There’s a spiritual habit that millions of Christians practice with extraordinary faithfulness every morning.
Before their feet touch the floor — sometimes before eyes are fully open — a hand reaches for the nightstand. They pick up their phone and begin their daily liturgy: email, news, social media, email again. No one taught them this ritual, and yet they perform it with a consistency that would make a Benedictine monk weep with envy.
Imagine if you were able to apply that same energy to your walk with God. Your spiritual life would look completely different. And that’s actually the point. What you do habitually — what you do without thinking — shapes who you are becoming. That’s true whether the habit is scrolling Instagram or sitting with the Psalms.
The historian Will Durant once said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” What Durant meant is that what type of person we are is based on our habits. Show me your habits and I’ll show you what type of person you are becoming. This is especially true when it comes to our spiritual formation. We are all, every day, being formed by our spiritual habits. The only question is whether your habits are forming you into the image of Christ — or into something else.
What Are Spiritual Habits?
A spiritual habit is any repeated practice that, over time, shapes your soul toward (or away from) becoming like Jesus. The classic term for such practices is spiritual discipline. But for many people today, “discipline” carries connotations of punishment, rigidity, or performance. It can feel like something you do to earn God’s favor rather than something you do because you have already received the grace of our Lord.
The word “habits” gets at the same idea with a different feel. Habits aren’t about grinding your way to holiness. They’re about arranging your life so that Christlikeness becomes the path of least resistance. Habits are a way of putting us on a path to healthy behavior so that it becomes automatic. For instance, you don’t think about brushing your teeth every night. You just do it because it’s become an ingrained habit. Spiritual habits aim at that same kind of effortless consistency. The effort you put into such habits will, over time, become embedded in who you are. And with the aid of the Holy Spirit, it can conform you to become more like Christ.
This is why intentionality matters. Left to themselves, our habits drift toward ease, novelty, and distraction (see: phones). But a God-pleasing spiritual life doesn’t run on autopilot. It requires us to deliberately build the practices that keep us connected to the Father, formed by his Word, and shaped by his Spirit.
And of all those practices we should adopt, habits related to Scripture are the most essential.
3 Spiritual Habits for Engaging Scripture
When it comes to the Bible, most of us have one gear: we open it, read a passage, maybe journal or pray, and close it. That’s a fine starting place. But it’s a bit like having a library card and only ever reading the same chapter of the same book.
Scripture rewards three distinct kinds of engagement, and each requires its own habit: breadth, depth, and internalization.
Breadth: Hearing the Whole Story
Most Christians have a canon within the canon. We have a handful of beloved passages we return to again and again, with only a vague sense of how Ecclesiastes connects to Revelation, or what the Minor Prophets are actually saying to us.
The habit of breadth is about moving through larger sections of Scripture quickly enough that we are able to see the broader storyline and to develop a feel for the whole. And one of the most effective tools for this is listening to the Bible in audio format.
This isn’t a modern shortcut. For most of church history, ordinary Christians didn’t own personal copies of the Bible. When they engaged with Scripture, it was because they heard it read aloud in community. Indeed, much of the text was written for hearing. The New Testament letters were written to be read to congregations while the Psalms were meant to be sung with others. This is how God’s people encountered his Word for centuries before the printing press.
Listening to extended sections of the Bible — a whole epistle, an entire gospel, several chapters of a prophet — activates that same oral, narrative instinct. You stop getting lost in individual trees and start seeing the forest. Apps and platforms like Bible Audio, Dwell, and Audible offer high-quality audio Bible options. You can also listen to the text here at BibleGateway. Try listening to the whole book of Romans in one sitting on your commute and you’ll see how it changes how you read Romans 8 (which many believers consider to be the greatest chapter in the whole Bible).
Depth: Reading the Same Book Again and Again
Next, include a habit that goes in the other direction.
Pick one short book of the Bible and read it in its entirety. Then repeat this process between ten to twenty times.
This sounds extreme until you try it. What happens around the fifth or sixth reading is something close to magic. Connections you never noticed surface. The author’s logic becomes clear. Verses you’ve quoted out of context for years suddenly make sense in their proper place.
Then, after the eighth or ninth reading, you’ll hit a wall that is similar to what runners face in marathons. The text will become dry and lose its flavor. You’ll want to move on to the next book or abandon the program altogether. Stick with it. Persevere and you’ll discover even more of the treasures that repeated readings can provide.
