One obstacle to studying the Bible is time.

There are so many questions and issues to explore in the Bible. Don’t you need hours to comb through the Bible, commentaries, and dictionaries?

As an Old Testament scholar, I want to say, “Yes!” You should spend hours studying the Bible. But I’m also pragmatic. Most people don’t have the time or bandwidth in their stage of life to study the Bible for hours at a time.

So, instead of feeling guilty or throwing in the Bible study towel altogether, you should develop a Bible study routine that fits into your schedule.

In this blog post, I’m going to identify some principles you can use to develop a short Bible study routine that will help you dig deeper into the Bible. You can use the principles I explain below to study for whatever duration fits with your schedule.

Principle #1: Relax.

Take some of the pressure off yourself. Studying the Bible is not a race. It’s a journey. And each person’s journey is unique.

You don’t need to accomplish any particular task on any specific day. Take each passage or topic you study one day at a time. The repetition of studying the Bible stretched out over weeks, months, and years will pay huge dividends. As with learning a language, consistent study is better than one day of extraordinary effort with no follow-up.

String together a bunch of days studying the Bible ten minutes at a time and you’ll be surprised at how much you discover.

Principle #2: Identify Your Goal

What are you trying to do when you study the Bible?

That’s an important question to answer. Do you want to get a survey of the whole Bible? Is there a specific topic you find intriguing? Are you trying to understand a specific passage?

If you want to study effectively in a limited amount of time, you need to know exactly what you are trying to accomplish. As you’ll discover, there are unlimited rabbit holes you could pursue when studying the Bible. Having a clear goal in mind will help immensely.

Principle #3: Make a Plan

You can’t accomplish every aspect of studying the Bible in each brief session. Instead, you should map out the tasks you need to accomplish and assign them to specific days, or place them on a checklist.

For example, when you study one passage of Scripture, you will need to know something about the passage’s literary, historical, and cultural contexts. You can create a tentative schedule for studying each of these elements. Focus your sessions on one of these topics until you’ve accomplished what you need to accomplish to move on to the next issue. Then rinse and repeat.

You may devote four or five days to exploring a passage’s historical context. Great! Allow yourself the appropriate amount of time to cover it fully. Remember. . . studying the Bible is not a race.

Principle #4: Keep a notebook.

Whether you are digitally inclined or technologically impaired, find a note-taking system that you can use to keep track of your study. A simple spiral-bound notebook or a complex digital second brain system makes no difference.

You just need a space where you can record your notes, observations, and questions. And you need to be able to return to that space day after day.

Don’t stress about your organizational structure or the tidiness of your notes. You can always go back and organize your thoughts if you want. Simply develop a habit of taking notes on what you study. This process will help you remember what you learned in previous sessions.

Conclusion

These principles are meant to help you develop your own routine. As long as you recognize that studying the Bible is a journey and not a race, you’ll be fine. You might even learn to enjoy the process.

I use each of these principles when I put together the monthly Bible Study Challenges I host. Here’s how I incorporate each one:

Principle #1: Relax

When a book is short, I might try to work through the whole thing in a month’s challenge. At other times, a challenge only covers a small section of Scripture. For example, the Bible Study Challenge on the Gospel of Mark only explored the first two chapters. The challenge on Lament looked at just three psalms.

There’s no right or wrong amount of the Bible to cover. We just explore what we explore and find contentment with that.

Principle #2: Identify the goal.

Each month, I establish a clear goal for the challenge. I pick a book, topic, or theme to study.

Principle #3: Make a Plan

Each Bible Study Challenge follows a particular plan intended to help you understand the book, theme, or topic by the end of the month.

Principle #4: Keep a notebook

Each day of the challenge includes a worksheet you can copy to your own Google Drive or print out and keep in a binder. At the end of the month, I send all the worksheets as a single PDF workbook. The goal is to help you keep your notes together.

At the end of the day, consistency in Bible Study is the primary ingredient for developing a Bible Study habit. If you stick with it, you will see huge dividends over time. Your ability to understand the Bible will deepen as you go.