Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - 12 Ways to Kill Your Bible Reading Resolution in 2021

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

Most Christians want more time with God. The best way to do that? Making a habit of reading the Bible. The problem is that most Christians also find building this habit incredibly challenging. In this episode, we look at 12 common mistakes people make when making a resolution to read the Bible. To learn more, visit us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook) @TenMinuteBibleTalks Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. My name is Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to invite you to read the gospel of Mark with us beginning in January. I love the first of the year because I'm the kind of person that likes to set new goals. I don't tell people about them because I often fail on my goals, but I like to do it. And sometimes I even succeed. And one of the things I always want to do is, grow in my reading of the Bible. And one of the ways that I have a better shot at succeeding is if I do it with other people. So is there somebody in your live friend, coworker neighbor, I don't know, who you would like to invite to read the Bible along with you? And not even the whole Bible, just the Gospel of Mark. We've got a great little study guide that we are including a link to in the show notes. And I think you'll really benefit from going through that study guide to

help you understand what's happening in the Gospel of Mark. Anyway, we'd love for you to do it. join us in that if you are open to it. And all that kicks off at the first of January. So let's jump into today's episode. Hey, welcome to 2021. I hope you're as excited to get rid of 2020 as we are. They are. We all are. Everybody's ready to move on. And we're all hoping that this is a far better year. And one of the ways you can make it a better year is to develop a habit of reading your Bible. Maybe you've already noticed that we are working through the gospel of Mark and Tim in at Bible Talks, and maybe you're just able to keep up with those podcasts. If that's the case, fantastic.

But if you're able to take another step toward God, another step in your faith, maybe you could read through the gospel of Mark on your own. In the show notes, we'll have a link to our Mark study guide, and it will make it as easy as possible, and that will make it as easy as we can to read through Mark with us. But today we just want to take a few minutes to acknowledge that this is harder for some of us than others to be consistent in our Bible reading. Now, you know me, I'm the public school kid. I have all the same struggles you do. But then there is private school Patrick, who I'm sure has no problem consistently reading his Bible. What say you, private school? Well, like, everybody has

different issues in their faith. One thing I've never found really challenging is reading my Bible consistently. That's not to say I've read the Bible every day of my life since I became a Christian. That would be ridiculous. And I, like anybody else, have had moments where it's been a little more challenging, but it's not the main challenge that I have. I have other challenges. Like, I struggle to want to work out consistently, which doesn't seem to be a problem for you, public school kid. That's right, us public school kids. Oh, okay. You take care of the body, but not the mind. Well, I'm just saying that we're not quite as academic and highfalutin. All right, so here we go. We are going to walk through kind of briskly 12 mistakes that we

made, while I've made, we're going to walk through 12 mistakes that I've made when I've tried to make a habit out of reading my Bible in a new year. So here we go. First one up. One mistake we make is that we have the wrong focus. That we start with a goal, hey, I want to read through my Bible this year instead of a habit change. One thing that James Clear says in his book, Atomic Habits, is that if we set up the right system, the goal will take care of itself. Which leads naturally to a second mistake. You've got the wrong plan. You need to know exactly what you are planning on doing when you read your Bible. So a great way of doing this is if you drink coffee like I do every morning, make a plan before you go to sleep. In fact, this sounds really

weird, but if you write it down, you will be 70% more likely, I didn't even just make that number up, that's a real number. You'll be 70% more likely to follow through on your plan. But you need a good plan. So if you drink coffee, put your Bible next to your coffee so that you'll be reminded when you get your coffee, write out your plan. Once I drink my coffee, I am going to read my Bible for five minutes or however long it is that you want to do. But the key part is you have to have a plan. If you just think in your head, oh, I hope, I hope, I hope that I'm going to do this and think that somehow magically it's going to happen, I promise you that day will never come. Yeah, just think about running a marathon or saving for retirement. Those are great goals, but that's not the important thing.

