Posted on June 8, 2026 by Rev. Jonathan Conner
Godly Living
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Christianity, as we detailed in Part 1: Worship, is something you do, something we should perhaps train ourselves to think of as a verb. We captured this truth like this: Salvation is Christ’s work, which we receive by faith. Christianity is our work, which we do in word and deed. And the doing of the faith reinforces the faith.
The church has captured this in the pithy Latin phrase lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of praying is the law of believing). The way the church prays and worships, the actions of the faith, not only reveals what the church believes, but also shapes what the church believes. So, what we believe informs our actions, and our actions shape and reinforce our beliefs.
In Part 1 we discussed the action of worship and the essential nature of the gathering of the gathered[1] to receive God’s gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation. In this article we turn to the action of reading our Bibles. Before we lay out practical ways to hone the habit of Bible reading, we first need to appreciate how critical this action is.
Our minds are wired to anticipate, to desire, to want. Our brains actually have a neurotransmitter called dopamine that powers this. I like to think of this super-powered chemical as the anticipation chemical.
Let me give you an image: Think back to Christmas (either Christmas 2025 or a Christmas from your childhood). In most homes, families wrap gifts. Sometimes they place those gifts under a Christmas tree in advance of Christmas. Why do people do this? Why don’t they skip the gift wrap and just hand out the gifts? Yes, the wrapping marks the gifts and the occasion as special, but there’s more. The special wrapping builds anticipation. It builds desire and longing. And that focuses our energy and attention on Christmas.
Or take another example: Parents are trying to get their young children to eat their vegetables. If there’s dessert, what do they often say? “If you want dessert, you need to eat your _________.” Obviously, vegetables! What’s happening here? The parents might not realize it, but they are triggering the dopamine response, building anticipation, to motivate their children. Dopamine motivates us. It moves us to take action toward something we perceive as pleasurable or rewarding, even if it requires doing a hard thing to get it.
This is regularly manipulated by advertisers, digital game developers, social media, AI chatbots, and so forth. But it can be harnessed for good. In fact, we can tap into this anticipation chemical to help us read God’s Word.
In a moment I’ll show you how. Before I do, though, I want to make it clear that I’m not suggesting that everybody needs to adopt the method of Bible reading I’m going to share. If you have a method that is working for you, fantastic! The best Bible reading method is the one you will do.
In fact, I would love to hear what method is working for you. I’m always eager to learn about the actions of the faith Christians have adopted and through which they are finding benefit. Experience has taught me, however, that most Christians don’t have a method that is working for them. Most Christians are not practicing the regular action of reading Scripture. As such, they are missing the wisdom and wonder that comes from God’s Word.
As we turn to the method I’m going to commend, I want to start by challenging us all with a simple dictum: No dusty Bibles.
Dusty Bibles are neglected Bibles. Neglected Bibles cannot nourish needy souls. They cannot shape ignorant minds. They cannot convict blind sinners. They cannot save lost souls.
If I might build on this, I would challenge us to let dust accumulate on our remote controls and screens before it covers our Bibles. And if I might point out why this is so challenging for us, our screens (or, rather, their creators) know how to trigger the dopamine response. They know how to awaken longing in us, a longing that pulls us to our screens.
Perhaps you should take a moment to meditate on the reality of where the dust accumulates in your life and whether you’d like to change that. Don’t let the dust cover your Bible. No dusty Bibles!
Now, let’s discuss the action of reading our Bibles. Let’s begin with Scripture itself. The Psalms begin with these remarkable words:
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
(Psalm 1:1-2)
There are several things to notice about this psalm. First, the word blessed is a legacy translation, kind of like the word art in the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father, who art in Heaven…”). People are attached to the word, so translators retain it. The simple and straightforward meaning of the Hebrew word, however, is happy.
We’ve discussed this before, but this isn’t an ephemeral, fleeting happiness. This is a ballasted, steadying happiness.
So the psalmist is describing the happy man. Appreciate that. Don’t you want to be happy? Isn’t that what every person on the planet wants? Doesn’t that lie behind so many of our life choices? Aren’t we constantly chasing after and yearning for lasting happiness?
The psalmist knows that about us, and he’s saying, “Hey, I know you want to be happy. I’ll tell you where happiness is found.” Imagine all the money people spend every year chasing after happiness when the dusty Bibles on our shelves are offering it for free!
The psalmist starts by describing where happiness isn’t found. It isn’t found in deepening fellowship with sin and stupidity (and the world is full of this!). It is found in the law of the Lord. The word for law (Torah) means teaching or instruction. God’s teaching brings happiness.
But notice what the psalmist says: Happiness is found in delighting in God’s teaching and in meditating on it day and night. Do you see the action of the faith? This isn’t a sporadic thing. It’s not a random thing. This is a honed habit.
That’s what we’re aiming after. We’re aiming after the honed habit of reading our Bibles, of delighting in God’s teaching.
Here’s one way to do it. I call it Word Before World and The Regular Return.
Here’s how it works. We all have waking routines, routines we either intentionally or unintentionally follow most mornings. These first moments of your morning are critical. Think through a typical morning. What do you do? More specifically, whose voice or voices are you inviting into your mind in those first moments of your day?
Many of us wake up and turn to a screen, the morning news, social media, our email, etc. Think about what you’re doing. You are inviting those voices to set the trajectory of your thoughts for your day. You are inviting those voices to teach you, to excite you, to frustrate you, to discourage you. To use a more theological word, you are inviting those voices to catechize you.
