Why Do We Read the Bible?
We prioritize daily Bible reading because without it we fail to achieve life’s great purpose: “to make God in Christ look magnificent—to make him look precious and valuable, to look like the supreme treasure that he is” (Philippians 1:20).
And yet, “there’s so much in us that is inclined to think or feel or act in ways that don’t make Christ look great.” To accomplish our great purpose, we must see glory. “If we don’t desire and cherish and enjoy and savor and treasure Christ, we will not commend him as magnificent in what we feel and say and do.
Christ is most magnified in us when we are most satisfied in him, and we cannot be daily satisfied in the depths of our soul in Christ if we don’t see him and savor him.” And that will “only happen” by a “steady meditation on the word of God in the Bible.” In Scripture we behold Christ’s glory, and this glory transforms us from the inside out (2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:4).
What Motivates Our Bible Reading?
Proper Bible reading is motivated by a desperation to see God. “The reason I read the Bible is because I am stone-cold dead without Christ and his Word. But I want all my life—every part of it—to be glorious. I want life to be beautiful. I want life to be vastly more than it is if I’m left to myself. I want to see how astonishing reality is at every turn—every person, every rock, every tree, every animal, every work of salvation. I know that, left to myself, I am an absolute dud. I am blank, nothing deep, nothing moving, nothing intense, nothing beautiful, nothing precious, nothing sweet or wonderful— just empty, blank, unmoved, coasting along from one worldly preoccupation to another.”
There’s “one hope for John Piper: that I would have eyes to see the God-entranced magnificence of everything—namely, that God would be pleased in my Bible reading to cause me to see the glory that is really there.” We must see and savor the glory that shapes us into redeemed sinners who magnify God by being satisfied in him. Set in this context, Bible reading is truly an “awesome quest.”[1]
Why Read the Bible Daily?
To a new believer who asked why daily Bible reading is so essential to a fruitful life: “I have never met a mature, fruitful, strong, spiritually discerning Christian who is not full of Scripture, devoted to regular meditation on Scripture, and given to storing it in the heart through Bible memorization—and that’s not a coincidence.”
Indeed, “it is absolutely essential, after coming to faith in Christ, to be radically, deeply, experientially devoted—unshakably, unwaveringly persuaded—that reading and meditating on and understanding and memorizing and enjoying the Scriptures is absolutely essential for the Christian life.” It calls for daily practice.
10 Reasons Why We Need to Read the Bible Daily
Here are ten reasons we need the word daily.
1. Scripture is a means of preserving our salvation. Salvation is a dynamic reality that functions in three tenses: past, present, and future. And in the present reality, “God saves us daily by Scripture” (1 Timothy 4:16).
2. Scripture meets Satan’s temptations (John 8:32, 44; 1 John 2:14). “Every time Jesus was tempted by the devil, he struck back with ‘the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’” (Ephesians 6:17). And he had it memorized “so he didn’t have to carry a book in the wilderness.”
3. Scripture is a means of grace and peace to us (2 Peter 1:2).
4. Scripture is meant to sanctify our lives, to make us more and more holy (John 17:17). “We don’t become perfect in this life, but we do become holy” through the Spirit’s work in our lives via the word.
5. Scripture gives us joy (Psalm 1:2; 1 Thessalonians 1:6). “Life without joy is unbearable. The Christian life is filled with afflictions. But in them all, God sustains joy, and he does it by the Scriptures.”
6. Scripture protects from error (Ephesians 4:13–14). How do Christians avoid becoming leaves blown around by all the cultural winds of opinions? The answer: “The unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God—knowledge that they experience not as the opinion of man, but as the word of God. That’s found in one place: the scriptures.”
7. Scripture gives us hope for eternity. Scripture promises us that the frustrations that limit our joy in this life will be removed in the age to come.
8. Scripture keeps us from being startled by false teachers and apostates (2 Timothy 4:3).
9. The Bible calls for careful handling, which we can only learn through day-by-day familiarity with the word (2 Timothy 2:15).
10. The Bible sustains our lives (Matthew 4:4). “Spiritual life—eternal life—just like physical life, must be fed, not by bread, but by the Word of God. If you think that you have eternal life as a kind of vaccination against hell, which needs no nourishment, you don’t know what spiritual life is.” Spiritual life is sustained by the daily bread of God’s Word.[2]
How Do I Get the Most From My Bible Reading?
With all these convictions in place, how do we maximize the impact of our daily Bible reading?
People are very different, and Bible reading will be a different experience for everyone, including the man who initially asked the question. “How disciplined is he? How much time does he have available? What skill does he have in reading—what speed and comprehension? How familiar is he with all the parts of the Bible, even those maybe he hasn’t read at all? What level of curiosity does he have that might drive him to slow down and figure things out that are puzzling to him?” Our Bible reading experiences differ because “our capacities for reading and comprehending, our speed, and our life situations are different.”
Despite the variables, here are common helps.
7 Ways to Maximize the Impact of Your Daily Bible Reading
1. Belong to a great church that models careful Bible reading by preaching verse by verse.
“Few things are more helpful in grasping the totality of Scripture than a steady, week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out, decade in and decade out feeding on the preached word of God. Oh, this is so important. If your pastor doesn’t preach Bible texts and explain to you what they mean, please try to find another church. Because the decades of your life will be gloriously transformed if you sit under the preaching of the word like that for a long, long time.”
What you hear preached on Sunday morning should illuminate what you read on Monday morning.
2. Find friends who offer accountability and ask you how your reading is going.
3. Set your routine. “Set aside a place and a time where you’re going to read your Bible every day. If you don’t have a set place and a set time, Satan—along with your own flesh—will almost certainly push your Bible reading right out of your schedule and out of your space.”
4. Pray. “Pray earnestly over your Bible reading before you read, while you’re reading, and after you read. Pray that God would show you what’s really there and make it real for you.”
5. Appreciate the deep change that comes from persistence.
The Bible is huge. In a given day you’ll read four chapters, most of which you will forget in an hour. In this sense, daily reading will soon feel “absolutely overwhelming and pointless.” But in the discipline, Scripture is “lodging itself in your mind and in your heart in ways you cannot comprehend. The so-called forgotten language, the forgotten paragraphs, the forgotten words, the forgotten stories, the forgotten points are becoming a repository from which the Holy Spirit can draw out things you do not even know are there.”
6. Take something specific from your reading.
More practically, aim to “take one crisp, clear sentence with you—something encouraging, something motivating, something strengthening, something guiding. Write it down on a little piece of paper, stick it in your pocket, stick it in your purse, whatever. Say it to yourself over and over again during the day. Those sentences accumulated—365 of them—are an amazing power and stockpile of truth over time.”
7. Very practically, use the Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan to read from four places in the Bible, with the benefit of catch-up days built into the monthly rhythms. But read it. Read all of it. Because “if we leave out big parts of the Bible, we probably won’t know God the way we should.”[3]
The Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan
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Sources
[1] APJ 1140: “A New Year, A New Bible Reading Plan” (January 1, 2018).
[2] APJ 1512: “Ten Reasons to Read the Bible Every Day” (August 14, 2020).
[3] APJ 1296: “How Do I Make the Most of Daily Bible Reading?” (December 31, 2018).