The Value of Daily

“And day by day, from the first day to the last day, he read from the Book of the Law of God.” – Nehemiah 8:18

Why read the Bible daily? Why, for example, ration out Proverbs verse-by-verse over the course of a year, as our plan does, when we could sit down and read the entire book in a matter of hours? Why not just read it in occasional chunks?

Put simply, this is a case where efficiency and productivity are not the same thing. There is a kind of growth that can only happen when we read the Bible inefficiently, one day at a time, every single day, and it’s as mysterious and mundane as our need to eat every day. There’s nothing wrong with occasional special meals, but the fact remains that our bodies are created to require food daily—if we go too long without that, we become weak and sick. The same thing is inescapably true of our spiritual lives. As Dean said in the sermon last September that launched this reading plan, “We may not be able to remember what we had for breakfast, but here we are—it sustains us.” It fills our tanks, and “when the storm hits, all that you’ve got is already in the tank.” You cannot grow as a Christian, he said, without regular Bible reading—it just doesn’t happen.

The truth is, most of us have consumeristic tendencies when it comes to reading the Bible. We want to be fed by someone else. We want it to be easy and convenient, tailored to our needs, like a fast-food drive-through. But reading the Bible daily on our own teaches us to self-feed. It allows us to encounter God on our own and not through the spiritual lives of others, and this over time produces a slow but sure growth that cannot escape notice. “When you miss your devotions one day,” James Cordeiro writes, “you notice. When you miss them two days, your spouse and kids notice. And when you miss them three days, the world notices.”

The point of my life when I was challenged to take this seriously was when I started learning about the lives of Christians like Hudson Taylor, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Jonathan Edwards, Amy Carmichael, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon, George Whitefield, William Tyndale, George Mueller, Adoniram Judson, William Wilberforce, John Bunyan, Martin Luther, William Cowper, David Brainerd: the one thing all of these people had in common was daily time with God, both in Scripture and in prayer, often extensively. “I have so much to do today,” said Martin Luther, “that I must spend at least three hours in prayer.” Do I take my spiritual growth seriously? Then I must read God’s word, day by day, from the first day to the last. 

Manna For The Day

“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not.” – Exodus 16:4

“And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” – Deuteronomy 8:3

“Give us this day our daily bread.” – Matthew 6:11

For forty years, the Israelites went to bed six days out of the week with their stomachs full and their cupboards empty. Can you imagine that? Never being able to keep more than what you finish that day? Not having any other way of getting anything to eat? This is so absurdly outside our own experience that it requires some imagination, but I feel like a few things would become clear. One’s utter dependence on God for daily survival. God’s unfailing, individually-tailored, provision (verse 18 in particular is magical, particularly for anyone who has tried to estimate food amounts for large groups).

The manna itself is magical. The word “manna” literally means “what is it?” The first time the Israelites saw it, they didn’t know what to do with it, a scene which strikes me as comical. It looked like coriander seed, the seed of the cilantro plant; white, fine as frost, tasting like honey wafers. 

God provides his people with something completely novel, that vanishes by the day, to illustrate the spiritual truth that we need sustenance from the Word that only he can provide—it can come from nowhere else—and that it comes in a daily portion. Have you ever wondered why it’s important to read the Bible every day? Why not just read the entire weeks’ worth at once? For the same reason, I suppose, that we can’t only eat once a week. Spiritual growth is like physical growth: life, change, depends on regular daily intake. The word is meant to be lived in and meditated upon, and that just doesn’t happen if your intake is limited to the occasional binge. 

As James Cordeiro writes, “When you miss your devotions one day, you notice. When you miss them two days, your spouse and kids notice. And when you miss them three days, the world notices.” The more we read daily, the more we realize that we really do depend on the Word to give us wisdom, perspective, strength for that day. And when we read with the expectation that God will provide, that he can speak to us through a verse from that day’s reading, we often find that he does. 

There is also a kind of lived-out faith and freedom in this daily rhythm. There is the sweetness of knowing God desires me to come to him each day, that Jesus taught us to ask for what we need this way. If I was reading to efficiently canvass content, I wouldn’t do it like this, but the less I read the Bible like a textbook, the more I read it like a love letter, the slower I go, the more constantly I want to savor it. And by giving me only enough for each day, God is giving me permission not to worry about the future. He is extending an invitation to live by faith. As Ian Duguid writes, “God has not promised to give us the grace to face all of the desperate situations that we might imagine finding ourselves in. He has promised to sustain us only in the ones that he actually brings us into. He therefore doesn’t promise that we will imagine how we could go through the fire for his sake, but he does promise that if he leads us through the fire, he will give us sufficient grace at that time. Like manna, grace is not something that can be stored up for later use; each day receives its own supply.”