The 11 Worst Bible Reading Habits to Leave Behind in 2025

do you want your Bible reading Bible study time to be more beneficial more consistent and more enjoyable than ever before then I think that at least a handful of these 11 habits are ones that you need to leave in the rearview mirror in case you and I haven't met yet I'm Keith faren your Bible coach my passion the goal of everything on this channel is to help you move from should to want when it comes to reading studying understanding applying and yes enjoying God's word so if you could use some help with that you're going

to click that little button down there so you don't miss a video now I don't know when you're watching this but I'm recording this at the end of the year as I'm looking at the new year and I want this new year or no matter when you're watching it this new season to be the most beneficial most consistent most fruitful time for you in God's word and I know that these habits I've boiled it down to 11 are the ones that I've struggled with in the past and the ones that people tell me over and

over and over again that they struggle with although I would say that number 11 is probably one that you haven't heard of so let's dive in with bad habit number one and that is reading the Bible without a plan I'm not just talking about a reading plan I'm talking about a clear picture of what you want your Bible reading to look like like what you want your connection with God to look like what you want your morning routine or evening routine or lunchtime routine whatever that plan is because as I've said many many times a

vision without a plan is Just a Dream your vision that picture that you have demands a plan and re so many people I see that just go into it hoping that they'll connect with God they have no plan of what they're going to read when they're going to read who they're going to read with where they're going to read they have no plan and without a plan the chance of you building a consistent regular habit with God in his word really really uh low so make sure you have a plan the second habit that we

need to leave behind is reading the Bible without having a relational mindset so often when we go to the Bible we read with an informational mindset not a relational mindset remember every time you pick this up the purpose is not just to learn about God the purpose is not just to glean information or nugget of Truth or a Word of Wisdom or encouragement the primary purpose for reading this book is to connect with the author the primary purpose of any Bible reading is relational not informational is there information in there yes absolutely is there guidance

for life is there are there words of comfort or instruction absolutely but the umbrella under which all of that sits is relationship you may have heard me say in a different video that uh that the the picture of the people that we've learned the most from the people that can challenge us the best the people who Comfort us the best are also the people that we share a pizza with or watch a ball game with or go hiking with these are the people that we are in deepest relationship with are the people that we learn

from Comfort us challenge us all of that God is Desiring to have a relationship with you not just make you more knowledgeable so you need to read with a relational mindset not just an information the third is we read the Bible without thinking what I mean is so often people go to the Bible because they feel like it's the the thing that I need to do as a Christian to make God happy and somehow if I've read my Bible and I've prayed and then then I can check the this made God smile box and we

don't read the Bible thinking about what it is that we've just read and so going in there with a checklist mentality instead of a let's put our whole heart and spirit and mind and loving God with our mind we need to have that thinking mindset to go along with the relational mindset from the last one the fourth habit that we need to leave in the rearview mirrror is reading the Bible without prayer if we're going to be developing a relational mindset then we need to be talking to God and listening to God but there's another

component to prayer that so many people don't ever think about and it's a whole chapter in this book how to enjoy reading your Bible that lays out the picture of the offense and the defense of a football game that the offense has a goal that they try to accomplish they're picturing the end zone and the defense is trying to stop St them all the time imagine the offense not even recognizing that the defense was there not even acknowledging that somebody was trying to stop them and wondering why they didn't score on every play well it

would be ridiculous somebody would at one point say ah there's somebody playing defense well there needs to be a strategy for beating the defense and I think the last thing the enemy wants is for you to build a regular consistent enjoyable life-giving with relationship with God through his word word and so he's on the attack he is Whispering lies in your in your uh spirit about you don't have time for this this isn't going to be good you'll never understand this all of that kind of like the smack talk before the big game right but

then there's also the distractions that come in while we read and we need to have a strategy and a big part of that strategy is prayer please don't read the Bible without prayer the fifth habit is we read the Bible without context so often we take little bits of scripture and we don't know what the context is about and you've heard this analogy before you've heard me use this of so often we study the Bible like we're studying the scenes of a movie we've never watched and so we'll hear something like I have fought the

