My sophomore year of high school, I decided I would read my Bible every day. I don’t remember being prompted from any sort of spiritual conviction. Mostly, I just noticed my Bible had a daily reading calendar in the front and I kind of took it as a challenge. The calendar had readings in Genesis and Matthew starting on January 1. I started reading sometime in February and took a few weeks to catch up.

In the almost 7 years since then, I’ve read my Bible on the same schedule, though I’ve regularly gotten behind and had to catch up again. This last fall, I was still in Jeremiah and Hebrews instead of Ezekiel and 1 John, and I didn’t catch up again till past New Years.

The weird thing for me is that, even though I’ve proven it’s not easy to make daily reading a habit, it can pretty quickly feel routine. Just doing my regular thing–reading my Bible like a good Christian should.

While I’m glad I’ve read my Bible consistently, doing it largely out of self-satisfaction at accomplishing something isn’t the best way to grow. For someone who claims to follow Him, shouldn’t becoming more Christlike involve learning something?

This year, I think I’m going to make an effort to ponder, cross-check, and try to get more out of daily reading than I have before. When I notice something new, I’ll post it here. To start with, I read this this morning:

Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’” But Pharaoh said, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover, I will not let Israel go.”        – Exodus 5:1-2, NKJV

Which reminded me of something I read just the day before:

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”        – Exodus 3:14

I like to call my morning Bible reading my “daily dose of Jesus.” I hope I get better at doing this than I am at taking my vitamin.