Quiet Time: Moving Backward to Move Forward
Personal Bible Study Series: Part 1
No Spiritual Discipline is more important than the intake of God’s Word. Nothing can substitute for it. There simply is no healthy Christian life apart from a diet of the milk and meat of Scripture. —Donald Whitney1
If you have spent any time in church, you have been told to read your Bible. But have you ever wondered why? The people of God have always been a people of the book. God chose to reveal himself through the written word. It is up to us to read it.
However, does our nearly unlimited access to Scripture make us better Christians?
Not necessarily.
Past Christians usually didn’t have Bibles like we do, yet we are told that every serious Christian today should be spending time reading it. Does that mean that these past believers were incapable of being as close to God as us?
This question dominated my imagination for a long time. I knew the answer had to be no, but I couldn’t get over how to address the gnawing accusation that maybe our modern emphasis on personal Bible study is just a cultural fad today. When I began to see online Christians asking these same questions, I knew someone had to talk about it.
How did our spiritual ancestors keep Scripture in their hearts without holding it in their hands?
Before we dig into some of this history, let’s first consider the current relationship between Christians and their Bibles.
Between 77 and 88 percent of American adults own a hard copy of the Bible. Everyone who has internet access has countless additional translations available. However, personal Bible reading is plummeting. One study identified “Bible users” as anyone who read their Bible outside of church three to four times per year. According to this 2022 study by the American Bible Society, the percentage of people who cleared this incredibly low bar hovered near 50 percent for the decade beginning in 2011.2 In 2022, the number collapsed to just 39 percent.3 But this could be changing.
Bible sales lurched forward by a reported 22 percent in 2024.4 Many attribute this to uncertainty, wars, and fear about the future. In times of trouble, people look for God. Whatever the reason, it could mark a revival in personal Bible study if not also a revival in personal relationships with Christ as well. This means a conversation about the history and role of this discipline is needed now more than ever.
Personal Bible intake is the most emphasized Christian spiritual activity outside of church attendance. But imagine for a second that you didn’t own a Bible. If you were raised in the modern Western world this might be a shocking thought experiment indeed! Would you be able to practice your faith? Some churches might hardly consider you a Christian! Now envision that instead of just not owning a Bible, you couldn’t own a Bible.
For centuries, believers sought life from the pages of God’s Word but rarely had their own copy. While shocking to us, this was the normal experience for millions of people that claimed to follow Christ for most of church history.
The truth is that we’ve not always read the Bible like we do today.
Until the modern era, most Christians knew Scripture only as an oral tradition. The Bible was and audio-visual experience. Most believers satisfied their thirsty souls by hearing it read to them on Sundays or seeing it in artwork on church walls and windows. Medieval stained glass was actually designed to present literal sermons in visual form.5 Those that couldn’t read or didn’t have access to the biblical material could experience stories like baby Moses in the bullrushes or Jesus as the Good Shepherd. They might grow to understand the passion week events through a series of statues depicting the stations of the cross.
Art coupled with theology for a unique teaching experience. However, this was obviously limited. It left congregants with only a fleeting impression of the stories of the Bible with only a little bit of actual theology and interpretation revealed depending on how the image was portrayed. There were few opportunities to go deeper into the story unless the sermon happened to match up.
This all began to change about five hundred years ago. A series of historical events combined to push us towards personal study. The invention of the printing press collided with the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on a person’s ability to directly communicate with God. Before long, the Enlightenment introduced even more concepts of individualism and personal freedom. By the time more modern Christians began emphasizing the concept of a “personal relationship with Jesus” over a collective or heritage-based salvation, the time was ripe for what we recognize as familiar.
Today, personal Bible study is by far the most emphasized individual Christian practice. It leads every list of spiritual disciplines. Bible intake not only tops these lists, but it is taught as the bedrock of all the other disciplines as well.6 Churches and digital apps generate reading plans with schedules and themes to keep their people engaged with Scripture. Whole movements have arisen in the last two to three generations to champion Bible intake and meditation.
All of this grew from earlier Christian practices of hearing the Bible read in corporate settings to us now having a hard time even imagining a true Christian without a devotional plan tucked in between the thin pages of at least one copy of Scripture in every home.
However, we are experiencing a turning point in the conversation about spiritual disciplines and spiritual formation in general.7 We need to have the serious conversation about why we are reading and studying Scripture.
Personal Bible study cannot become a legalistic ritual or we lose the spiritual core that kept the practice alive in different forms for centuries.
Rather than just accepting a new narrative that questions the need to personal Bible intake, we should consider carefully the emergence of this practice and how believers worked out their faith before easy access to Scripture. Rather than listen to those that call us to “move past” our fascination of Scripture, we should move into the past to recover a hunger and thirst for the words of God.
This article is part of one of a larger series on the spiritual discipline of personal Bible study. Look for more articles in this series as well as preorder the upcoming book Quiet Time: The Past, Present, and Potential Power of Personal Bible Study releasing September 2026.
1 Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, 22.
2 “Discover What America Thinks about the Bible,” American Bible Society, 2025, https://www.americanbible.org/news/state-of-the-bible/
3 Consider this article for further analysis: Zach Dawes Jr, “‘Unprecedented Drop’ In Bible Engagement among U.S. Adults,” Good Faith Media, May 2, 2022, https://goodfaithmedia.org/unprecedented-drop-in-bible-engagement- among-u-s-adults/.
4 Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, “Sales of Bibles Are Booming, Fueled by First-Time Buyers and New Versions,” Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/business/media/sales-of-bibles-are-booming-fueled-by-first-time-buyers-and-new-versions-d402460e.
5 Anne F. Harris, “The Reception of Stained Glass,” in Elizabeth Carson Pastan and Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz, eds., Investigations in Medieval Stained Glass: Materials, Methods, and Expressions (Brill, 2019), 207.
6 Jason Zellmer, Conference Talk, June 2025. This is a central idea of a host of books on the Christian life.
7 David Fitch, “The Spiritual Formation Movement: Some Ways It Can Go Off the Rails,” Fitch’s Provocations (blog), October 10, 2023, https://davidfitch.substack.com/p/the-spiritual-formation-movement.