And day by day, from the first day to the last day, he read from the Book of the Law of God.
– Nehemiah 8:18

Why read the Bible daily? Why ration it out verse-by-verse over the course of a year when we could sit down and read entire books in a matter of hours? Why not just read it in occasional chunks?

Put simply, this is a case where efficiency and productivity are not the same thing. There is a kind of growth that can only happen when we read the Bible inefficiently, one day at a time, every single day, and it’s as mysterious and mundane as our need to eat every day. There’s nothing wrong with occasional special meals, but the fact remains that our bodies are created to require food daily—if we go too long without that, we become weak and sick. The same thing is inescapably true of our spiritual lives. As Dean Smith said in a sermon once, “We may not be able to remember what we had for breakfast, but here we are—it sustains us.” It fills our tanks, and “when the storm hits, all that you’ve got is already in the tank.” You cannot grow as a Christian without regular Bible reading—it just doesn’t happen.

The truth is, most of us have consumeristic tendencies when it comes to reading the Bible. We want to be fed by someone else. We want it to be appealing and convenient, tailored to our needs and packaged nicely, like a fast-food drive-through. But reading the Bible daily on our own teaches us to self-feed. It allows us to encounter God on our own and not through the spiritual lives of others, and this over time produces a slow but sure growth that cannot escape notice. “When you miss your devotions one day,” James Cordeiro writes, “you notice. When you miss them two days, your spouse and kids notice. And when you miss them three days, the world notices.”

I was challenged to take this seriously when I started learning about the lives of Christians like Hudson Taylor, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Jonathan Edwards, Amy Carmichael, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon, George Whitefield, William Tyndale, George Mueller, Adoniram Judson, William Wilberforce, John Bunyan, Martin Luther, William Cowper, David Brainerd: the one thing all of these people had in common was daily time with God, both in Scripture and in prayer, often extensively. “I have so much to do today,” said Martin Luther, “that I must spend at least three hours in prayer.” Do I take my spiritual growth seriously? Then I must read God’s word, day by day, from the first day to the last.

This year has seriously challenged our routines. We’ve all had to consider what is “essential” (talk about a word whose meaning has been incontrovertibly changed) amid the constantly changing and radically novel experience of entering into and emerging from aspects of the pandemic. Has regular Bible reading made the list of essential tasks? How has it sustained or carried us through this time?