I was a child, getting ready for church, when my dad asked me if I had read the whole Bible yet.
“The whole thing?”
“You read a lot of books.”
Yes, but this was the Bible—the big, scary book we took to church each week, too big to fit under an arm comfortably. If our pastor could spend an entire service talking about just a paragraph, how long would it take for a little girl to get through all of the paragraphs? Making a false start in Genesis was easy, but carrying it through to Revelation seemed impossible.
It wasn’t until Sunday, July 26, 2009 when I was 13 that someone challenged me to spend five minutes each day reading the Bible for 30 days.
After 30 days I didn’t stop. I continued on for 602 days in all, some days carried by curiosity through the words for more than five minutes, other days forcing my eyes to stay open through a single page. Then the day came; I finished reading the entire Bible, at 15 years old, on Saturday, March 19, 2011.
It was good. So good that I read it over again from the start, just to remind myself of the details. For the next 622 days, I read the same words, yet learned new things. Then, I started it a third time. Even two times through, it seemed, wasn’t enough.
One of my biggest sources of confusion when I became an adult in the Church was linked to that same question my dad asked me as a child. Why had so few adult Christians read the whole Bible?
I learned not to assume that people around me knew scripture. Instead, it was a rare treasure to find someone who had read God’s Word in its entirety.
If not for the encouragement of my dad and the example set for me by many godly men and women in my church, I probably still wouldn’t have made it through the Bible today.
Maybe a little encouragement and direction is what we all need to read the Bible and to return to it.
Three False Paradigms
The reasons we don’t read the Bible are vast, yet categorizable. In other words, our very personalized, specific reasons can be traced back to a humanly-common core belief that affects our actions.
Ultimately, what holds us back from reading the truth of the Bible are lies, or false paradigms. The following sections address three lies we might be believing when reading the Bible does not feel delightful or doable.
1. The Bible is too long.
Have you ever looked at the Bible and felt like you’re at the base of a rock face without any climbing gear? You might believe the lie that the Bible is too long.
Too long is a comparison to the other things we read. On our bookshelves, the Bible is easy to spot because it is the thickest. Compared to the text messages, photo captions, news headlines, and content snippets we read on a day-to-day basis, the Bible looks monumental.
But not when you break it down and consider the power of a sustained pattern over a year. According to TGC Canada, nearly half the books in the Bible take less than half an hour to read.
Here are a few samples from their list of Bible reading times, compiled by Chance Faulkner:
- 3 John — 219 words, 2.2 minutes
- Jonah — 1,082, 10 minutes
- Philippians — 1,629, 16 minutes
- John — 15,635, 156 minutes
- Acts — 18,450, 184 minutes
In other words, the book of John, at 156 minutes, can be finished by simply reading for 22 minutes per day for a week, or five minutes per day for a month.
What’s especially encouraging about this is that TGC’s calculations are based on a slow reading speed of 100 words per minute. While reading speeds vary from person to person, Forbes reports that the average reading speed is 150 words per minute for third graders and 300 words per minute for adults. Speed readers hit 1,500 words per minute or more. This all means that the calculations above are realistic for the average reader, even if he or she is slowing down a lot.
Crossway, using slightly faster word per minute values, created some excellent infographics to compare the lengths of books of the Bible. Their calculations show that you could read the whole Bible in a year in just 12 minutes per day!
Crossway also offers the suggestions of reading the Bible for six minutes per day for two years or 30 minutes per day for 160 days.
A year is going to pass by quickly whether we read our Bibles or not. By choosing not to spare 2.2, six, 12, or 30 minutes, we don’t slow time or save it. We squander it and face a high personal loss of growth and delight.
The Bible is not too long. The truth is, the Bible makes us long for more of God.
Maybe that line is a cheesy play on words, but a small mental adjustment is easier to make than a large one. The enemy’s objective in making us believe the Bible will take too much of our time has more to do with preventing our affections for God and our joy than saving us a few minutes to do housework, make sure an assignment is flawless, or scroll social media.
2. The Bible is too boring.
Have you ever opened the Bible and felt like you were going to fall asleep on a bed of tight lines of text? You might believe the lie that the Bible is too boring.
Like too long, too boring is a comparison to the other things we read, watch, and listen to. On our shelves—or more likely our virtual libraries—we have not only books, but movies. These are the stories that hold our attention. We love the characters, the plot, the way the effects are done or the lines are written.
