It’d be silly and dangerous to give up on healthy eating if you didn’t feel happier or stronger as or right after you ate. The same is true of Scripture reading. We shouldn’t measure success entirely by whether or not we feel pleasure as we read. Not every Scripture passage should cause even the healthiest Christian to feel surface-level happiness. Don’t chase after a feeling; chase after nearness to Christ.

In his best-selling book Atomic Habits, James Clear tells the story of a friend who lost over 100 pounds through diet and exercise. Clear’s friend began with a goal of going to the gym for five minutes daily. (He even set a timer and faithfully left the gym each day after five minutes.) By making his goal achievable and repeatable, he became someone who went to the gym every day. Once this practice became a habit and lifestyle, he began tweaking it over time (for example, he started exercising for longer than five minutes). Eventually, his exercise and diet habits led to transformation.
Like physical transformation, spiritual transformation is the gradual reward of consistent habits. Even when you don’t immediately feel the effects of your Bible intake, you can be confident your spiritual fitness improves little by little each time you engage with God’s Word.
Consider four ways Bible intake parallels diet and exercise habits and why even our smallest efforts matter.
1. The First Two Minutes Are the Most Important
Clear notes the heaviest weight in the gym is the front door. The same is true of most habits: it’s not the habit itself, but starting the habit, that stops most people.
Clear encourages readers to replicate his friend’s minimalist approach to habit-building, even starting with two-minute routines (rather than five minutes) to make starting and replicating behaviors simple. (He calls this the 2-Minute Rule.)
If you don’t already have a rhythm of Bible reading, commit to reading for two minutes every day. Make daily reading as achievable as possible. By doing this consistently, you’ll become someone who reads the Bible every day. That’s a huge step. From there, you can tweak the habit as you wish. Clear observes, “A habit must be established before it can be improved.”
You cannot improve what you don’t already practice.
2. THe Most Rewarding Outcomes Are (Almost Always) Delayed
Clear notes that our outcomes are a “lagging measure of [our] habits.” We’re who we are today largely because of the habits we’ve built over the past few weeks, months, and years. It’s not what we’ve done most recently but most consistently that shapes us.
One workout or protein-rich meal won’t drastically strengthen your bones. Yet a consistent exercise routine and calcium, vitamin D, and protein intake over months and years will improve bone health significantly. Likewise, spiritual health is a lagging measure of what we train and feed on consistently. Bible reading isn’t only for the here and now but also for how it forms us over time.
Beyond the cumulative benefit of Bible reading, you’ll be surprised at how often God blesses you (and others through you) a few days or weeks after you read a certain passage.
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When you descend from lofty rhetoric about “Traditions” and “Values,” it becomes apparent that a huge number of the actual practices and social institutions which built those virtues have disintegrated, not because of Progressivism or Socialism but because of the new environment and political economy generated by technology.

Two recent articles are well worth your time and thought. The first is a piece at The Federalist by John Davidson. He argues that “conservatives” should drop that label in favor of something more descriptive of their position in, and posture toward, predominant liberal society:
[A]ny honest appraisal of our situation today renders [the label] absurd. After all, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving? In just my lifetime, they have lost much: marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law. Calling oneself a conservative in today’s political climate would be like saying one is a conservative because one wants to preserve the medieval European traditions of arranged marriage and trial by combat. Whatever the merits of those practices, you cannot preserve or defend something that is dead. Perhaps you can retain a memory of it or knowledge of it. But that is not what conservatism was purportedly about. It was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing.
Radicals, restorationists, or counterrevolutionaries are all suggested as alternative monikers for what is typically now called the “New Right.” I find the invocation of Thomas Jefferson’s brand of radicalism distasteful as a model—albeit there is something to it—but Davidson’s nod toward the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts is one I’ve offered as well. The enduring conservative impulse here is to look to the past for inspiration, an impulse that someone like Yoram Hazony makes definitionally definitive for conservatism. That hasn’t changed with the New Right, though a creative, often eclectic approach now animates that exercise.
Much of the New Right, reactionary energy is fueled by critiques of what has passed for conservatism for the past several generations. Such conservatives, as Davidson justifiably argues, have conserved precious little. Chief among the old conservative defects in the dead consensus was an allergy to state power.
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What, one may ask legitimately, is the relation of Genesis 1–11 to Genesis 12–50, to the rest of the Torah, to the rest of the Old Testament, or to the rest of the Bible? The latter questions assume, of course, the existence or possibility of a single plot structure running through the assorted collection of books we call the Bible. Is Genesis 1–11 just the “primeval history” that we have to get out of the way before the real story starts with Abraham in Genesis 12? Some Christians approach putting the Bible together this way.
My thesis in this brief piece is that all of our foundations for life and living are found in the biblical teaching on creation, especially as delineated in Genesis 1–3. From the account of creation, we see that God rules sovereignly over all his works as King. He establishes his rule, moreover, in a bond or relationship of love, loyalty, spirit, and trust with humans. Not surprisingly, then, one of the central themes of the Old Testament is kingdom through covenant.[1]
The Image of God as a King in Covenant with God
The foundation for kingdom through covenant is laid by the creation of humans as the image of God. Genesis 1:27–28 actually deals with two topics by means of a chiasm or literary sandwich:
(A) in the image of God he created him
(B) male and female he created them
(B´) be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth
(A´) and subdue it and rule over the fish/birds/animals
After the general statement in verse 27a that God created humanity in his image, we have in verse 27b a couple of important footnotes. The fact that humanity is constituted as male and female prepares us for the command to be fruitful, and the fact that humanity is the divine image prepares us for the command to rule over the creatures. Thus, while binary sexual differentiation is the basis for procreation enabling humans to increase in number (the B elements in the chiasm), our status as God’s image is expressed in subduing and ruling (the A elements). Note that our identity as God’s image is expressed as we rule creation on God’s behalf. This identity does not require bearing children, nor is biological gender a necessary aspect of our ability to function as God’s image. Rather, the image of God correlates to men and women ruling over creation.
Careful analysis of the terms “likeness” and “image” in the Hebrew scriptures shows that these words speak of kinship and kingship. Likeness focuses on our relation to God as his obedient sons and daughters while image focuses on the way we represent God to the rest of his creation. These would have been understood as covenantal relationships since family language is invoked to describe covenants in the Bible and ancient Near East. Note as well that according to the grammar of the original text, ruling over the creatures in v. 26b is a result of creating man in the divine image. So, the image has to do with the core of our being and status and is not only or simply functional.[2]
Most occurrences of the word “image” denote a physical statue. Accordingly, mankind is set in the midst of creation as God’s statue. He is evidence that God is the Lord of creation. Mankind exerts his rule not in arbitrary despotism but as a responsible agent, as God’s steward. His duty to rule is not autonomous; it is a copy of the divine king who sits in glory. Hence the concept of the kingdom of God is found on the first page of the Bible.
From the First Adam to the Second
Adam begins to rule the world under God by naming everything created on the earth just as God ruled by naming everything created in the heavens. This understanding of the divine image fits the background of the ancient Near East where the setting up of the king’s statue was the equivalent to the proclamation of his domination over the area in which the statue was erected.
When the descendants of the first man and woman fill the earth with chaos and social violence flowing from the breaking of the covenant by Adam and Eve, God destroys all creatures by a flood and preserves a pair of each kind. God makes a new start with Noah and he is given Adam’s covenant and mandate (comp. Genesis 1:27–29 with 9:1–7). When the family of Noah ends up confused and scattered over the face of the earth because of the curse of Babel in Genesis 11, God chooses Abraham and his family in Genesis 12 to inherit the role of Adam and Eve.
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