As we come to the end of 2021, many of us are in the last week of our Bible reading plans and are looking for our plan for next year. Maybe, we’ve never done a daily Bible reading plan, or at least never completed one. I want to share with you a few reasons why you should have a daily Bible reading plan for 2022, some tips for making daily Bible reading successful, and offer you some motivation for why daily Bible reading is worth it.

Why You Should Have a Daily Bible Reading Plan for 2022:

We are instructed in Scripture to be diligent students of the word (2 Timothy 2:15) and to long for the word so that we “may grow thereby, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious” (1 Peter 2:2-3). Note how Peter uses language that brings up the ideas of eating and being nourished in verse three just as our physical bodies need daily nutrition to keep functioning and growing, so too with our Spiritual bodies. And just as many of us would never miss one of our daily meals, we should never miss a daily spiritual meal. Daily Bible reading is how we get our daily spiritual nutrition to continue growing and functioning as a Christian.

To that end, I have only one recommendation for a daily Bible reading plan, and it is the one I use in my reading; It is Mark Robert’s “Five Day Bible Reading.” Here are the reasons why I use this plan and why I recommend it to others:

• The plan is workable. You read only Monday – Friday (5 days) as the name suggests. And, in my experience, I can do the reading in about 20-30 minutes each day.
• The plan is the whole Bible. Each day has a reading from the Old and New Testaments.
• The plan is adaptable. If a whole Bible reading plan sounds intimidating, you can adapt the plan to read the New Testament in a year. Just use the last reading of each day to do this. So, if you are starting with daily Bible reading, are a new convert, or are a mature Christian, this plan is for you.
• The plan is portable. That is, it is just a piece of paper or a PDF. You can use it with any Bible (print or digital). The portability has been super helpful when traveling and only having my digital Bible with me.

Some Tips for Making Daily Bible Reading Successful:

My habit of daily Bible reading did not appear overnight. It took intentional effort to set in place daily Bible reading. Along the way, I found things that did not work and some things that I found very helpful. Here are the two biggest pieces of advice that I found to be very helpful in establishing and keeping the habit of daily Bible reading.

1. I resolved not to fail twice. Before I started my daily Bible reading in 2020, I found and listened to a sermon by Mark Roberts titled “Building The Habit of Daily Bible Reading,” and in that lesson, Mark made this point. He said the key to developing a new habit is resolving not to fail twice. That is, you are going to miss a day. That’s okay. But make sure it doesn’t happen twice in a row. This, more than any other piece of advice, was the biggest help to me in establishing and keeping the habit of daily Bible reading.
2. Read at the same time every day. The only way we find time for something is if we make time. Just like when we need to see a Doctor or have lunch with an old friend, we make the time for it; we need to make the time for daily Bible reading. For me, it is in the morning after I get ready and I make my coffee. I find that starting each day with God and His word sets me up for success that day.

Why Daily Bible Reading is Worth It:

I want to end this post with some motivation in your daily Bible reading. Here are some things that I found started to happen the longer I did my daily Bible reading.

• Greater Biblical literacy. The first thing I started to notice after a couple of months was that I had a better recall of the Biblical record and familiarity with the overall trajectory of the Bible. I was able to see the connections that existed within the Scriptures. Which only reinforced the desire to keep going!
• Big Scary Books Weren’t That Scary. There is a tendency to make the things we put off doing bigger and scarier than they are. Such was the case when it came to the major prophets. When I finally got to them in the reading, I found out that one, they weren’t that scary (that is hard to understand), and two, they weren’t that long or tedious. Now, this doesn’t mean that I understood everything Ezekiel or Zachariah was saying, but they weren’t so confusing that I couldn’t understand the overall message God was sending through those prophets.
• Starting the day with the word helps! When I began each day with reading the Bible, I also noticed that I was better equipped to handle that day’s challenges and temptations. Also, starting each day, reading the Bible starts you off on the right foot.

I hope you’ve been encouraged to commit yourself to daily Bible reading in 2022!