As a public relations professional, I’ve been educated in the power of stories on people. We all love them. That’s why Humans of New York, the photography project by Brandon Stanton, is so popular: he pairs his photos will interviews to tell a story. His audience is captivated by little details and at times even brought to tears by the words of people they don’t know. When there is a need, strangers step up to donate or offer help.
Among these stories, real or fiction, the Bible is the greatest one ever told. It’s true. When we understand the plot of the Bible, we start to see that other great stories simply borrow off of it. And the other real life stories we love? They have a common Author, who wrote the lives of the people in the Bible just like He’s writing ours today.
We all have different preferences in what we like to read for fun. Here are some ideas of what to read in the Bible based on genres you may like:
- Do you like poetry? Try the book of Psalms.
- Do you want to read a love story? The book of Ruth has both romance and family love.
- Like a strong female lead? The book of Esther is great.
- Prefer something familiar? I started with the book of Jonah after hearing the story in church.
- Love a good mystery? Read the prophets of the Old Testament and look for clues that point to Jesus.
- Love history or war stories? You’ll like the Battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua.
- Feeling more philosophical? Proverbs or Ecclesiastes will make you think.
These books and stories are great starting places, but ultimately the most satisfying story is the redemptive plot weaved through the entire Bible that centers on Jesus and His sacrificial, unconditional love for broken people.
Not only that, this true story makes an impact on our daily life. The Bible stays that “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). We are encouraged by the story and equipped by it.
The Bible is not too boring. The truth is, the Bible makes life without God look boring.
When we compare the history of the Bible to other stories, the other stories fall short. Even the parts of the Bible we struggle to read through are packed with the excitement of a beautiful story that God longs for us to be part of.
3. The Bible is too difficult to understand.
Have you ever read the Bible and felt like you needed someone to explain it to you like you’re five? You might believe the lie that the Bible is too difficult to understand.
While too long and too boring were comparisons to the other sources we read, too difficult to understand feels like a comparison to ourselves as people. It’s personal. We sit in front of the Bible with the best intentions and walk away feeling not smart enough to get it.
Going back to my example, when I started dedicatedly reading the Bible at 13 I knew very little about the world outside of my home, my school, and my church. It was difficult to picture what a tabernacle was supposed to look like. The book of Job was more confusing than anything I had read before. The joy of piecing together the story was intermingled with a discouragement against moving forward. Some of my pages had nothing I wanted to underline.
Even now, there are passages I struggle to wrap my mind around. And that’s okay. The Bible is our way to get to know the thoughts of God, whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8). God said “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). If we read the Bible and immediately think we understand it and agree, we’re probably just misunderstanding it.
The key, then, to reading the Bible successfully is to ask help from the author. God offers us His Spirit to help us understand His thoughts.
For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
1 Corinthians 2:11
Jesus said to his followers that the Holy Spirit would come to teach them all things and bring to mind all that He said to them (John 14:26). Reading the Bible isn’t supposed to be unnecessarily difficult, but it is complex and challenging to understand apart from asking for God’s help.
The Bible is not too difficult to understand. The truth is, the Bible forces us to lean on God to understand.
And isn’t that the point anyway? We read the Bible for more of God. By asking, through prayer, for His help to understand, we’ll do more than just pick up on some snappy quotes for our wall artwork. Instead, we’ll lean humbly on God and know Him more.
Read it all, 100 times
This blog is not meant to say that I am good or special for having read the whole Bible. Rather, it is to show that it does not take remarkable talent for a Christian to read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
Maybe it will take committing 5 minutes per day. Maybe it will take starting with a book of the Bible that seems interesting. Maybe it will take surrendering the pride of wanting to feel smart.
Read the whole Bible. Make today your July 26, 2009, the day when you start reading. Read it again. And again. And again. Be like the man quoted below who read it 100 times in 47 years.
For the first four years after my conversion I made no progress, because I neglected the Bible. But when I regularly read on through the whole with reference to my own heart and soul, I directly made progress. Then my peace and joy continued more and more. Now I have been doing this for 47 years. I have read through the whole Bible about 100 times and I always find it fresh when I begin again. Thus my peace and joy have increased more and more.
George Mueller
Next Steps
- Commit to reading the whole Bible or to reading the whole Bible again.
- Pray and ask God to help you.
- Make a reading plan you can follow. I personally chose five minutes per day to start. Check out these resources to help you:
Crossway Infographics: You Have More Time for Bible Reading than You Think
How Long Does It Really Take to Read the Bible from TGC Canada - Start today.
