift our focus from lofty goals to small habits. Those small habits are usually the means by which we achieve the lofty goals, after all.
We all have habits, whether we realize it or not. It’s just a matter of whether we have cultivated them intentionally or let them develop without much thought. The ways we spend our time, how we speak to other people, even our morning preparations all tend to be habitual. Good habits really do help smooth our path through life. And it’s always possible, though not always easy, to change our habits and to develop new habits that better align with our values, priorities and goals.
James Clear writes in his book, “Atomic Habit,” “It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underesti mate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis …. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous.”
If you have a habit of regular scripture reading, yay for you! That’s wonderful, and you should keep at it. Stick with what’s working for you. If you don’t have such a habit, it’s never a bad time to change that.
Think about starting small — one or two chapters a day. At two chapters per weekday (ten chapters a week), you’ll read the whole Bible in just over two years. Even the very longest books of the Bible only take about a month at this rate, and over half of them can be read in a week or less!
A slow, steady pace like that will show you that you can make real progress just a little at a time. That makes it easier to stick with the discipline long term, and maybe even to build on it later. If you make this a habit, you can read the Bible over and over, four times every decade, even with breaks in between (and those unintended breaks along the way). How many times have you read the Bible in the past ten years?
Nothing is more formative in our lives as Christians than the regular reading of scripture. God’s word is “living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and it will do its work on you.
If you have the time and desire to read faster, or use study guides, or dig deeper — great! If that just makes you give up after a month, don’t worry about those extras. Just read the words of scripture a couple chapters at a time, and let them change you — little by little, over weeks and months and years, shaping you more and more into the image of the God in whose word you dwell. That alone is a very fruitful habit.