You Really Can Do This!
Join me in reading the Bible from cover to cover this year.
Make 2025 the year you read the Bible from cover to cover.
I’m not kidding.
There are so many reasons why the Bible is worth reading—but you’ll never discover them until you actually start to read it.
One thing that’s easy to do in our age of easy-believism, “my truth” and “your truth,” and “anything goes” is this: Making up your own religion based on what sounds good to you at the time and what fits your cultural preferences.
It’s kind of like choosing to follow a new diet—until it becomes inconvenient. When a pan of hot brownies presents itself, you’ll find reasons to justify why it makes perfect sense to consume half the pan—afterall, you’ve worked out and watched what you ate all week. Just as you won’t lose weight with this approach, making up your own religion will fall flat when you find yourself in a situation where you need God’s help.
It’s tempting to follow Jesus based on our own preconceived notions, politics, culture, and preferences, but if you’re doing that, you’re denying yourself from ever truly knowing God. You see, God is real, and the more you live your life as if you believe He’s real, the more He reveals the truth of His existence to you. Reading God’s Word will help you to see His character across time in a variety of situations. It will also help you recognize how much He earnestly loves His people—including you. Quite simply, it will change you.
On the flip side, if you ignore God or belittle what He says, He has no reason to trust you with His wisdom or His presence.
There are many ways you can read the Bible.
Approach #1: Read Randomly
You can randomly plop open the pages and see where your eyes happen to land and accept that as “your word for the day.” That works well until your word for the day involves a story about incest, rape, or one of the other stories of the Bible for “mature audiences.” The Bible contains quite a few of those because it’s a story about humanity and how people draw close to God—then fall away—then draw close again—then fall away. When they draw close, things usually go well. When they fall away, that’s generally when the bad things happen.
Approach #2: One Book at a Time
Another approach is to choose a book and read it—then move to the next book that piques your interest. This is also good, but if you do this forever, you will not have a full picture of the entire story of the Bible.
Approach #3: Read the Entire Bible
Or, you can decide this is going to be the year you’ll read the entire Bible. It’s honestly not very hard, and most plans break it down to about 15 minutes of reading a day. Many online plans will even read the Scriptures to you.
Daily Audio Bible Plan
When we moved to Tennessee in 2017, I began to listen to the Daily Audio Bible podcast on my daily commute to work. Each day, Brian, the host, reads a portion of the Old Testament, the New Testament, a Psalm, and a Proverb. At the end, he records prayer requests from people across the world. Listening to him read filled my morning drive, and the community of believers at the end of each podcast made me feel not-so-alone as I adjusted to life in a new part of the country.
World Outreach Church’s Plan
My church has read the entire Bible together each year for many years. Every January, they issue a new Bible reading plan, and it’s available on our app, which will even read the passages to you. Our pastor frequently takes a sermon to make the more challenging books easier to navigate (like this sermon on Leviticus), and every week it seems someone I’m talking to will reference a recent passage we’ve read. Not only are we learning God’s Word together on Sundays, but we’re delving into it each day on our own. The depth and growth this brings to a community truly surprises me.
What To Do When You Miss a Day, a Week, or more
The other key to reading my entire Bible came to me through one of my babysitters, many years ago. It must’ve been the beginning of the year because we were talking about this exact same topic—reading the Bible in a year. I told her I always started the year with good intentions, but would find myself missing a day, and then maybe a week, and then who can catch up after that?
“I had that problem, too,” She said. “But my Dad told me just to start on the day we’re on—you’ll probably catch up on what you missed during a future year, anyway!”
Even though that concept wrangled my “I have to do everything perfect” tendencies, it was wise advise—and so when I tell you this is my seventh time reading through the entire Bible, you can add in the words “give or take a few chapters, here and there.”
Will You Join Me?
Today, I invite you to join me in reading through the entire Bible with me. Please comment if you’ll come along for the ride. And if you’ve read the entire Bible before, drop a comment to tell us something you’ve learned.
Remember, this plan is not about being perfect—it’s about taking time to get to know God better. That will happen, whether you read your Bible early in the morning at the kitchen table or listen to it in the spare moments of your day while you’re in traffic. When you take time to seek God, He will be faithful to honor your efforts. I look forward to hearing what truths He reveals to you!
You can find the two plans I mentioned here:
Hey Susan! I'm reading through a chronological plan called the Bible Recap. This will be my fourth time through.
I am Susan! I think it's my 10th year , but I never stop being amazed or learning something new. Such a great article and invitation.