good fight I have finished the race I have kept the faith and we will only look at that one little verse and say what is it mean to fight the good fight and finish the race and keep the faith and as somebody said so what's second Timothy about we don't even know we don't we have no idea what the context of that letter is we don't realize that Paul was in death row on death row sitting in prison this is the last letter that he's ever written and that he's writing not to the churches in

galatia or the church in Philippi he's writing to Timothy my dear son well getting that context of the movie in which you're studying the scene is hugely important not just to understanding but also we remember more in the context of story and it just simply makes more sense and it's more fun when we have context I've said many times and I will keep saying it until the day I die context is King now similar to the last habit is we read the Bible without exploring this is context may be a part of that but it's

also one of those things where I find that people make kind of one of two mistakes when I when I'm talking about this habit one is they only focus on the passages that they really really like they keep coming back to the same book of the Bible to the same Parables to the same section of scripture to the same Psalms and they constantly are just focusing on the ones that they enjoy the ones that they like the ones that make them feel good or the other side of that spectrum is they only study the passages

that are like those hard passages right the the the difficult subjects the challenging ones that's the only thing that they they read about watch videos about look at and so they're either always trying to feel good or always trying to solve some debate and those are the two ends of the spectrum and they don't look at the a full array of passages in the Bible they don't spend time just exploring the narrative Stories the history of the people of Israel the creation story and all that goes on in the rest of Genesis after that or

the freeing of the the the isra is the people of Israel from bondage and slavery and how so much of that Old Testament narrative sets up a better understanding a more Rich understanding and quite honestly a more enjoyable understanding of all that Jesus taught and did and accomplished in the New Testament and so this idea of sometimes I think we just need to put on our Explorer hat and we need to explore passages that we've never explored maybe you've never really looked at the Minor Prophets or you've never looked at the his historical books of

Samuel King's Chronicles maybe you've never looked at really The Poetry of uh the book of Psalms or the prophecy in Revelation maybe you haven't looked at those spend some time exploring and you'll see the richness of God's word the seventh bad habit is reading the Bible without resources I believe there is Great Value in reading the Bible and just the Bible just sitting down reading God's word having no additional resources and just having a conversation with god through his word I think that's oftentimes a fantastic place to begin a Bible study but just like any

other hobby that you have any passion that you have whether that's sports or cooking or gadgets or music or whatever it is my guess is you enjoy talking about it with people uh out that that people that have the same passion well I think that getting together with people can be huge and that's one of the resources other people I maybe should have made that a habit a bad habit on its own is just reading the Bible without people but in this area of resources sometimes that resource is a good study Bible sometimes that resource

is a small group of people to get together and talk about it with sometimes that resource is an additional devotional book that dives deeply into the topic or the person or the book of the Bible that you're studying sometimes those resources are some of the tools a vast majority of which are free on the internet I'll put some links down below to some of my favorite free online Bible study resources um that uh that kind of teach you how to use those to make your Bible study even more rich but uh reading the Bible alone

can be good but we also need to read the Bible with resources if we want to fully grasp all the richness of God's word we can never get the most out of God's word when we're only reading the Bible on our own these next two are kind of like flip sides of the same coin and that eighth mistake the eighth bad habit if you will is is reading the Bible without meditating so often we have our Bible reading time and even if we're spending a lot of time even if we're spending 30 minutes 45 minutes

