1 Timothy 4:6-8, “In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine which you have been following. But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.”
What “resolutions,” if any, do you make at the dawn of each new year? If statistics are any indicator, most are forgotten by January 31. Within a month, the resolve we felt so intensely on December 31 vanishes like the morning dew. The good intentions to eat less, exercise more, go to the gym, read more, watch less TV, save money, and spend more time with the family may all be noble and praiseworthy. It doesn’t take long for the zeal to fade and the old habits to return. Resolutions are fickle things. Or maybe it is the resolvers who are fickle.
In one sense, January 1 is just another day. The sun comes up and the sun goes down. It’s really no different in substance than, say, July 19. Since we turn the page on the “year” instead of the month or day, it FEELS different. You write a different number at the end of the date on your documents, which feels significant. We don’t feel like we are getting older when we note the change of date from day to day. When we write 2025 instead of 2024, we have to reckon with the fact that yet another year has passed by and almost without our notice. It crept by, day by day, slowly, steadily, relentlessly.
Personally, I am not big on New Year’s resolutions. However, there is one thing that I begin again each and every New Year’s Day. I see this through all the way to the end of the year and then begin afresh on January 1. It’s something I wish to strongly commend to you – read through the Bible in a year. This isn’t a resolution suggestion. It is a discipline recommendation.
Before you dismissively set this article aside, thinking such a thing is unachievable or unrealistic, please hear me out. I think the guidelines, suggestions, and recommendations you’ll find below will be a great help and encouragement to you.
Please don’t take what you are about to read in a way I don’t intend. I’m not trying to lay down my own man-made, Pharisaical, legalistic formula for you to follow. I wouldn’t want to impose some false standard of spirituality upon your life, which could only produce guilt and frustration. That isn’t my goal. I want to encourage you to consider prioritizing this most fruitful practice. Over the course of the last 28 years, this one discipline has proved to be of tremendous spiritual blessing and benefit to me. If it isn’t your practice to regularly and systematically read Scripture, I hope this article will encourage and motivate you to make it a fixture in your routine.
The Word
The Bible makes lofty claims of itself. It claims to be the Word of the living God—powerful, divine, eternal, and everlasting truth. The Scripture is the mind of God, His wisdom, containing all that is necessary for life and godliness.
If you are not convinced of the benefit of reading, studying, memorizing, and meditating on Scripture, take some time to slowly read and think through Psalm 119. Most of you reading this will readily affirm the supernatural nature of Scripture and the blessing of regularly reading in it. Given that, let me ask you this: do you have a systematic and consistent way of exposing yourself to that Word?
Reading through the Bible one (or more) times each year is the single greatest spiritual discipline I have ever adopted. You may be wondering, “What about prayer?” “What about serving others?” or “What about pursuing holiness by mortifying sin?”
The discipline of regular Scripture reading supplies the energy, direction, and foundation to all other spiritual disciplines. Your prayer life will be enhanced when you know God’s will, as revealed in Scripture. Your prayers will be more intelligent, thoughtful, and purposeful. Reading Scripture informs our prayers and motivates them. The saints of old recognized the benefit of praying through passages of Scripture, allowing the Word of God to inform the language and content of their prayer.
Knowing God’s Word helps us resist temptation and put sin to death. When the words of Scripture course through our minds, we will not be conformed to this world (Romans 12:1-2) but instead, transformed as our minds are renewed by the Word of God. Reading through the Bible makes our prayers more meaningful, our service more fruitful, and our war against sin more powerful. That is why I say without hesitation that reading the Bible through each year is the single greatest spiritual discipline I have ever adopted.
An Attainable Goal
Reading through the Bible each year is a far more attainable goal than you might at first imagine. It’ll seem daunting if you’ve never tried it. When I have encouraged others to do this, the response I most often get is something like this, “The whole Bible! That is a lot! I don’t know if I can do that in only a year.”
