How Reading the Bible Daily Changed My Life

Cover photo: taken on a Sunday afternoon just after recording myself making flatbread for Yeshua, something I return to often in my devotion.

Reading the Bible every day changed my life.

I know how that sounds, but stay with me. It has genuinely, and very quietly, rearranged the entire architecture of my life.

Not in the ways I expected, and not in small, tidy ways. In ways that moved me across the country, that shifted things in my legal career, that called me to build this blog and more things outside my comfort zone, and that opened a kind of spiritual intimacy that I honestly did not know was available to me as a person walking this earth.

Here is all of it — how I read Scripture, what it opened in my relationship with God and Yeshua, and why reading it for yourself changes everything.

Part I

How I approached it

Here’s how it actually looked day to day. Since this was my first time reading the Bible from beginning to end, I wanted to start at the beginning and continue in the order events actually occurred. So I followed a 365-day chronological reading plan through YouVersion.

I did not finish in 365 days, and I did not pressure myself to. That was never really the point. I read daily, or close to it, but some days I only made it through part of the scheduled reading. Some days I didn't read at all. That was okay (though I now understand how essential it is to stay in the Word daily).

What mattered most to me was the way I was reading it. I chose slow consumption over completion. If a verse cracked something open in me, I would put the plan down and simply sit with that one thing. That was the reading for the day. No rush. No guilt. Just presence. And somewhere along the way, Psalm 27:4 became mine:

One thing I ask from the LORD, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.

What made this practice sustainable was the ritual I built around it. I gave my time with Scripture a real home. For me, that space was my daily bath, quiet and uninterrupted. But it doesn't have to look like that. Some people read first thing in the morning before the day begins. Some read in bed at night. What matters is that you give it a consistent, protected space and make it something you genuinely look forward to. I made it beautiful on purpose. That made all the difference.

There is something powerful about building a ritual around your time with God. It signals to yourself — and to Him — that this time is set apart. Non-negotiable. Sacred. My ritual became something I protected fiercely because it held my time with Scripture. When you return to the same space, at the same time, in the same way, your mind and your spirit begin to arrive there before you do. The ritual becomes an invitation.

And it is okay to make it enjoyable. In fact, I think you have to. Discipline alone will not carry you through the Bible. Delight will. When you genuinely look forward to the time, you protect it differently. You show up differently. And you receive it differently. Scripture itself tells us that His Word is sweeter than honey. Let it be that for you.

Part II

What it opened in my relationship with God and Yeshua

Reading the Bible for myself gave me a picture of God and Yeshua I never had before. Not the version filtered through sermons or passed down through other people's interpretations, or the renderings of Yeshua that I saw on screen in movies and television. The Bible gave me the full and textured picture that only comes from sitting with the text yourself.

I saw how people communicated with God. How they negotiated with Him, how they prayed, what moved Him and what didn't. I saw Yeshua navigating challenges from the community around Him, what reached Him and what didn't. In Matthew 8, a leper approaches Him and says if you are willing, you can make me clean. It almost sounds like a challenge. Yeshua responds: I am willing. Three words. No hesitation, no condition, no deliberation. Just immediate, unhesitating compassion. Those three words were so beautiful to me when I first read them.

And then there are the moments where Yeshua reads almost like a military commander gathering His disciples, laying out the mission, instructing them on how to move through towns, how to heal the sick, how to perform miracles on their own, what to watch out for. The strategy, the intentionality, the precision of it. I read those passages and I look at the kingdom as it exists today and I just marvel. It came from those rooms. Those conversations. His focus. His love.

All of this rich context changed so much in my understanding of God and Yeshua. And through the stories, I began to know them. Really know them. I began to understand their character in a way that was unavailable to me before. You cannot get this secondhand. You have to read it yourself.

Beyond the knowledge, something shifted spiritually. My relationship with both God and Yeshua has grown in ways I struggle to put into words. I am closer to them now, in understanding, yes, but also in the spirit. That closeness is the greatest thing this practice has given me.

Part III

Why you have to read it for yourself

I want to be honest with you about something. I did not grow up reading the Bible. I came to it as an adult, on my own, for the first time, and I found it deeply, sincerely enjoyable.

What you receive from sermons, Bible studies, and pop culture renderings of these stories is real — but it is partial. Someone else has already filtered it for you. They have chosen what to emphasize, what to summarize, what to leave out. And so much gets left out.

When you sit down with the text yourself, you encounter the full richness of it. The complexity of the characters. The texture of the language. The details that never make it into a Sunday message — some of which will genuinely make you go ‘huh?’. I found so much humor in the Bible. There is drama and tragedy, tenderness, and moments of breathtaking beauty. There are stories you think you know that turn out to be nothing like what you were told. You start to see how the whole story holds together, and how threads laid down in Genesis are still unraveling thousands of years later. It is truly breathtaking.

The Bible is, without qualification, the greatest book (or piece of technology) our species has ever produced. And it is unquestionably divine.

Proverbs 25:2 says:

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to search it out.

God has hidden things in Scripture that are meant specifically for you. Things that can only be uncovered by you, in the way that only you can receive them. That is the invitation extended to every one of us. And what you find there, in your own time, in your own searching, will be yours alone. No sermon can deliver it. No secondhand account can replicate it. It is waiting for you on the page.

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If you have been curious about starting your own daily reading practice, I hope this encourages you. You do not have to be perfect at it. You just have to begin.