I was recently asked what one thing had most spurred my spiritual growth over the years. The answer was easy: I read the Bible every day, and I read it in its entirety every year, and it’s a non-negotiable in my daily routine.
By Dec. 31, I hope to finish reading the Bible through for the 27th consecutive year. Each year, I have, by God’s grace, read the Old Testament through once, and the New Testament at least twice, Psalms and Proverbs two to three times. By no means do I say that to boast or desire to make our readers think more highly of me than they ought, but I do consider it as central to my calling to ministry and, alongside prayer, as the single most important key to knowing God and consistently growing in His grace.
When I surrendered to God’s call to vocational ministry in the mid-1990s, I had never read the entire Bible — much less read it in one year. Since I understood preaching and teaching the Bible as central to my calling, I figured I’d better get busy and give myself completely to reading, studying, meditating on, and memorizing God’s inspired, infallible, inerrant, authoritative, all-sufficient Word.
After completing it that first year, I decided that I needed to do it again annually and have been committed to it ever since. Seven days a week, most every day, I rouse from sleep between 5 and 5:30 a.m. and pray, read, take notes on my reading, (and guzzle coffee) until around 7-ish, sometimes longer on Saturday.
I believe the impact on my life has been seismic. In my many years as a pastor, I was often asked by church members why they weren’t growing much in the Lord. My response was always the same: “Are you regularly reading God’s Word?” Almost without exception, the answer would be “no.” It’s almost like taking your car to the mechanic with brakes squeaking loudly. You haven’t replaced the brake pads in seven years, yet you’re baffled why the brakes are grinding and your vehicle isn’t stopping. So it is with weak Christians who ignore the inspired oracles of God. They simply will not mature in the Lord any more than a human will be healthy if they try to live exclusively on a diet of cotton candy.
Growing up in Georgia on our family’s farm, I used to play by (and in) a creek that ran through our pasture. Some summers, we’d have a drought, and the grass in the pasture would turn brown. But the grass and the trees beside the creek were always green, always fulsome, always beautiful. Why? They were anchored next to a continual supply of water and the drought did not harm them. Reading God’s Word — if not daily, regularly — is like that for the believer.
Psalm 1 gets at it memorably: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night” — (with the result that) “he is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.”
Regular intake of God’s Word — reading, but also meditating on and memorizing verses and sections — is vital because God has invested His transforming power in the Bible, working through the Holy Spirit who indwells you. Reading God’s Word regularly, prayerfully, and meditatively:
• Helps you to spot patterns of sin that need to be put to death (Rom. 8:13).
• Furnishes you with the needed ammunition in your daily war against the unholy trinity of the world, the flesh, and the devil (Eph. 6:10–13). As John Piper well put it, we don’t follow Bible reading plans to tick off a daily checklist. We do it to meet an internal necessity. Think daily food consumption being necessary for your body.
• Helps you develop the mind of Christ on all the issues of life (Phil. 2:5).
• Helps to form in you an eternal perspective in daily life (2 Cor. 4:18).
• Enables you to know God, His character, His attributes, His will and His ways with us (Isa. 40:9–31).
• Transforms you by the renewing of your mind (Rom. 12:1–2).
• Gives you an immovable foundation and peace when suffering and adversity invade your life — as they inevitably will in a fallen world (Phil 4:7).
• Focuses your heart and mind daily on Christ and how to love God and love your lost neighbors by sharing the gospel with those who face a wrathful eternity without the Lord (Matt. 28:19–20).
• Provides you with true wisdom from above and gives you a voice of absolute truth in a world where thousands of competing messages war continuously for the throne of your heart (James 3:17–18).
• Changes the things you think about and talk about, so the good things that are growing in your heart and mind come out of your mouth. As I once heard John MacArthur say, “The mouth is the gate through which depravity exits,” but God’s Word has the potential to transform those words into God-glorifying syllables (Matt. 12:33–37).
Here’s my challenge to every reader of The Baptist Courier: Read through the Bible entirely in 2024. If that intimidates you and you don’t think that’s doable because of your schedule or familial circumstances or another good reason, resolve to read the Bible in its entirety over the next two years. There are very few promises I am willing to make, but I can assure you that God’s Word hidden in your heart (Ps. 119:11) will bear much spiritual fruit in your life and will keep your roots planted in firm ground when the storms of life coming blowing in.
I pray you will be “like newborn infants, (who) long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation” (1 Pet. 2:2).