I’m on year 29 of reading through the Old Testament once per year and the New Testament and Psalms twice per year. May I just say that not once has it been boring or rote or repetitive.
Hebrews 4:12 says that God’s word is living and active. Scripture is alive by the Triune God who gave it, and there is food to eat there that will sustain the weariest saint.
Often folks will say they don’t want their spiritual disciplines, like Bible reading, to become stale or habit. My response to these statements goes like this, “Do you worry about breathing becoming a boring and rote habit?” “Do you worry about eating becoming a rote habit so as to just stop or do it rarely?” The answer is always, “Of course not!”
It’s interesting how we can justify not establishing healthy habits for our lives with the concern that those habits become rote. There are exceptionally good habits that will give life and extend health to our appointed days. Healthy eating. Exercise. Managing our minds. All these are good habits and should become reflex and ingrained defaults for optimal health. Bible reading is like that.
Prayer. Bible reading. These go hand in hand, and these should become default and habitual practices that we truly go to without having to muscle them up.
The truth is that there is no good reason to not establish these good spiritual disciplines as default habits. Just like feeding our body is a given, feeding our body/soul existence needs to become a given.
So, if you are prone to avoid spiritual disciplines because you have thought it poor for them to be a habit, rethink that position, and strive to make the soul/body nourishing activities of spiritual disciplines part of your healthy habits.
It takes 20-23 days to establish a habit. So, try consistently reading your Bible and praying as you read for 23 days. Don’t be concerned if you get to the end of a daily habit and didn’t have some existential experience. Not every hamburger I eat is life-changing. There are some, but not all. And you know what? Even the worst hamburger still provides energy and strength to hit the wights and joy to my soul. And, before you get on me for hamburgers not being healthy, you need to repent. They are God’s favorite food. Just ask him! Kidding, but you get the point. Not every day of spiritual disciplines will result in some wild testimony-giving experience, but it will feed your existence, and the cumulative effect will result in spiritual health that you will notice over time.
So, give it a try! Have a great day ya’ll.
Theology in the Dirt 