It might seem overwhelming at first. But I’m not suggesting you read through it in a week or month. I am suggesting you stretch it out over a whole year. A year is a very long time. It is so long, in fact, that you are only going to live through 80 or so of them during your whole life. Three hundred sixty-five days offers you 8,760 hours to fit it all in. That is plenty!
When you spread the reading out over the whole year, it isn’t that much per day/week. You take it in small amounts. That is how to tackle a big project: one small step followed by another. Then another. As the old adage says, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” I would rather read Scripture than eat an elephant, but you get the idea.
The NASB has 807,361 words. If you read 200 words a minute, it’ll take you 67 hours and 15 minutes to read the entire Bible.1 When you spread that over a year, that averages out to 11 minutes a day.2 If you allow yourself one day off that schedule per week, you would spend only 15 minutes a day for 6 days per week. That is all it takes to read through the Bible in a year.
Is 11 minutes a day really that much? Will you spend 11 minutes a day scrolling through social media, getting updates on your favorite sports team, researching some obscure detail from your childhood memories, absorbing news headlines, or catching up on the latest political outrage? We can burn through 11 minutes before we even realize we’re being unproductive.
I knew a professor who taught at the Bible College I attended who read through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice each year. Doing that would only add a couple minutes to your 11-minute commitment. If you really want to be aggressive, try keeping up with another of my professors who read the Old Testament twice and the New Testament four times a year. I don’t share that to shame you, but to encourage you once a year is doable! Few people could keep up that schedule consistently, but anyone can spare 11 minutes. Don’t set an unrealistic goal at first. Just purpose to read it through once in 2025.
My Own System
I started reading through the Bible once a year on January 1, 1997, one month after I took over as pastor at Kootenai Community Church. Almost immediately I found a system and a rhythm I have maintained with little deviation since. Starting January 1, 2025, I will begin my 29th read through Scripture.
Over the years, I’ve refined my own habits and found a number of things helpful in maintaining discipline and reaping spiritual fruit from it. I’ll share some of those with you in hopes that they’ll set you off on the right foot if you are just starting. If you have already done this, I hope the following will encourage your continued progress.
First, find a place in your routine that’ll provide consistency. If the time you choose for reading is prone to disruption or normally scheduled for other things, you’ll never maintain the practice. Something will always come up, and you’ll sacrifice the reading to the tyranny of the urgent. You could read early in the morning before others are awake, on your lunch break at the job, while the kids are doing school work, after dinner while others clean up, or after others have gone to bed.
Second, find a pace that’ll help you reach your goal and then mark and monitor your progress. This is important! It’ll encourage you throughout the year to see your progress. I prefer to pace my reading not by time spent but by chapters read. I read 5-6 chapters a day, depending on the length of the chapters. Sometimes, I read more. Sometimes, I read less. I read five days a week. I usually skip Fridays and Sundays. On Fridays, I have an early morning appointment, after which I sometimes read. On Sundays, I review my sermon manuscript from 5:00 a.m. until I step into the pulpit. If I don’t preach on a Sunday, then I read that morning. I aim for five chapters a day, five days a week.
You might suspect this takes more than 11 minutes a day. It does, but my goal is to finish by Thanksgiving each year, not December 31. In 28 years, I’ve seldom missed that goal. This allows me to do something special for the month of December. During December each year, I pick a single book or section of Scripture to read through multiple times at the same pace of 5-6 chapters a day. I select my December reading according to need or interest.
For two Decembers prior to preaching through the Gospel of John, I read the book repeatedly. When doing something like that, I break in different locations each time through so I’m always reading different contexts together. For instance, the first time through, I’ll read chapters 1-5, then 10-15, etc. The next time through I read chapters 20-21 & 1-3, then 4-8, 9-13, etc. That allows me to see different passages next to each other in a variety of ways.
One December, I read through Titus (3 chapters) each day, 5 days a week. Another year, I read Hebrews over and over. Once, I spent December reading, meditating, and memorizing Psalm 73. I read Leviticus multiple times in December. One year, I read Psalm 37 two or three times each day. You really get to know a book well when you read it a couple dozen times in a month. In 2023, I added a chapter a day, upping my pace to 6-7 a day, and finished by Canadian Thanksgiving (2nd Monday in October). I chose to read through the New Testament a second time and finished easily by Christmas.
