Easter marked the end of the season of Lent. And for many of you, it also marked the end of a six-week Bible reading plan! Bible Gateway offered two different Bible reading plans during Lent; each of them challenged readers to spend time each day simply reading and reflecting on a passage of Scripture.

To those of you who made it through one of those reading plans (or at least made a good effort to do so): congrats! Making it to the end of any Bible reading plan is a challenge, and we applaud you for investing the time required to do so. I’m sure there were days in the past six weeks where you questioned whether it was worth spending the time to read each daily reading. Hopefully, you found it to be a worthwhile practice.

Second, keep going! What started as perhaps a difficult daily task should now be a habit; part of your everyday routine. If you can keep it up, you’ll find that daily Scripture reading has a profound effect on your life. Committing to do anything every day is difficult, even if it only takes a short amount of time… but this is a commitment that bears fruit. As the psalmist writes:

Your word is a lamp to guide my feet
and a light for my path. — Psalm 119:105 (NLT)

If you’re interested in turning your six-week Scripture reading habit into a year-long one (or beyond), Bible Gateway has several 365-day reading plans you can try, including plans that walk through the entire Bible, plans that read through just the New Testament, and more. You can see the plans on our reading plan page.

Most of those plans started on January 1, so if you start now, you’re joining “late”—but you can always use the calendar on the reading plan page to skip back to January 1 to start from the beginning. However, I recommend simply choosing a plan that interests you and picking up with it today; after all, the point is not “just” to read through the Bible from beginning to end, but to get into the habit of reading a bit of Scripture every day. (And right now is actually a great time to pick up one of the “Old and New Testament” reading plans, as they’ve just finished reading through the first several books of the Old Testament, traditionally some of the most challenging for new Bible readers. You can always revisit them in the future.)

Whether you followed a Lent reading plan or not, now’s a fine time to commit a small part of your day to Bible reading!