‘I Don’t Have Time to Read Scripture’

“You’re going too fast. You’re making careless mistakes.”

I can still hear my dad saying this as he was helping me with my math in the basement. A worksheet or quiz lay in front of us, and its message was clear: I know how to do the problems; I’m just not doing them carefully. “Ugh,” I groan, “this takes forever! When can I be done?”

Decades later, I find myself sitting at my own kitchen table next to a math sheet belonging to my kids. This sheet says the same thing as the one from 25 years ago: smart, careless student. “Ugh, this takes forever! When can I be done?”

Ironically, hurry itself is patient. It’s more than happy to linger in one’s DNA for decades at a time, waiting to make a reappearance.

“A hurried, shallow reading of Scripture is not strong enough to support our walk in this world.”

Despite the well-known negative effects of hurry, it is not a vice in American society. Like busyness, hurry is considered a social plus, a sign of seriousness and purpose. “I can only stay for a little bit” is something a respectable, in-demand person says. The intelligent modern person uses technology to shave off every unnecessary minute. Even leisure is a candidate for hyper-efficiency, as we ask AI to summarize books instead of reading them, or put our podcasts at 1.5x speed.

Work and leisure are not the only places we hurry, are they? What if we asked ourselves how much of last week’s Bible reading we genuinely remember? It’s true that mornings are not infinite. On some mornings, Bible reading feels like a race against time, to beat our children’s early wake-ups or the nonstop activities about to begin. But is the answer to our lack of time always to just hurry up?

Hurry Doesn’t Hear

Here’s the problem. Hurry doesn’t actually help us hear faster. It prevents us from hearing altogether. Hurry may be a friend of efficiency, but it’s an enemy of attention. When we slow down long enough to really understand what God wants from us as his people, we see that his kingdom is less like a microwave and more like a garden. He values speed and efficiency not nearly as much as health and rootedness. If we would really hear God’s voice in Scripture, we must fight hurry.

Let me give you three reasons why hurry prevents our hearing and offer three options better than hurry.

1. Hurried reading is shallow.

This point is so obvious we tend to forget it. As George Orwell observed, seeing what’s right in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle. When we come to the Bible asking primarily how we can speed up or optimize the experience, we inevitably bounce off the words, like rocks skipping across the surface of the pond. Our eyes glance over passages, scanning them instead of sitting in them, trying to arrive at “the point” as fast as possible.

Here’s the thing: God’s word is so alive and rich that even this kind of inattentive glancing can feel satisfying in the moment. And there may be days when, in his providence, a quick skip over the surface of his promises is the best we can do. But a crutch is not a leg, and a hurried, shallow reading of Scripture is not strong enough to support our walk in this world.

2. Hurried reading is forgetful.

Think about some of your favorite and most formative memories, such as a graduation, a wedding, or the birth of a child. While those days may have been busy and chaotic in some ways, you probably intentionally soaked in certain moments, knowing in advance you’d want to treasure the sights and sounds for years to come. We tend to remember best what slows us down the most. When something stops us in our tracks, we usually leave footprints.

“If we would really hear God’s voice in Scripture, we must fight hurry.”

When we come to God’s word in a state of hurry, we often forget what we read. Our goal is to check the box that says we did something with our Bibles that day, and the faster we can accomplish that something, the better. This may feel efficient for our schedules, but it leaves us unprepared to bring the word to mind during trials, temptations, or discouragements.

3. Hurried reading is temporary.

It only takes a brief stretch of shallow, forgetful reading for us to ask ourselves (maybe subconsciously), “What’s the point of this?” There’s a limit to how many times we will sacrifice sleep or scrolling in order to take a passing glance at Bible verses we will forget just an hour later.

Most of us know from experience what happens when life circumstances force us to be selective about our time. Usually, the hard-won habits and intentional essentials stay, and the sporadic, half-hearted things go. The more we treat our Scripture reading as a box to check as quickly as possible, the more we’ll see it as an unnecessary box to begin with.

How to Fight Hurry

So, if hurry prevents us from hearing, what’s the alternative? I suggest liberating our listening from hurry with three tools: plans, pondering, and patience.

Plans

Hurry often creeps in when we’re trying to force something into the margins. But Bible reading shouldn’t be that, and it doesn’t have to be. Instead, we can see our daily time in God’s word as an essential, an anchor habit around which the rest of our day takes its shape.

As James Clear observes in his helpful book Atomic Habits, one key to making a practice stick is to organize your surroundings to make the practice easier and more automatic. If you’re targeting unhurried reading in the morning, go to bed early enough the night before. Keep phones and tablets out of the bedroom at night so you don’t spend your first thirty minutes awake scrolling. Put an open Bible in the room so that it’s right there. Plan to be unhurried, and you’re more likely to be.

Pondering

I once asked Donald Whitney, author of one of the best books on spiritual disciplines, what advice he would give to someone who has only twenty minutes for a quiet time. Without hesitating, he said, “Read for five minutes; then meditate for fifteen.” For many evangelicals, meditation is an undervalued and underused spiritual discipline. But many seasoned saints cannot speak of their time in the word without it.

“Meditation and hurry are mutually exclusive. Pursue one, and you will flee from the other.”

There are good resources on what biblical meditation looks like and how to do it. The only point I’ll make here is this: Meditation and hurry are mutually exclusive. Pursue one, and you will flee from the other. Instead of trying to skim through as much Scripture as possible, take two or three passages and sit with them. Read them out loud, changing the inflection of certain words each time. Ask why the author chose this word or that comparison. Two verses that you drive deep into your heart will loom larger in your spiritual life than a chapter you hurry through.

Patience

“Ugh, this takes forever! When can I be done?”

Sometimes I think there’s always a part of me, spiritually, that’s sitting at my basement table, staring at careless mistakes on a math sheet. I just want to be done: done with fighting sin, done with forgetting Jesus’s promises, done with being filled up and poured out each day. Can’t I hurry past all this?

In Psalm 1, the blessed man who delights in the law of the Lord is compared to a tree planted by streams of water. By contrast, the wicked are like chaff blowing in the wind. The thing about chaff is that it really does move a lot. One good wind and it will cover a lot of ground very efficiently. But that is not the metaphor God has chosen for his people. Instead, we are trees: growing slowly, day by day, almost imperceptibly, thriving and bearing fruit over time.

Let’s be okay with the long, difficult, unhurried life of listening to and following our Lord. There will come a day soon when the war against time is over, and all that’s left is joy and an eternity to feel it. On that day, we’ll be grateful for every unhurried minute we spent at the feet of our Savior.