The important thing is to have a plan that will help you reach your goal. So you want to read the Bible more? You want to read through it in a year? Great. But do you have a plan to get you there? The next mistake would be having the wrong expectations. I've talked to a lot of people who say, you know what, I'm going to read my Bible every day this week. I'm going to get into a habit, and I'm going to read my Bible for 30 minutes every single time. And guess what? By day two, they missed the mark, and then by day three, they think, well, I'm already a failure, and by day four, the habit hasn't even begun to develop. So don't have expectations of having this big, long, quiet time with God. Instead, give yourself different expectations. Set really short

expectations. Tell yourself, you know what, I'm going to read for maybe three times a week, and I'm only going to read for five to ten minutes. And when you fall short, don't get disappointed and let that defeat you. Yeah, and I might even suggest, instead of having a time frame, just have maybe a number of chapters. I want to read one chapter today. Or I want to read one chapter of Mark and one Psalm. Make it very definable, very doable. Another mistake is that we have wrong aspirations. So you want to read through your Bible in a year? Okay, that's great, but that's so indefinite. How am I going to accomplish that? What if you took a next step and said, really what I want to do this year is I want to read my Bible five times a week? That's how I'm going to

read through my Bible this year is I'm going to commit to a certain number of chapters five times a week or whatever the number it is that you pick. These, of course, are just examples. But I think even better than that would be to say that I'm not really committed to reading my Bible as an end result. What I'm really committed to is developing a closer walk with God and reading my Bible is a means to develop that deeper relationship with Jesus. This is one of the mistakes I make all the time where reading the Bible just becomes something I do because I said I was going to do it and I get determined to keep my goal and it becomes more about my pride than anything. It's possible for me to read my Bible out of pride instead of really wanting a deeper relationship with God. Another mistake is yet another wrong expectation. And it relates

to what you just said. Sometimes we expect every time we read our Bible to be this amazing steakhouse dinner. You're sitting down. You've got your twice-baked potato. You're perfectly rare filet or ribbi or brussels sprouts yeah you've got some spicy brussels they're not normal brussels those things got some korean barbecue brussels that's what you expect your bible reading to be every single time and guess what reading your bible isn't like going to a steakhouse it's like going to breakfast can you remember what you ate for breakfast yesterday trick question i didn't eat breakfast yesterday oh patrick is in it fasting we'll see if i still am but the time this the gears.

Is this an end of 2020 resolution? Yeah, it's an end of 2020 resolution, which is when we're still recording. Reading your Bible is like eating breakfast in the sense that you never remember what you ate for breakfast, at least most days, but it still nourishes you. It gives you what you need to get through the day, to have the energy to do everything that you need to do. Reading your Bible, developing a relationship with God is a lot like this. It's like having a conversation with your spouse every day.

You might not remember what you talked about, but if you just stopped talking to them for weeks on end, it's going to wreck your relationship. So don't expect a steak dinner. Expect breakfast. Some days, you might have a steak dinner, quiet time, a steak dinner, time with God. But for the most part, it's going to be ordinary. It's going to be every day. And that's not disappointing. That's exactly what your soul needs. Okay, another mistake that we commonly make is we try to do these Bible resolutions on our own. And when I do things on my own, I'm much more likely to fail. When I do it with other people, there's a far better chance that I'll succeed. So if I try to do something, imagine you're Patrick and you're trying

to intermittently fast, but your wife, hypothetically, is having these delicious breakfasts. And you'd be sitting there going, gosh, I want that too. This is so hard to watch you eat while I'm trying to not eat. That would be so twisted. But if she's doing it with you, then you feel like we're in this together. Yeah. But then you'll have to make one or two really awesome meals every single time. So think about if you're running a marathon and you want to train. What's the thing that's going to get me out of my bed on a cold morning? Is it my own personal motivation? Or is it the fact that my friend is waiting for me at the trail? Well, it's probably that someone is holding me accountable. So if you do this in a group, grab a friend, person in your small group, person at work, that doesn't matter.

Just grab a friend and read Mark together. You're far more likely to succeed. Another mistake is reading the wrong version of the Bible. Maybe you grew up in a tradition where you only read the King James version. I didn't know this was a thing, by the way, but it's very much so a thing. I was doing a wedding once. It was at this old church, and the Bible reader came up and read the Bible that was right there on the pulpit, which happened to be a King James version. And I asked the person who ran the church, hey, do you have any other Bibles here? Because we need something we can understand. And I heard an audible gasp. I go, well, I did not mean to offend the authorized version here. Now, I'm saying this jokingly because if it's hard to understand the King James version being read inside of a wedding, how much more so when you're just trying to do it by yourself as a quiet time? Pick a good version of the Bible that's actually understandable. I love the NIV. The ESV is a little more difficult to understand. I might just start with the NIV if you're getting into this.