It is important to find something that works for you. Set a goal, set your pace, and mark your progress.
Third, find a Bible reading plan that will help maintain both your pace and your progress. There are dozens available offering various approaches to the Scriptures. You can try a chronological approach, reading the passages in the chronological order of the events they describe. Those plans fit the various books into the flow of history. If you take this approach, you might be surprised to find yourself reading Job before Joshua and Isaiah before Nehemiah. You might consider purchasing a chronological Bible that puts the passages in that order.
There are reading plans that split the daily allotment into two: a morning and evening reading. That allows you to begin and end your day with God’s Word. Some plans offer readings from three different sections of Scripture: historical (Genesis-Nehemiah), Psalms and Prophets (Job-Malachi), and the New Testament. Grace to You offers a MacArthur Daily Bible that follows that division and provides helpful devotional and explanatory notes. In 2022, I used that for my daily reading and read every note along with the text. It was a nice change of pace from my normal pattern.
Speaking of my own normal pattern, I usually work my way through both testaments at the same time, varying the order of books slightly each year. That looks something like this:
- Genesis-Deuteronomy
- Matthew
- Joshua, Judges, Ruth
- Mark (by this point, it is Resurrection Sunday)
- 1 Samuel – 2 Chronicles
- Luke-Acts, etc.
I divide the Psalms into three 50-Psalm blocks and read those sections between other books. The Psalter is already divided into five books (Psalm 1-41; 42-72; 73-89; 90-106; 107-150). One year, I used that division and sprinkled those blocks of Psalms throughout the rest of my reading. Thus, I alternate from the Old Testament to the New and back again.
I group books that are similar or books written by the same author. For instance, I read the books of Moses (Genesis – Deuteronomy) in one stretch. I read Jeremiah and Lamentations together. I group the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus). I prefer to take in the whole kingdom history of Israel in one long stretch (1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah). Sometimes, I break that up with another book that fits within that history, thus mingling a bit of chronological structure into my schedule. For instance, I will read Ecclesiastes in the middle of reading about Solomon in 1 Kings.
The book of Proverbs is a bit of an outlier in my plan. I don’t read 5-6 chapters of Proverbs in one sitting as I find it difficult to appreciate any one proverb when I am reading so many. I sprinkle the chapters of Proverbs throughout the year, reading a chapter when I need one to bring me up to my 5-6 chapter goal for the day. For instance, Deuteronomy has 34 chapters. At a pace of 5 or 6 chapters a day, my last day in Deuteronomy will include only four chapters, so I will put one from Proverbs in there to fill up the quota. Variety really is the spice of life.
Once again, find your own system, plan, pace, and enjoy.
Some Handy Tools
When I first started, I tracked my progress on paper. I used a small Bible reading plan published by the Gideons. Each day, I would cross off the chapter or book I read. Now, I do the same thing on my iPhone. The most customizable and versatile app I have found is called ReadingPlan. It offers dozens of premade reading plans to choose from. If you are a bit more tech-savvy, you can use the app to create your own. I use their plan called “Not A Plan,” which allows me to check off individual chapters. The app keeps track of the amount (%) of the Bible I have read, which helps me stay on pace throughout the year.
If you prefer reading on an electronic device (tablet or Kindle), there are some great apps available. In my opinion, the best option is Literal Word. It’s an easy-to-use, simple, and ad-free app that offers NASB, LSB, ESV, and KJV translations. The search function is fantastic and it includes lexical information for every word in Scripture. If you just want the Bible text, Literal Word is the best option. If you want some helpful notes, the BEST app is called Study Bible. It is published by Grace to You (John MacArthur’s ministry). The app with Bible text from the ESV is free; however, for only $6, you can get ALL the MacArthur Study Bible notes integrated as well as links to articles, blog posts, and MacArthur’s sermons, all provided through Grace to You. I love this app!
