How Do I Keep Going When Bible Reading Feels Dry?

Question 11135. Spiritual dryness in Bible reading is something almost every believer I know has faced, and if you are in the middle of it now, I want to say plainly that it does not mean your faith has failed or that God has gone quiet forever.

I have had seasons in ministry where opening my Bible felt like duty rather than delight, where the words sat flat on the page and nothing seemed to land. It is uncomfortable to admit that as a pastor, but I would rather be honest than let anyone think this only happens to weaker Christians.

Scripture itself names spiritual dryness

The psalmist describes his own soul, nephesh, thirsting for God “as a deer pants for flowing streams”, in a dry and weary land where there is no water (Psalm 42:1 to 2). That image was written by a believer in genuine spiritual distress, not by someone outside the faith looking in. Spiritual dryness is not a modern invention or a sign of unusual failure. It is a recognised experience within the life of faith itself, named honestly in Scripture rather than hidden from it.

I find that enormously freeing. If David could feel this way and still be called a man after God’s own heart, then a dry season does not disqualify you from anything.

Common causes worth ruling out

Before assuming spiritual dryness is purely spiritual in origin, it is worth being honest about ordinary causes. Exhaustion, poor sleep, unaddressed stress, and physical illness all blunt our capacity to engage with anything, Scripture included. Unconfessed sin can also produce a genuine sense of distance from God, since sin dulls the conscience even where it does not remove salvation. And sometimes dryness follows a season of unusually intense spiritual highs, a natural levelling out rather than a crisis. Naming the likely cause honestly, rather than assuming the worst about your faith, is the first useful step.

I would also gently say that if this dryness has settled into something heavier, a persistent flatness that will not lift and touches every part of life, that may be depression rather than spiritual dryness alone, and it deserves proper care alongside pastoral support, not spiritual explanations only.

Keep reading even when it feels dry

The instinct in a dry season is often to stop, to wait until the desire returns before opening the Bible again. I would counsel the opposite. Job, in the middle of his own suffering, said he had treasured the words of God’s mouth more than his necessary food (Job 23:12), holding onto Scripture precisely when feeling had drained away. Spiritual dryness is not cured by absence. It is far more often eased, slowly, by continued presence in the Word, even when that presence feels dutiful rather than delightful at first.

Faithfulness in a dry season often looks unglamorous. It looks like opening the Bible anyway, reading a shorter passage than usual if that is all you can manage, and trusting that God is not absent simply because He feels distant.

Change the pattern, not just the willpower

Sometimes spiritual dryness is aggravated by a stale routine rather than a spiritual failing. If you have read the same plan the same way for years, try reading a different genre for a season, the Psalms instead of the epistles, or a narrative book you rarely visit. Try reading aloud rather than silently, or slowly through meditating on a single short passage rather than covering ground quickly. Small changes to the pattern can loosen a rut that feels bigger than it actually is.

Bring the dryness itself to God in prayer

One of the most freeing things I have learned is to pray about the dryness directly rather than around it. Tell God plainly that His Word feels flat right now, that you are showing up out of obedience rather than desire, and ask Him to meet you in that honesty. The psalmists modelled this kind of directness constantly, and God never rebukes them for it. Spiritual dryness prayed about honestly tends to loosen its grip faster than dryness carried silently and alone.

Community carries you when private discipline cannot

There are seasons where your own reading will not be enough, and that is precisely what the wider church is for. Being present in a small group or simply sitting under regular preaching lets you receive from the Word through others’ faithfulness when your own feels thin. I have watched people carried through genuinely dry years by nothing more dramatic than staying present in a church that kept opening the Bible together each week, even when they personally felt nothing.

I have also found it helpful to remember that dryness in one season does not predict what the next season will hold. I can look back over more than two decades of ministry and see clear patterns of ebb and flow, seasons of rich, almost effortless delight in the Word followed by stretches that felt like walking through sand. Neither extreme lasted forever. The psalmist who cried out in dryness in one psalm is often found celebrating God’s nearness a few psalms later, and I take real comfort from that rhythm being written into Scripture itself rather than hidden as something shameful. Spiritual dryness, however long it lasts, has never in my own experience or in the honest testimony of Scripture been presented as a permanent condition.

If you are walking with someone else through this, resist the urge to offer a quick fix. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do for a friend in a dry season is simply to keep showing up, praying with them, and reminding them gently that this is not the end of their story with God, even when it feels that way from the inside.

There is a particular kind of spiritual dryness worth naming separately, the dryness that follows a great disappointment, a prayer that seemed to go unanswered, a hope that did not materialise the way you trusted it would. This kind of dryness often carries a thread of quiet anger or confusion toward God that a person is reluctant to admit even to themselves. I would say, as gently as I can, that God can bear your honest anger far better than He can bear your polite distance. Bring the disappointment to Him directly, even clumsily, rather than letting it harden into a silent grievance that slowly empties your Bible reading of any remaining life. Spiritual dryness handled honestly, however painful the honesty, tends to move somewhere. Spiritual dryness buried under a performance of contentment tends to simply stay put, sometimes for years.

I would also gently mention corporate worship as a resource many overlook when they are in a dry season. There is something that happens when you sing truth you do not currently feel, surrounded by others who do feel it, or who have felt it before and will again. The congregation carries you in those moments, lending you their faith when your own feels thin, in much the way four friends once carried a paralysed man to Jesus on a stretcher because he could not get there under his own strength (Mark 2:3 to 5). Spiritual dryness is not meant to be weathered entirely alone, and there is no shame whatsoever in leaning on the faith of the people around you until your own begins to steady again.

Take heart, too, from how many faithful believers before you have walked through exactly this and come out the other side still trusting God, often more deeply than before. Spiritual dryness, endured honestly rather than denied, has a strange way of eventually deepening a person’s faith rather than destroying it, though it rarely feels that way while you are still in the middle of it.

One last practical suggestion. Keep a simple written record of prayers prayed and passages read during a dry season, even briefly, because it is remarkably easy to forget, once the season passes, quite how faithfully you kept showing up while it felt like nothing was happening at all. Looking back at that record later, once the fog has lifted, often becomes its own quiet encouragement, proof that faithfulness was present even when feeling was not.

So, now what?

If you are in a dry season right now, do not read it as evidence that your faith has failed. Rule out the ordinary physical and spiritual causes honestly, keep opening the Bible even when it feels like duty, pray about the dryness itself rather than hiding it, and lean harder on the community of the church while your own private discipline feels weak. Spiritual dryness is a real and recognised part of the Christian life, and it does not have the final word. The God who met the psalmist in his thirst is the same God present with you now, whether or not you can feel Him.

“As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.”

Psalm 42:1 to 2 (ESV)