I love the audio Bible as well. So there's an app, the Bible app, the U-V-V-V-V-V-V-V, and it has all these free audio Bibles that you can listen to on there. This is one you want to download, the NIVUK, because it has this British guy. He is an amazing reader. He reads everything perfectly. But find a Bible or an audio reader that actually makes sense to you, that you aren't just struggling to understand what the words mean. Don't start with a difficult-to-read Bible translation. People ask me what the best version of the Bible for them to get is, and I tell them it's an easy question to answer. and the best version of the Bible is the one you read.

So you can have all these versions and you can think, well, this one was translated by these people or this is the one my church uses. Who cares? The best one is the one that you actually pick up and will read. I would throw out even the new living translation as super readable. So let's touch back on a mistake that we kind of mentioned earlier. I think we can take another look at it from a little bit different angle, and that is our motivation. You can read the Bible for their wrong reasons, or you can just read the Bible for reasons that maybe aren't morally wrong, but they're not going to keep you going.

For example, I think obligation and duty and guilt, they're not always all bad. There are times we should feel guilty, and there are things we should do because we're obligated. I just don't think it's going to carry you that far through your Bible reading. So I think the motivation has to be something more about God. I want to learn about God. I want to develop a relationship with Him. Or I need to read my Bible because I've got to figure out how to keep following Jesus through this challenge that I'm facing. That life is hard and I need God's promises.

I want to know what the good life is that Jesus promised. Jesus is this incredible teacher. He's the teacher that people throughout the centuries have looked up to and here all of his teaching is in this book. and I need that teaching for my life. If your need drives you to the Bible, you're much more likely to make it than if it's something you're just doing because somebody told you you were supposed to. And I think that if you have the right motivation, you are a lot more likely to end up looking for the right things. See, one of the easy mistakes to make is looking for all the wrong things. I know some people who go to the Bible, they're looking for some spiritual tingles maybe. Others who go to the Bible.

spiritual tingles. You know, just a little... Is that like Christian mingle? Yeah, I think that happens on Christian mingle as well. Something like that. No, that's what some people go for. Other people go just to get some head knowledge, maybe. I think that if you are motivated to deepen your relationship with God, to deepen your love for him, then you should, if you really want to know God, you should be wanting God to shape you.

And so you should be looking in the Bible for application. You should be reading the Bible looking for it to actually. change your heart, your mind, your behaviors. And this is one of the reasons why we put our little Bible study together, by the way, is because it brings every single passage to a application point. You will find this. If you actually apply the Bible to your life every single time you read it, you will find reading it much easier. There's something about getting a takeaway from the Bible that makes you more motivated to show back up the next morning. If you think that reading your Bible more in 2021 is going to be easy, well, that's another mistake.

To be honest, it's going to be difficult because changing our habits is always hard. At least it is for me. Forming bad habits, somehow that comes naturally to me. But changing those habits and trying to form good habits, gosh, it's always tough in every single area of my life. And this isn't going to be any different. First, we have a spiritual enemy out there who wants to sabotage us. But I think my biggest enemy is my own sinful nature.

So one of the wise things you can do is just to ask. yourself, if this fails, in other words, if we get to the end of 2021 and I haven't read my Bible anymore than I did in 2020, if I try to read Mark with you guys and it didn't work, why do you think it won't work? Try to foresee the problems that might come. Now, if you're sitting there, you might be thinking, well, I could see that my phone would keep me from doing this because it will cause me to get distracted. If that's you, and it probably is because it's probably all of us, then maybe it's not smart to try to read your Bible on your phone every morning because it's just holding a big major distraction. Maybe you need to put your phone in another room.

If you look at and go, well, it's busyness. What are you going to do to overcome that? Maybe you need to start your day with your Bible reading because you know that once your day gets going, it'll be almost impossible to find time. Or if you're a parent of young kids, kids interrupting you, that's going to be a huge thing. Okay, so what am I going to do? Is it to be during their nap time, or maybe I read my Bible with my kids and turn it into a family thing. I don't know. You just have to somehow—well, you don't buy that? I've got young kids. I've got a four-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old. They're not private school kids like you?

