by Pastor Victor Chen
With the new year comes various resolutions that can be easy to start but difficult to sustain. For Christians, the new year can mean restarting a Bible-in-a-year reading plan or attempting to read the Bible everyday.
And like other resolutions, we can start well with Genesis 1, yet sputter at Exodus and give up entirely at Leviticus. Or we keep up through day 15 yet give up somewhere around day 40.
If that’s you, you may think, ”Why should I even try this year?”
Reading the Bible consistently is a difficult discipline to keep (I speak from personal experience). It doesn’t help that reading is becoming more of a lost art, as social media news feeds have relegated us to speed skimming (or scrolling).
The last thing we want as Christians is to view reading the Bible as a chore or assignment we just check off, but engage very little with.
So if you’re having trouble reading the Bible everyday, try starting here.
Try reading a Psalm a day.
Psalms are easy to read because they are songs
What can make the Bible difficult to read, is how many different genres there are in the Bible and their corresponding difficulty. Narratives read easier because they read like story. Genealogies … not so much. The apocalyptic presents a whole range of questions and the laws can read like …. laws.
The Psalms are songs to the Lord meant to be sung, recited and memorized. There’s great emotion captured in the psalms intertwined with great truth about the Lord.
Psalms are easy to read because they are prayers
When we crawl out of bed and crack open our Bibles, we are often searching for something to grasp onto to help us through the day. That is why we can be discouraged when we open the Bible and read laws or genealogies and even narratives. When there is nothing apparent for us to take from the passage, we can make the mistake of trying to “spiritualize” what we read and draw out something that was not intended to be there.
But when we read a psalm in the morning, what we read becomes our prayer for that day. It becomes less about what we can get out of the psalm and more about aligning our hearts with the prayer of the psalmist.
Psalms are easy to read because they come in manageable portions
Reading the Bible regularly according to chapters can feel arbitrary because the chapters or verses don’t always follow the train of thought or movement. That is because chapter and verse designations were put there later by people to help break up the Bible in specific pieces.
The psalms on the other hand, are self-contained units, often with helpful introductions. Aside from a few long psalms, most psalms come in manageable portions. Psalms don’t feel daunting to get through.
But what about the rest of the Bible?
Reading a Psalm a day is not meant to discourage you from reading the rest of the Bible. If anything, it will encourage you to read the rest of the Bible. (The book of Psalms is the most quoted OT book in the NT!)
This suggestion is merely meant to help get you started each day in the practice of daily Bible reading. After reading a psalm in the morning, you can proceed to read a portion of the Bible during your lunch break, afternoon break or in the evening.
In other words, reading a Psalm everyday keeps you reading the Bible everyday!
For those who enjoyed the book, “Gentle and Lowly”, author Dane Ortlund has written a book with a daily Psalm accompanied by a reflection, “In the Lord I Take Refuge: 150 Daily Devotions through the Psalms”. Feel free to contact me at vchen@evergreensgv.org to order a copy.