Shorter books are the ideal place to start. Philippians, Colossians, Ruth, and Jonah are all short enough to read in a single sitting and rich enough to easily reward twenty consecutive readings. Once you’ve built the habit, you can move to longer books (but resist the temptation to jump to Genesis or Isaiah).
The point of this habit is saturation in God’s Word. You’re not trying to finish the Bible faster. You’re trying to know one book better than you’ve ever known any book.
Internalization: Getting God’s Word Into Your Heart
The third habit goes even deeper to hide God’s Word in your heart.
Memorization is the classic practice here, and it remains one of the most spiritually formative things a believer can do. When Scripture lives in your memory, it becomes available to you in moments when you have no Bible handy — in a hospital waiting room, in the middle of a temptation, in the dark hours of the night when anxiety won’t let you sleep.
Many people give up on memorization because it seems incredibly difficult. Why then can we remember lyrics to songs and commercial jingles we heard as teenagers? What keeps them stuck in our head even decades since we heard them last? The reason is because of what is known as the “song effect” or “music-memory effect.”
One of the most effective methods for retaining words long-term is attaching them to music. The brain encodes songs differently than prose. Songwriters and educators have been using this for centuries, from children’s alphabet songs to ancient Jewish liturgy.
Today there’s an abundance of Scripture put to music in every genre imaginable, from country to R&B and from pop to folk. A quick search on YouTube or Spotify will point you to songs built directly from Psalms, the Sermon on the Mount, and key passages from Paul’s letters. And if you can’t find a song built around the specific verse or passage you’re trying to memorize, AI tools can help you create a customized memorization song. You can take your target text and set it to a style that fits how you hear music.
It may sound strange, but give it a try and you’ll see it works better than you could have imagined.
What These Habits Looked Like for Me With James
I’ve been putting all three of these habits to work recently with the book of James.
By listening to Scripture on audio repeatedly during walks and drives I began to see how James connects with the Wisdom books (there’s a reason it’s called the “Proverbs of the New Testament”). I also began to make connections I hadn’t noticed, such as how James and 1 Peter both refer to Proverbs 3:34 (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5) and Isaiah 40:6–8 (allusion in James 1:10–11 and direct quote in 1 Peter 1:24–25).
The repeated readings (ten in a row over the course of two weeks) then helped me to better see how James was building his argument across the letter and not just making isolated points about faith and works and his concern for the poor. And I was able to quickly memorize whole chapters (currently, James 1-3) by hearing them set to music. In the past, I struggled to memorize a verse a week and would quickly forget it. Now, the text has become so ingrained that I often wake up to a voice in my head singing, “Count it all joy my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds …” and can recite the rest of the chapter with ease. Indeed, I haven’t been able to get James out of my head.
Implementing these practices has taught me that these aren’t techniques just for spiritual elites. They’re accessible, practical habits that any believer can build into ordinary life.
Start Somewhere
You already have spiritual habits. The question is whether they’re working for you or against you. The phone you reach for before you’re fully awake is proof that your brain is capable of remarkable consistency. That same capacity, pointed toward God’s Word, can transform your spiritual life.
Pick one of these habits this week. Listen to Philippians on your commute. Start reading through Jonah every morning. Put a verse to a tune you like. You don’t have to be extraordinary. You just have to be consistent.
And be patient with yourself. The most formative habits aren’t the dramatic ones. They’re the quiet, daily, almost unremarkable choices to return — again and again — to the Word that gives life.
Develop spiritual habits to live a Gospel-centered life with the help of the NIV Spiritual Habits™ Bible from Zondervan and The Gospel Coalition’s Joe Carter.
Christians are called to live a life worthy of the calling we have received. The NIV Spiritual Habits™ Bible helps develop a gospel-centered life that is both attainable and sustainable. With book introductions and enough daily readings for an entire year, this Bible gives readers practical and achievable techniques to build godly habits that will enhance their walk with God.
Joe Carter is a senior writer for The Gospel Coalition and an associate pastor at McLean Bible Church in Arlington, Virginia. He is the author of The Life and Faith Field Guide for Parents and coauthor of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s Greatest Communicator.