No, we don't have family devotions. I mean, my one-and-half-year-old doesn't speak English yet, so there's not much hope there. Well, okay. So you— But here's my point. I have figured something out in the midst of this, which is— Ignore your kids. I've seen you. I'm saying this because I know a lot of parents. who somehow feel guilty when they're doing anything and they're not paying attention to their children at all moments, or they're not refereeing their little fights that they're having, or they're not entertaining their kid with something. Well, this is probably a broader parenting point of you've got to

help your kids become independent players who can manage on their own. The smaller point here is you can do that in your own Bible reading. I try to read my Bible before my kids get up, but sometimes that doesn't work out. Sometimes they wake up earlier than I wanted them to, and it looks like letting them sit there and play and sometimes cry because, yeah, Daddy's got to read his Bible. And maybe they're going to go to a psychologist one day and said, well, I wept every morning while my dad read his Bible. But I hope what they might say is I realize that my dad loved God more than he loved my mom, more than he loved himself, more than he loved me. And that gave me a deep sense of security because I knew that he committed his life to someone and something that was going to make him a far better dad and a far better

member of our family than he would have been otherwise. Yeah, that's really powerful, Patrick. I'm glad you said that, and it takes us to another mistake, and that is what a successful day looks like. I'm wired to think a successful day means accomplishing a lot of things, checking off my to-do list. It's just one of the curses of being in my head. That's how I tend to define success. But what if you define success this way? What if you said the best thing I can do with my day is walk with God? What my family needs from me is for me to walk with God.

The best gift I can give my roommates or my coworkers or my spouse or my kids or whoever it is, the best thing I can give them is for me to spend a few minutes praying, reading my Bible, and throughout my day walking with Jesus. I'm addicted to busyness. I'm addicted to adrenaline. That's what I love to do. And it's an addiction just like drugs or alcohol or shopping or junk food, sugar, whatever. And if you're addicted to busyness, you think the best thing,

you can do with your day is to accomplish a lot of things. I just think that's really wrong, and it's a mistake that I continue to make, but am trying not to. The best thing I can give anyone in my life is for me to walk with Jesus. The last mistake, and this might be the biggest possible mistake that any of us could make, especially if you are good at making resolutions, which is, or maybe bad, having the wrong confidence. If your sense of confidence comes from your own ability, there's only two possible routes you will go. You will either succeed and become proud, which means that your Bible reading has not accomplished much worthy in your life, or you will fail and you'll beat yourself up and think, I can't do this, I will never be a Bible reader. It's time for me to give up.

You should not look for confidence in yourself because you and yourself don't have the ability to give yourself the strength to do this thing. You know who does have the strength? Jesus. Jesus is the one who gives us the grace, the mercy, the ability at times to wake up and get going that we need to actually read our Bibles. When you get to the end of your life and you're standing before God and you look back on the days where you were faithful and you look back on the times where you spent time with him and his word, I don't think you're going to say, wow, God, I did a really good job. I'm so glad I did that. Aren't you thankful too, God? I think you're going to look at God and say, God, you were so gracious to me. Thank you for giving me a desire that I didn't have. Thank you for giving me the willpower that I didn't have. So if you're looking at making a habit of Bible reading and maybe you failed a dozen different times in this or more,

don't let that knock you down because your confidence was never in yourself. Your confidence should be in Jesus and His goodness, his grace, and his mercy to help you find time with him on a regular basis. Patrick was talking to you and me, not himself, because he always reads his Bible. But I think that was helpful for me to hear that it's okay to falter because I falter a lot. Just get back up. It's not so much where you are as much as the direction they are heading. Again, we have a link in the show notes to our Mark Bible reading guide. That's where I'd start.

Let's do it together. Listen to the podcast. Share this with other people. Invite them to read the Bible along with you. We'll be praying for you and you be praying for us too, okay? Hey, quick reminder that, like I said, at the beginning of the episode, we are going to be reading through the gospel of Mark beginning in January. So download the study guide. You'll find the link in the show notes.

Think about who you could invite to do it with you and maybe even invite them to listen to the podcast with you. Hope you'll take advantage of this. Take care. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could show. share this podcast with.

Texting an episode to a friend or family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.