For most of us, this isn’t intentional. It’s simply our habit. And that’s precisely my point! This is the way most of our habits come to be; they happen because we slide into them. But we need to realize two things: 1) They are habits, and 2) They do affect us. Habits do things to us. In this case, we’re turning our waking moments over to any number of voices and habitually inviting them to catechize us, often in the ways of the world. And they are doing it very well.
This is why I’m encouraging you to adopt Word before World. You need to reclaim those waking moments for God’s Word, to invite God to catechize you. Now, before you start listing off all the reasons why you can’t do this, ask yourself if you want to know the happiness the psalmist describes. If you do, read on.
Here’s how Word before World works. You get to pick where you want to start in your Bible. Maybe you’ll pick a Gospel. Maybe you’ll pick the psalms. You get to pick. Once you do, read for three to five minutes. You are welcome to read longer, but the goal here is not to set up unachievable goals that we don’t attain, resulting in discouragement, believing them impossible, and quitting.
With Word before World you pick where you want to start and then you read for three to five minutes. And here’s how you want to approach the text: What is God going to teach me? What’s going to happen next in the story? These questions effectively cover God’s Word in gift wrap, and that builds anticipation. It triggers the dopamine response. It produces a regular, happy feeling of hope and eagerness.
You may choose to anchor prayer to Word before World, and we’ll cover prayer in an upcoming article, but the main goal for now is to keep our Bibles from accumulating dust and to invite God to be our first teacher of the day.
Once the morning has passed, we turn to The Regular Return. Here’s how this works.
Somewhere in the middle of your day, you will return to the same section of Scripture you read in the morning, and you will read it again, again for three to five minutes. And then somewhere toward the end of your day, you will do it again—same section of text for three to five minutes.
Notice the time commitment. Over the course of the whole day, we’re aiming for nine to fifteen minutes. Some may scoff at such a low number, but here’s why I’m suggesting this method: It needs to be achievable.
As I said before, if you have more time, wonderful. You can spend as much time in God’s Word as you want to. And there is great benefit in doing deep dives into God’s Word. But for now. we’re aiming after the habit.
Yes, you will be reading the same section of text three times. You may initially be resistant to this. That’s no surprise. American culture doesn’t like repetition. We’ve been catechized in the myth of progress. Progress, according to this myth, means moving forward and never looping back.
But here’s what the myth of progress overlooks: To move forward, you need a regular return. Athletes understand this. They regularly return to the basics. Musicians understand this. They regularly return to their scales. Soldiers understand this. They regularly return to the drills.
Progress in Christianity requires a regular return to God’s Word. Remember what the psalmist said: The happy man meditates on God’s teaching day and night. He used the word meditate. I’m using the phrase the regular return. They mean the same thing.
There are two things I want to point out about this:
Let’s take each in turn.
When Rebecca and I were teaching our children to read, we discovered the power of regular repetition. They didn’t need hours of intense reading instruction once or twice a week. They needed ten to fifteen minutes a day. The power wasn’t in any one session; the power was in the repetition. It built a scaffolding in their minds upon which to hang pronunciations, spelling, grammar, and higher-level concepts.
The same holds true with reading God’s Word. The power is in the repetition. It’s not that God’s Word is powerless unless it’s repeated; it’s that our ability to recall it, apply it, and delight in it is strengthened through our regular return. This is why we shouldn’t look down our noses at nine to fifteen minutes a day. Those brief minutes are multiplied and magnified, like compound interest, when we repeat the process daily.
The Regular Return also builds anticipation. Remember earlier when I encouraged us to approach God’s Word as if it were gift-wrapped? By building this image in your mind, you can tell yourself that you get to open three presents every day: one at the beginning of your day, one in the middle, and one at the end. This gives you three things to look forward to every day.
This is something incredibly important for us to appreciate. The human mind needs something to look forward to, and having three gifts to anticipate every day is mentally invigorating and enlivening.
These three daily anticipated gifts do something more: They drive away sinful longings. I’m not suggesting that if you read your Bible three times a day you won’t struggle with sin, but I am certain it will help. Over time, it will construct new mental pathways, new ways of thinking, that lead away from sin and into righteous and happy living.
Sin is often a mental battle, especially when we’re dealing with addictive sin. Addictive sin (alcohol, pornography, substances, food, etc.) hijacks our desires. It tells us that happiness is found in having a certain substance or in certain images or in another pleasure-saturated experience, and it lodges that longing in our minds so that we yearn for it. It wants to become the thing we look forward to.
But the thing about sin is that it always overpromises and underdelivers. In fact, what it delivers is dysfunction, discord, breakdown, and chaos.
Conceptualizing God’s Word as three gifts you get to open every day triggers the dopamine response, builds anticipation, and rewards you with God’s truth, wisdom, and love. It might not make the sinful desires go away, although over time it very well might. What it will do, though, is build positive desire and bring positive reward—the positive reward of happiness.
To discover and enjoy the happiness the psalmist celebrates, we need to be committed to No Dusty Bibles. And the way we do that is through Word before World and The Regular Return.
So, dust off your Bible and get started! Do Christianity. Do the faith.
– Pastor Conner
[1] I use the phrase “gathering of the gathered” to capture Martin Luther’s explanation of the church and the Holy Spirit in his explanation to the Third Article of the Apostles’ Creed where he explains, “[The Holy Spirit] calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.” The Spirit gathers us and our response is… to gather, to gather around the means Jesus has given to bring life and salvation: The preach Word and given Sacraments.
Rev. Jonathan Conner is a contributor and speaker for Lutheran Family Service in the areas of mental health, godly living, and parenting. He is a regular guest on the podcast Issues, Etc., and the multi-part series Kids Have Questions. Pastor Conner is a graduate of Concordia Seminary St. Louis and currently serves as the pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Manning, Iowa.
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