It’d be silly and dangerous to give up on healthy eating if you didn’t feel happier or stronger as or right after you ate. The same is true of Scripture reading. We shouldn’t measure success entirely by whether or not we feel pleasure as we read. Not every Scripture passage should cause even the healthiest Christian to feel surface-level happiness. Don’t chase after a feeling; chase after nearness to Christ.
In his best-selling book Atomic Habits, James Clear tells the story of a friend who lost over 100 pounds through diet and exercise. Clear’s friend began with a goal of going to the gym for five minutes daily. (He even set a timer and faithfully left the gym each day after five minutes.) By making his goal achievable and repeatable, he became someone who went to the gym every day. Once this practice became a habit and lifestyle, he began tweaking it over time (for example, he started exercising for longer than five minutes). Eventually, his exercise and diet habits led to transformation.
Like physical transformation, spiritual transformation is the gradual reward of consistent habits. Even when you don’t immediately feel the effects of your Bible intake, you can be confident your spiritual fitness improves little by little each time you engage with God’s Word.
Consider four ways Bible intake parallels diet and exercise habits and why even our smallest efforts matter.
1. The First Two Minutes Are the Most Important
Clear notes the heaviest weight in the gym is the front door. The same is true of most habits: it’s not the habit itself, but starting the habit, that stops most people.
Clear encourages readers to replicate his friend’s minimalist approach to habit-building, even starting with two-minute routines (rather than five minutes) to make starting and replicating behaviors simple. (He calls this the 2-Minute Rule.)
If you don’t already have a rhythm of Bible reading, commit to reading for two minutes every day. Make daily reading as achievable as possible. By doing this consistently, you’ll become someone who reads the Bible every day. That’s a huge step. From there, you can tweak the habit as you wish. Clear observes, “A habit must be established before it can be improved.”
You cannot improve what you don’t already practice.
2. THe Most Rewarding Outcomes Are (Almost Always) Delayed
Clear notes that our outcomes are a “lagging measure of [our] habits.” We’re who we are today largely because of the habits we’ve built over the past few weeks, months, and years. It’s not what we’ve done most recently but most consistently that shapes us.
One workout or protein-rich meal won’t drastically strengthen your bones. Yet a consistent exercise routine and calcium, vitamin D, and protein intake over months and years will improve bone health significantly. Likewise, spiritual health is a lagging measure of what we train and feed on consistently. Bible reading isn’t only for the here and now but also for how it forms us over time.
Beyond the cumulative benefit of Bible reading, you’ll be surprised at how often God blesses you (and others through you) a few days or weeks after you read a certain passage.