Originally written for byFaith Magazine. Ava Ligh serves as campus staff for Reformed University Fellowship at Columbia University in New York City.
“I don’t read the Bible enough. I should read it more.” This oft-repeated confession by Christians to fellow believers is as ubiquitous an admission as “I have not been eating well, and I should work out more.”
That we should read the Bible is rarely questioned. Why we should read it is also fairly well-established.
What we rarely do is examine why we, as confessing Christians, don’t read the Bible despite saying that we should. In my years of lay and vocational ministry, I’ve known the acceptable answers to this question and what we perceive to be “unacceptable” answers.
While time constraints are the most “acceptable” excuse, they don’t hold up under scrutiny and serve as the Bible-reading equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”The Bible is readily accessible for the 91% of Americans who own smartphones, and with just 12 minutes a day, we can read it in a year. Making time to read the Bible is more than doable for most of us who claim to have no time.
The real reasons we don’t read the Bible go unexamined because we consider them unacceptable. The Bible feels boring and like a waste of time. I’ve had this confirmed by the college students to whom I minister. It’s boring for those who have grown up in Sunday School and feel they already know all the stories and key verses and that there’s nothing new to learn. It feels like a waste of time for those who find the Bible difficult to understand.
Most of us struggle with a combination of both: we skim familiar passages, like the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000, because it is repeated in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and we avoid more obscure parts because they’re too hard to grasp. As a result, we fail to be shaped by the well-known and the unfamiliar sections of the Bible.
On the heart level, the reason we struggle to want to read the Bible is common to all fallen humanity. The effect of sin has caused a “hardness of heart,” which makes us like sheep that are prone to stray and turn to our own way (Ephesians 4:18; Isaiah 53:6). This spiritual problem will require spiritual assistance, and we ought to pray for ourselves and for others the same prayer that Paul prayed for the Ephesians: that God may grant us to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in our inner being, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith (Ephesians 3:16-17).