Stop Scrolling the Bible and Start Sitting With It

We live in a golden age of access to Scripture—an age our spiritual ancestors could hardly imagine. Every verse is a tap away. Podcasts read the Bible to us while we drive (perhaps you’d like to give ours a listen?) AI apps can summarize the Isaiah scroll in an instant. If there’s a way to consume Scripture quickly, efficiently, and with minimal friction, someone has designed it.

And yet somehow… we are still starving. 

While in places where following Jesus is costly we hear stories of believers clinging to Scripture as if it were their only oxygen, in the West we often drift past verses like billboards on a highway—glanced at, but never entered.

But James tells us the goal is not to hear the Word and nod politely. It is to look intently, to linger, and then to do: 

“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing” (James 1:22-25).

That kind of hearing can’t be microwaved. It requires something we’ve nearly lost: attention.

But here’s the hopeful part: you don’t need a monastery or a six-month retreat to change this. You just need a Bible—an actual, physical Bible—open on the table.

There’s something grounding about paper and ink. You can’t swipe away Leviticus. You can’t toggle to Instagram when a verse hits too close or too far for that matter. A paper Bible invites you to slow down. To think. To notice. To obey. And that kind of slow consumption—small but serious—can bring peace to a distracted heart. 

So as 2026 rolls on, here’s a simple challenge—nothing flashy: pick a book of the Bible. Pick a plan. Commit with one other person. Read slowly. Ask questions (Ok, I promise I’m not a salesman but maybe try this book for help?) Read expecting God to speak. And when He does—obey. It’s not too late to start. 

If thousands of us did that the rest of this year, and thousands of communities were shaped not just by access to Scripture, but by actual submission to it, imagine what God could do. He might just use you to bring Jesus into the attention of someone who desperately needs to know him.