60 minutes we've set aside a ton of time we spend that time we might say a prayer at the beginning God please help me remember what I'm reading here and and then we dive into our Bible reading and we might Journal about it or we might Mark our Bible or we might go to other resources we might be reading a devotional book or look at bible dictionaries and we we may take a lot of notes we even that whe whether it's you're just building a habit and you're just spending two or three minutes or whether

you're spending 60 Minutes I find that so often myself included the Temptation is to wrap up our Bible reading time with whatever the last thing we were studying is and we don't build in a few minutes even three to five minutes better if it's even a bit more than that to just meditate on it to just think about it to just ponder it to just chew on it and really bring that relational mindset into the way that we finish our Bible study to just to just ask God God what is it that you want me

to be thinking about through the day what do you want me to carry with with me throughout my day will you bring this back to my mind throughout the day so that I can meditate on it even when I'm not actively reading and studying your word that it can just be a part of my Bible reading I know that one of my favorite passages of scripture about kind of meditating on scripture is in Joshua 1 with this it's kind of they're on the edge of the Jordan they wandered the desert for 40 years Joshua was

about to lead them into the promised land and and got this whole picture of be bold and be strong for the Lord your God will be with you well right in the middle of that precrossing the Jordan pep talk you find this do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to do everything written in it well how is it possible to be careful to do everything written in something that we don't know that we haven't meditated on this idea of

carrying it with us meditating on it so that we can carry it with us is huge now bad habit number nine is the flip side of that coin which is reading the Bible without responding H when we study God's word and we meditate on God's word we need to respond to God's word now I no longer ask the question at uh at in my Bible study time what it what am I going to apply because I think sometimes there is a direct application to our life but I think there's always something that we can respond

to sometimes our response is an application sometimes our response is I'm going to study this more deeply tomorrow sometimes our response is to just be thankful and to worship to be grateful sometimes our response is just to look at that and say I didn't even really understand everything that I read but wow that was amazing story of God working in the lives of people just as messy as I am right there there are so many responses to scripture I don't think the response is always an application we need to be open to God calling us

to apply his word but I think the question of how am I going to respond is much much better so we we all too often read God's word even think about it a little bit and we don't ask that question how am I going to respond so make sure that anytime you read God's word you ask yourself what is my response the 10th bad habit that we have is reading without worshiping now I'm not just talking about singing a song although there have been times when I've read the word and been drawn right into a

time of singing and musical worship but when um this idea of reading without worshiping I think sometimes we forget that this book is God breathed this is inspired by God himself when we sit down and we read God's word we are in the presence of the one who wrote it we are in relationship with the author of life with the god of creation with the creator of all with the creator of you and me when we sit in the presence of God with this word it's not just any other book it is unique it is

special and there there are times when I think we need to come to God's word and just sometimes said not to not to worship this word but worship the word that this book points to and and recognize what a unique opportunity we have to sit with the god of the universe hearing exactly what it is that he has for us I think the reading of God's word should work should lead us to a time of worshiping God to sit in awe and wonder the 11th bad habit the one that I said you probably haven't thought

of and wouldn't really even seem to make sense in this list is reading the Bible without the Bible I feel like this is a habit that's becoming more and more regular is that we go to our Bible study and we spend this much time reading the Bible and this much time reading everything else we go to a devotional book and the actual time in scripture is 30 to 45 seconds and yet will read pages of what someone else has to say about it I think that there need to be times I I've written devotional books

I'm not knocking devotional books but we need to make sure that as we use these other resources I talked about the importance of resource resources earlier in this video but those resources need to be a supplement to our Bible reading not a replacement for our Bible reading and all too often our Bible study processes and devotionals and methodology and even our discussions have way way more time looking at what other people say about the passage and what other people that we're reading the Bible with have to say about the passage then it is actually spending

time in the word actually reading God's word and spending time hearing exactly what it is that he has to say so as you go into your Bible reading time make sure that you remember that everything else the people we're studying with the resources the the study Bible notes the graphs the charts the blogs the videos everything else is supplemental to the essence of the meal which is God's word so make sure you aren't reading the Bible without the Bible that's the biggest mistake of all so I hope that these 11 bad habits identifying those will

help you kind of figure out which ones you have a tendency toward and I'd actually love to hear which ones you are leaving behind I'd love to hear about that in the comments what are the habits you're leaving behind what are the new habits you are building as we enter into this new year and as always as you leave a comment think about who you can share this video with like this video subscribe to this Channel and I look forward to an amazing year of being your Bible coach I will see you in the next

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