How to Read the Bible When You Have Twenty Minutes

Most advice about how to read the Bible assumes conditions you do not have.

It assumes a quiet hour, an early morning, a settled mind, a desk. It often assumes a plan that will take you through the whole thing in a year, which requires roughly fifteen minutes a day of unbroken attention, every day, without exception, starting now.

If you have small children, or shift work, or a mind that will not settle at six in the morning, that advice is not neutral. It quietly tells you that the practice is for other people.

So this is about twenty minutes, which is a real amount of time that most people can find a few times a week.

First, drop the year

The one-year plan is a fine tool and a terrible master.

Its great weakness is that it turns reading into a schedule you are behind on. Miss four days and you are facing a backlog. Backlogs produce skimming, and skimming produces the experience of having read Leviticus 14 without retaining a single thing, which teaches you that Bible reading is something you endure.

If a plan is working for you, keep it. If you have failed at one three times, the plan is not the problem and neither are you. The fit is wrong.

Read a whole book, slowly, over several sittings

Here is what I would do instead, and it is not original — it is close to how these documents were originally received.

Pick a short book. Read it start to finish over a week or two, in sittings of twenty minutes, in order, without jumping.

Mark is a good place to begin. It moves fast, it is the shortest gospel, and it was almost certainly meant to be heard in one or two sittings. Philippians is four chapters and unmistakably a letter to people the writer misses. Ruth is four chapters and a complete story. First John is short, repetitive in a deliberate way, and about as warm as Scripture gets.

Concretely: Mark is sixteen chapters, so four sittings of four chapters finishes it inside a fortnight. Do not stop at the end of chapter eight even though it is halfway — that is where Peter finally answers the question, You are the Christ, and Jesus immediately starts telling them he is going to be killed, and Peter tries to talk him out of it. The whole book leans on that scene, and reading up to it and then putting the book down for a week takes the air out of it.

Philemon is a single chapter of twenty-five verses. If you want the smallest possible complete unit, start there — one letter, one situation, one awkward request, read in a sitting.

The advantage of a whole book is context, which is most of what makes a passage make sense. Verses lifted out of books are how almost every misreading starts.

Ignore the numbers

This one changed how I read more than anything except reading aloud.

The chapter divisions were added in the early thirteenth century, credited to Stephen Langton. The verse numbers are later still — a Paris printer named Robert Estienne put them into a Greek New Testament in 1551. Both are finding aids, and both are well over a thousand years newer than the books they sit inside.

Which means they are not the author’s structure, and every so often they are actively in the way. A chapter break drops in the middle of an argument. A verse number turns half a sentence into a quotable unit. If you have ever had a verse handed to you that seemed to say something the surrounding paragraph did not, this is often where it started.

The practical version is two habits. First, when you reach a chapter number, keep going for one more paragraph before you stop; see whether the seam is real. Second, when a verse strikes you, read the five verses on either side of it before you decide what it means. That is thirty seconds, and it is the single cheapest accuracy check available to a reader.

Read it out loud

This sounds eccentric and it is the single change that has made the most difference for me.

Nearly all of this material was written to be heard, and you do not have to take that on trust — the documents say so themselves.

Paul ends Colossians by telling them to have the letter read in the church at Laodicea, and to read the Laodicean letter in return. He puts the Thessalonians under oath about it: I put you under oath before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers. Revelation opens by pronouncing a blessing on the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and a second blessing on the people listening.

One reader, a room, a scroll, and everyone else listening. That is the setting these texts assume about themselves.

Reading aloud slows you to the speed of speech, which is roughly the speed the thing was built for. It also stops the skimming, because you cannot skim out loud.

You will feel silly for about ninety seconds.

Three questions, and no more

When you finish the twenty minutes, ask three things. Do not write an essay.

What did it actually say? Not what it means for you. What is on the page. Who is speaking, to whom, about what. A surprising proportion of confusion clears up here.

What did I not understand? Name it specifically. Not “that was confusing” but “I do not know why he says that about the fig tree.” A specific question is answerable later; a general fog is not.

What is one thing I would do differently if this were true? One. Small enough to do this week.

That is the whole method. It takes three minutes.

On study Bibles and commentaries

Use them, but second.

The order matters more than people say. If you read the note before the text, you will read the text through the note, and you will not notice the things the note does not mention. Read the passage cold first, form your own questions, and then go and see what someone who has spent thirty years on it thinks.

You will also find that the commentary is far more interesting when you arrive with a question of your own.

One warning about looking up words, because this is where careful readers most often go wrong. If a word matters, do not settle for what its parts appear to mean. Word origins are a graveyard of confident nonsense, and a great deal of it gets preached. The honest method is boring and takes two minutes: find where the same writer uses the same word elsewhere, and let his usage set the meaning rather than the root. A concordance does this for free. If you cannot check it that way, say you are not sure, which is a perfectly respectable thing for a reader to say.

When it is dry

It will be dry sometimes. That is not a malfunction.

Psalm 119 is 176 verses long and is essentially a sustained love poem about God’s word. Look at how it is built: twenty-two stanzas, eight verses each, and inside each stanza every line begins with the same Hebrew letter, working through the alphabet in order. That is not a mood. That is somebody sitting down to a long, difficult, formal piece of work.

And buried in the fourth stanza is the line my soul clings to the dust. Two verses later, my soul melts away for sorrow. Then the whole enormous poem ends — after 176 verses of praise for God’s law — with this: I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I do not forget your commandments.

The most enthusiastic passage in Scripture about Scripture was written by someone who was lost at the end of it.

Sweetness in this, where it comes, seems to be something that develops over years rather than something you arrive with. That has certainly been true for me, and I have heard it from enough people across enough traditions to think it is normal.

Show up. Read the words. Some sittings are just deposits.

One practical thing about translations

If a familiar passage has gone flat, read it in a different translation. Not because your usual one is bad, but because familiarity makes the eye skip.

Every major tradition has translations it trusts, and there are more good ones in English than at any point in history. Pick a different one for a month and watch how many sentences you had stopped seeing.

The twenty-minute version, in short

Pick a short book. Read it in order, out loud, for twenty minutes at a time, past the chapter numbers rather than stopping at them. Ask what it said, what you did not follow, and what one thing you would do. Commentary after, not before. Expect dry stretches and keep going.

That is it. No plan to fall behind on, and nothing that requires a life you do not have.