A New Year’s Resolution to Read the Bible, and How to Keep It

Why do Bible reading resolutions fade by February?

If you’re making this resolution, you have plenty of company. On New Year’s Day 2025, more than 3 million people started one-year plans in YouVersion. January is a natural time to begin. The trouble comes a few weeks later, usually for one of three reasons:

• The goal is too big. Reading the whole Bible, or an hour every morning, sounds right on January 1, when you have the day off. It’s harder on a cold Tuesday in February, especially if your plan has reached Leviticus.
• It has no set time. A plan to read sometime today usually loses to everything else that happens today.
• One miss feels like the end. A plan with dates shows every gap. Two days behind becomes five, and starting again begins to feel like admitting defeat.

How long does it take a resolution to stick?

Longer than most people expect. In a 2010 study from University College London, Phillippa Lally and colleagues found that new daily habits took a median of 66 days to feel automatic, with a wide range of 18 to 254 days. If you start on January 1, day 66 falls in early March.

So if February feels hard, nothing has gone wrong. The January feeling has worn off and the habit hasn’t formed yet. Knowing that gap is coming makes it easier to stay with it. Our guide to how long it takes to build a habit goes through the research.

Start with why you want this

Before you decide how much to read, write down why you want to. If the reason is that you feel you ought to, the resolution won’t have much to run on in February. If you want to know God better, or you’d like a steadier start to the day, or a psalm got you through a hard year, you’ll have something to come back to.

Psalm 90, a prayer about how short life is, asks: “So teach us to count our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12). The start of a year is a natural time to pray it.

Keep it small

Make it small enough to do on your worst day. In the study, simple behaviors became automatic sooner than demanding ones, so five or ten minutes will carry you further than an hour. Try trading your first idea for a smaller one:

You can always read past your goal. If you do want to read the whole Bible, make the daily minutes your resolution and let the finish take care of itself. Our 2027 plan with dates takes about 9 minutes a day.

Tie it to a moment you already have

The habits in the study were tied to a fixed situation, and yours should be too. A good resolution fits in one sentence with two parts: a moment that happens every day and a small amount of reading.

• After I pour my coffee, I read for five minutes.
• When I sit down on the train, I read one psalm.
• When I finish lunch, I read a chapter of Mark.
• Before I turn out the light, I read for ten minutes.

Choose a moment from an ordinary workday, because January 1 isn’t one. Write the sentence down, then put your Bible where that moment happens. Our guide to building a daily Bible reading habit covers this in more detail.

Decide now what happens when you miss a day

You will miss days, so decide what you’ll do while you’re calm. A simple rule works: read today’s reading, with no catching up and no guilt. In the study, one missed day didn’t undo people’s progress. A long gap is harder to come back from, so the aim is to keep a miss small.

Build that mercy into the resolution itself. Most days is a fine goal, and so is five days a week. A psalm gives the reason: “Like a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him. For he knows how we are made. He remembers that we are dust.” (Psalm 103:13–14). A resolution can leave room for that too.

Christian New Year’s resolutions you can keep

If you’d like a starting point, each of these fits on a sticky note. Pick one, not five.

• Read one psalm a day. Start on January 1 and you’ll finish all 150 by May 30.
• Read the Gospels, a chapter a day. All four take 89 days, and Mark alone takes 16.
• Read Proverbs in a month. It has 31 chapters, so January fits it exactly.
• Learn one verse a month. That’s twelve verses by December.
• Pray for one person by name each day. Keep a short list in your Bible.

If you choose a verse a month, our Bible verses for the New Year are a good place to find the first one.

What if it’s already February?

Start again today. January 1 has no special power; it’s only an easy day to begin. A resolution you restart on a Tuesday in March counts just the same. Make the goal smaller than last time, pick a better moment, and read today.

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