If you want a great app to help you memorize Scripture, get Scripture Typer or VerseLocker. These are AMAZING helps for Bible memorization you can take with you everywhere. I am not going to describe them to you. You have to check them out!
Some Pointers for Profitable Reading
Here are a few things to remember while reading.
- Always be looking for something. To keep my mind from wandering, I find it helpful to intentionally look for something as I read. For example, one year I watched for every passage in the gospels where Jesus addressed human sexuality or immorality, writing down the references as I read. When reading through Genesis to Deuteronomy one year, I took note of every mention of God hardening a heart. Reading through the minor prophets one year, I noted every passage that mentioned God’s kingdom, rule, or sovereignty. When I read through the New Testament a second time, I noted every reference (with a brief description) that mentions Satan, demons, evil spirits, exorcisms, or deliverance. This ended up being a daily Bible reading that helped me with some research I needed to do for a future writing project. If you are attentively looking for things in the passage, your mind will be engaged, and your reading will be more fruitful and interesting.
- Don’t be afraid of genealogies. When I read through passages that are long lists of names, tribes, or families, I don’t get bogged down trying to pronounce each and every name in my mind. Instead, I let my eyes land on the name long enough to see if it was familiar. In fact, in genealogies, that is what I am looking for – familiar names I know from other books, passages, or stories. One of the benefits of genealogies is the reminder that millions have had their time on this globe and played their part in God’s redemptive plan before I ever showed up. I read the list and reminded myself that they all lived, served God, and died. Likewise, I will pass from the scene and be lost in the blank spaces of history between names more notable than my own.
- Don’t be discouraged if you don’t understand EVERYTHING you read. You aren’t going to, so don’t expect to. You won’t grasp the significance of every name or place. References to geography may mean nothing to you. Some of the events will sound odd, and you won’t know how they fit with everything else. You won’t comprehend the details of every prophecy. Don’t worry about it. Read, glean what you can, and remember that next year, at about the same time, you’ll be back to that passage to read it again! You’ll be AMAZED how much better your understanding of these passages is after you have read them ten times over the next ten years. It is far better to read the Word and not understand everything than to not read it because you don’t understand everything.
- Don’t be discouraged if you fall behind. If you miss a few days because of circumstances you can’t control, don’t abandon the project. Simply add a little bit more to each day’s reading for a couple of weeks. You’ll catch up in no time! In 2000, Diedre and I built our home. I was working over 40 hours a week on the house and preparing a weekly message. I wasn’t able to keep up my daily reading routine. I fell behind by a third of a year. After we moved in, I added a little bit to my daily reading – a chapter here and a chapter there. I maintained the pace, and after 2 years, I caught up and was back on track. In fact, that is when I started reading 5-6 chapters 5 days a week.
- Consider an audio Bible. The technology available has eliminated every excuse for not knowing our Bibles. If you can’t read or genuinely can’t find the time, you can have the Bible read to you. Nearly all Bible apps read the text to you. You can listen while you shower, drive, work in the garden, walk, or cook dinner.
- You are never too old to start. If I had started this practice when God saved me instead of waiting until I was 24, I would be starting on my 39th year instead of my 29th. I would love to get those 10 years back! I would know my Bible that much better, and I’m convinced my high school years would’ve turned out differently!
If God should grant you just one more year of life, can you think of anything more profitable and productive than reading through His Word one more time? If I knew I were to die next week, I would not give up this discipline! If God should grant that I live to be 90, I will be able to read His Word through 40 more times! What a delight!
Don’t delay!
I am absolutely sincere when I say to you that reading my Bible through once a year is the single greatest spiritual discipline I have ever adopted. It has produced the greatest blessings. It has yielded fruit beyond what I could have imagined. If I had known this earlier, I would have started earlier. I commend it to you. A fresh new year is ahead of you.
If resolutions are your thing: Resolved, to read through the Bible in 2025!