How much time should I spend reading the Bible?

Question 11076

Daily Bible reading raises a question of quantity almost immediately, and the question is usually asked with a slightly guilty face. How long is long enough? Fifteen minutes? An hour? Is there a figure that would settle the matter and let me stop worrying about it?

I understand why people want a number. A number is manageable. But Scripture declines to give one, and I think that refusal is deliberate rather than an oversight.

What Scripture Says About Daily Bible Reading

There is no verse prescribing a duration. Joshua is told that the book of the law shall not depart from his mouth and that he shall meditate on it day and night (Joshua 1:8). Psalm 1 says the same of the blessed man. Notice that both texts describe saturation rather than a slot.

The Bereans in Acts 17:11 examined the Scriptures daily, which is the closest the New Testament comes to a frequency. Even there the emphasis falls on the eagerness and the examining rather than on the clock.

So the biblical vision for daily Bible reading is not a quota discharged and then forgotten until tomorrow. It is a mind steadily soaked in what God has said, so that His words are available to you at eleven in the morning and at midnight, not only at seven.

Two Errors That Face in Opposite Directions

The first error is legalism. Someone decides that thirty minutes is the mark of a serious Christian, achieves it, and quietly begins to feel superior. Or fails to achieve it and concludes that God is displeased. Both reactions have mislocated the whole business, because daily Bible reading is not a payment.

The second error is casualness. A verse on a phone app while queuing for coffee, and the account is considered settled. I am not against such things, but nobody would call that a relationship in any other area of life. You cannot know a person on the basis of thirty seconds a day.

The right instinct sits between the two. God is not counting your minutes; He is your Father, not your line manager. And He has given you sixty six books because He intends to be known, which takes time nobody can shortcut.

What Realistic Faithfulness Looks Like

For most Christians in ordinary circumstances, fifteen to thirty minutes of unhurried daily Bible reading is a sensible aim. That is enough for two or three chapters read slowly, a little reflection and some prayer arising out of it. It is achievable in almost any life if it is protected.

But circumstances differ enormously and I refuse to pretend otherwise. A mother of three under five, a nurse on rotating nights, a man caring for a wife with dementia, none of these people should be told they are failing because ten minutes is all they can find. Ten attentive minutes offered honestly is worth more than an hour resented.

Conversely, if you can find two hours for a television series, the claim that you have no time for daily Bible reading will not survive examination. The question is not availability of time but allocation of it, and most of us know perfectly well which it is in our case.

Quality and Quantity Belong Together

People sometimes set these against each other, as though a short thoughtful reading were automatically superior to a long one. That is not how it works. Thirty minutes of genuine attention gives you more than five, and five minutes of genuine attention gives you more than thirty spent gazing at a page while your mind sorts the day’s emails.

Attention is the variable that most affects the value of daily Bible reading. Read where you will not be interrupted. Put the phone in another room. Read aloud if your concentration is poor, because the ear catches what the eye slides over.

Then stop and ask three things of the passage: what does this show me about God, what does it ask of me, and what do I not understand? Writing the answers down, even in a sentence each, turns reading into thinking.

When Life Makes It Impossible

There are seasons when daily Bible reading genuinely cannot happen in the way you would like. Newborn babies, terminal illness, night shifts, depression heavy enough to make a page of print unmanageable. I have sat with people in every one of those situations.

In those seasons, change the method rather than abandoning the aim. Audio Scripture while driving or feeding a baby is real reading; see my answer on audio Bibles. A single verse memorised and repeated through the day may be all that is possible, and it is not a lesser thing.

What I would not do is let the guilt accumulate until the whole subject becomes unbearable. God knows your frame and remembers that you are dust (Psalm 103:14). He is not standing over you with a stopwatch.

The Aim Is Formation, Not Accumulation

The purpose of daily Bible reading is not to acquire information that could be tested. It is to be shaped. Paul tells the Colossians to let the word of Christ dwell in them richly (Colossians 3:16), and the verb for dwelling suggests taking up residence rather than paying a visit.

A resident word changes how you see your work, your marriage, your money and your enemies. That kind of change happens by repeated exposure over years, which is why the daily part matters more than the duration. Small and constant beats large and occasional, as anyone who has tried to get fit already knows.

Measure yourself, if you must measure at all, by whether Scripture is shaping your instincts, not by whether you hit a target this morning.

Building the Habit Into a Real Life

Habits attach themselves to existing routines. Daily Bible reading is far more likely to survive if it is bolted to something you already do without thinking, such as the first cup of tea or the moment the children leave for school. Willpower is an unreliable partner; structure is better.

Choose a time when your mind actually works. There is nothing holier about the morning, whatever the biographies of eminent Victorians suggest. If you are alert at ten at night, read at ten at night.

And expect dry patches. Some weeks the text will feel flat. Keep going anyway, in the same way you keep eating when food is uninteresting. The nourishment does not depend on the appetite.

What About Study as Well as Reading?

Daily Bible reading and Bible study are related but not identical, and confusing them causes a good deal of frustration. Reading covers ground and keeps you in the flow of the text. Study stops, digs, compares passages, checks a word, follows a theme. Both are needed and they do not have to happen at the same sitting.

I would suggest keeping the daily reading simple and unhurried, and setting aside a separate longer slot once a week for the digging. That way the daily habit is not weighed down by expectations it cannot carry, and the serious work still gets done somewhere.

Groups help enormously here. A midweek Bible study, or two friends working through a book together, will take you further into a passage than solitary daily Bible reading usually does, and the discussion tends to expose the questions you had not thought to ask.

If you want practical guidance on tools for the digging, I have written about that in my answer on essential Bible study tools.

And do not neglect memory. Carrying a verse through the day extends the reading far beyond the time you spent on it, which is one way of obeying the day and night language of Psalm 1 without giving up your employment. A memorised text works on you at moments you could never have scheduled.

It is also worth saying that seasons legitimately differ. A believer preparing to teach, or working through a difficult question, may read far more for a while. Another believer in a period of exhaustion may read far less. Neither is the permanent standard, and treating a temporary intensity as the new normal is how people burn out.

I would rather you thought in years than in mornings. Daily Bible reading sustained modestly across a decade will take you through the whole Bible several times and will shape you more than any concentrated burst. The Christian life is not a sprint and Scripture is not a syllabus to be completed.

So, now what?

Set a floor rather than a target. Decide the smallest amount you will do on your worst day, perhaps ten minutes, and treat that as the line you do not cross. On better days you will do more, and you will do it gladly rather than dutifully.

Then stop measuring for a month and see what changes. Daily Bible reading is a means of knowing a person, and nobody times their conversations with someone they love. How much of the last week has God actually had a say in?

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

Colossians 3:16, ESV