The Spiritual Insanity of Daily Bible Neglect
A call to treat God's word as it is
Dear Christian,
I want to ask you an important question that I hope you will not run from:
Do you read your Bible every day?
I’m not asking if you open up the YouVersion app at some point and distractedly glance at the verse of the day. I’m not asking if you have a three paragraph devotional you crack open in your first moments of waking consciousness. I’m not asking if you lend your ears to theology podcasts or watch hours of biblical “deep dive” YouTube videos.
I’m asking: do you open your Bible every day and read it? Really read it as if the Bible is what it says it is?
In case you need a reminder, your Bible claims it is…
…breathed out, every word, by God himself (2 Timothy 3:16)
…living and active, with the power to lay your soul bare before the Lord (Hebrews 4:12)
…worth more than any treasure this world has to offer (Psalm 19:10; 119:72)
…able to shed light on your path through this dark, dark world (Psalm 119:105)
…your ultimate and final source of truth (John 17:17)
…the sword of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 6:17)
Does your engagement with your Bible reflect these realities? Does the time and effort you put into knowing God’s word harmonize with the nature of what God’s word claims to be?
When your Savior faced his great temptation in the wilderness, battling not only the physical weariness of a 40 day fast but also the seductive words of his great enemy the devil, the weapon he wielded against his adversary was the weapon of the Holy Scriptures. With every temptation the devil threw at him, the Lord stood on the unwavering authority of these words:
“It is written…”
“It is written…”
“It is written…”
And what was the first passage of Holy Spirit inspired writ he fired back at his enemy?
“It is written,
‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matt. 4:4).
Jesus held back a Satanic assault on the ground of Deuteronomy 8:3, and in so doing he re-affirmed a powerful Old Testament truth:
Your life as a Christian is utterly dependent on the Bible.
I want you to see this, brother or sister. According to Jesus Christ, God’s word is to our souls what food is to our bodies. Which begs the question: if you fed your body to the same extent you feed your soul the Scriptures…how long would you make it?
A few weeks? A couple of months? How long until your vital organs would shrivel? Until your ribs would show? Until serious disease began to settle in? How long until you died?
This is not an extreme question. This is a basic question concerning your spiritual life. If you don’t think daily Bible reading, meditation, and prayer are absolutely essential to your survival as a follower of Jesus Christ (as Jesus himself says it is), then what you’re doing right now is living in the insanity that comes with starvation. You are spiritually starving for God’s word.
To be clear, I don’t intend to be unnecessarily harsh. I simply want you to see how desperate our need for the Scripture really is. If you are a Christian who has the time to consume podcasts, read books, watch TV, go the movies, attend sporting events, play video games, train for distance races, go hunting, etc…but you somehow don’t think you have time to meaningfully engage with God through his word on a daily basis, then I want to wake you up to the very real spiritual danger you are in.
If this article describes your indifference to the Scriptures, then at best you are disobeying your Lord and reaping real spiritual consequences for your negligence that you likely aren’t even aware of because you are too malnourished to even recognize it. You are walking in a haze. At worst, you might not even belong to Christ. That’s a terrible reality to consider, but it is on the table. “My sheep hear my voice,” Jesus said. “I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). Those who have been born again hear the voice of Christ calling to them from the Scriptures. They recognize the Old and New Testaments as the very words of God and follow his voice. They believe the Bible is what it claims to be and respond accordingly. If you are not treasuring God’s word and running to its wisdom daily, and (an important and) you see no need to repent of that, then it raises serious questions about the state of your soul.
With that said, I want to assume we are dealing with the “best” case scenario - you’ve been sinfully negligent of your Bible and you want to change that.
If that’s you, I want you to hear me when I say that no Christian treasures God’s word perfectly. I can give myself as an example. I’ve read literally dozens of books on theology and the Bible this year - time that I think was well spent. But do you know how many passages of Scripture I memorized in 2024?
0.
I did not memorize one verse in the Bible this year. In failing to do so, I am out of step with with the instructions of God’s word:
“I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Ps. 119:11)
“You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul” (Deut. 11:18)
“The law of God is in his heart; his steps do not slip” (Ps. 37:31)
“This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it” (Josh. 1:8).
Most importantly of all, I am out of step with my Lord’s example I wrote of above, in which he waged war against Satan in Matthew 4 with the words of Scripture he’d memorized and had at the ready for just such a fight.
This is not to excuse any negligence you are responsible for. It is simply to recognize that we all have ground to take in this area. And take it we must.
So I write to you as much as to myself: we must be a people who feast daily on the Scriptures. We must be a people who read it, know it, store it up, and respond to it in prayer. We must be men and women who treat the Bible on its own terms and interact with it in accordance with what Jesus and the Prophets and the Psalmists and the Patriarchs said it is. The Bible is not an expansion pack or an add-on to the Christian life. It is our daily bread. It’s where we go, joyfully, to hear the very voice of God.
Oh Lord, grant us greater reverence for your words.1
1 If you don’t know where to start, find a Bible plan. I’d recommend a two-year bible plan like this one by Stephen Witmer. It will get you through the Old Testament and New Testament each once, and through the Psalms and Proverbs four times in that two year period.
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Thanks again for reading. Feel free to share this post or leave a comment!
Zak, I appreciate this post so much! As a seminarian, I am often guilty of reading tons of books about the Bible and theology so much so that I forget to read for my soul. Thank you for the reminder and the challenge!
In another regard, however, I have been doing relatively well: Scripture memory. I have been faithful here largely because my church is doing it together, each week challenging one another to be faithful.
This is fantastic!!