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How to get people to read their Bibles every day

Imagine, if you will, a row of nine dominoes, all standing on end. Your goal is to knock all nine down, but you can only touch one. Which one do you push? The one on the end, right? In my opinion, “disciplined in daily life” is much like an “end” domino. If this trait falls, all the others will probably topple over as well.

Discipline often carries negative connotations, but when I speak of discipline, I have in mind primarily the discipline (or habit) of spending time every day praying to God and meditating on his Word. If we can teach people to spend time alone with God nearly every day, we have some hope of developing in them the other eight traits of a disciple. But if we are unable to help people develop this habit, it is unlikely that we will ever make biblical disciples.

Discipline is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of what it means to be a disciple. People often use the word to refer to “doing what I ought to do instead of what I want to do” or “doing what I should do, not what I really like doing.” But we are not trying to create people who read their Bible and pray even though they do not feel like it (though that may be an intermediate step). Our ultimate goal is to create people who feel like reading their Bible and praying. Disciple-making teachers seek to create people who pray whenever they want to…and want to quite regularly.

Biblical discipleship is all about the heart, about motives. It is about creating people of passion and desire. It is not about law and “should” and “ought to.” At times we must do one thing when we want to do another—that is responsibility. But that is not the heart and soul of Christian discipleship. That is the stuff of law, the stuff of the Old Covenant, the stuff of the Pharisees.

Disciple-making teachers do not merely present rules. They are fundamentally after a change of people’s hearts. They are out to create people who, as Augustine explained, love God, love others, and do whatever they want. Disciple-making teachers are out to create people who pray because they want to, who read the Bible when they feel like it and feel like it often, who serve as much as they want to and want to quite a bit. Disciplemaking teachers seek to create people who do all of this, not out of law or obligation, but out of their heart’s desire.

So how do you create people like this? How do you create people who want to pray, read their Bibles, serve, give, and love? One thing is certain. Guilt and law don’t work. Two thousand years of Old Testament history prove that beyond any doubt. Still, it seems we haven’t gotten the message. We think we can get people to do better by telling them what they should do and what they shouldn’t do. The Bible has a word for this.

Law.

Trust me, it doesn’t work. Giving people the notion that God will love them more if they read their Bibles is wrong, yet it happens all the time. Whether teachers say it explicitly or only allow people to jump to their own conclusions, it happens, and it is wrong. We should never use God’s love as a threat.

This is not a minor matter. It touches at the heart of the gospel. The gospel is about grace, about a God who loves us completely no matter what. Sometimes we find it too easy to preach a “grace-and” gospel—a little bit of grace and a little bit of law. But the gospel is all grace, nothing less and nothing more.

Even if we don’t preach a “grace-and” gospel, people may hear one anyway. The “grace-alone” gospel of the Bible is radical in its concept of salvation and in its concept of discipleship. Both are all about grace. Left to themselves, people often assume a grace-and gospel. So we must constantly and vigilantly teach otherwise.

We must teach the biblical view that people become slaves to sin (Romans 7:7-25). Slaves. If we understood and believed these verses, we would take more seriously the addicts when they say that they can’t stop. They want to change, but they can’t. I am not referring merely to alcohol, drugs, or other common addictions. All sin is addictive, which means that people cannot stop. They are powerless to stop.

If we truly understand this, we will stop giving platitudes about how people who are sinning simply need to quit. Telling people they are sinning and need to quit simply will not work.

Pressuring people to follow specific Bible-reading or spiritual-discipline programs won’t produce long-term change, either. Specific programs may help for a while, but they are crutches. There’s nothing wrong with crutches when we need them, but we shouldn’t confuse walking with crutches with real walking.

For example, challenging people to read one chapter of Proverbs each day for a month or to read through the entire Bible in a year may be a useful way to help them develop the habit of reading their Bibles regularly. But we must remember that these programs are crutches. Our goal should be to help people fall in love with the Word, not with the crutches.

If we can’t use law to bully people into being disciplined whether they feel like it or not, and we can’t rely on programs for long-term change, how can we create people who are disciplined in their daily lives?