What I'm Reading in 2025
Part 1: The 'Why' & the 'How' Behind My List
Why I Read: Stewardship & Discipleship
Confession: I am a verified slower than average reader.1
In January 2021, I applied for the ThM program at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.2 And part of the application process was a timed reading assignment. It consisted of reading several different texts of varying lengths as fast as I could and then answering questions about them to gauge my comprehension level.
The good news? My comprehension score was decent.
The bad news? The time it took me to comprehend the material took longer than it does the average person.
Why do I say all of that? Well, two reasons.
First, because I want to encourage you that even if you aren’t a strong reader like me, you can still engage in the life of the mind if you’re willing to put in the work.
Second, while reading is far from being the only means of discipleship, I do think that our God-given ability to learn and grow in our understanding of Him and His work by engaging with the written word is a remarkable blessing. Indeed, to be born into a society where learning to read is valued is a gift in itself that I think believers ought to steward for God’s redemptive purposes.
Consider, for example, that God has revealed Himself chiefly through things like nouns and verbs and adjectives in a book we call the Bible.
One way we could look at that would be to say, But I’m really not much of a reader. Why couldn’t God reveal His plan of redemption through some other mode?
Or, on the other hand, we could say, Wow! How amazing that God would condescend to make Himself known through human language in a book! And you’re telling me that if I read and ponder its words carefully I can know Him? What a treasure the Bible is!
I opt for the latter. And I hope you will too!
God has given us the Bible and… He has given us a treasure trove of pastors and scholars and theologians who have written books about the Bible so that we can understand our sacred text better.
In 2025, I hope you’ll engage with both!
For a little added motivation, check out this video by John Piper. I believe it just might stir your heart to engage with the Bible (as well as books to help you understand the Bible) at a deeper level in the coming year.
Okay, motivated yet?
Great! Now, how do we go about reading? Where do we start? Especially if you struggle to read. It’s to that topic that we’ll now turn.
How I Read: Developing a Realistic Strategy
It’s easy to fall into the trap of reading for the sake of having read. But that’s not the point. Our motivation for reading ought always to be to know God truly so that we might live faithfully.
For me, that means I have to read slowly if I want to understand.
All in all, I’d say I’ve been engaged in serious reading since about 2011. And over the course of that time, I’ve discerned what is a realistic pace for me — A pace that’s also determined by the kinds of reading I do. For the sake of clarity, I think I can boil my reading habits down to 4 broad categories: Bible reading, devotional reading, academic reading about the Bible, and ministry-related reading.3 The first three areas are where I want to challenge you to engage in 2025. So, here’s a summary of how I approach each one. Once you see my strategy, I hope it will establish a baseline to help you carve out your own for next year.
Bible Reading
My aim during the week is to get up at 5am to enjoy a quiet cup of coffee and time with the Lord through prayer and the Word. Admittedly, since I’m not a morning person, I’m not as consistent with this practice as I’d like to be. But hey, that’s the point of New Year’s right? To ask the Lord for His empowering grace to develop stronger habits.
At any rate, when I do wake up my morning Bible reading begins with Piper’s well-known I-O-U-S prayer:
Incline my heart to your Word
Open my eyes to see its beauty
Unite my heart to fear Your name
Satisfy me this morning with Your steadfast love
This prayer literally takes just a minute or two, but steadies my heart to prepare to read the Scriptures. And once I’m ready to come to them, my reading comes in two varieties: (1) reading for depth and (2) reading for breadth.
Since I have to budget my time wisely (the kids have to be up at 6am to start getting ready for school and I want to make sure this time also involves prayer and devotional reading), I know that I have about 30 minutes to read. So, how much reading can I accomplish / comprehend in that time?
If I’m reading for breadth (for example, trying to get at the big picture of an Old Testament historical narrative or trace the flow of argument in one of Paul’s letters), I can read about 4 chapters in 20-25 minutes. This also leaves me a little bit of space to ponder the material I’ve covered before moving on to prayer and devotional reading.4
If I’m reading for depth, seeking to see smaller details in the text, I can usually cover 1-2 chapters, depending upon their length (mostly, however, this means reading 1 chapter).
I might also add at this point that my Bible reading does not consist of isolated verses, but usually involves walking through an entire book from start to finish. This helps me to keep everything in context as I’m reading and I can also more easily chart my progress throughout the year.
For 2024, I committed to a slower, in-depth reading of the Torah (Genesis — Deuteronomy). If you were to decide to read it for depth next year — reading a chapter a day at least 4 days a week — it would take you about 47 weeks to complete — just in time to then read the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke for Advent (by being immersed in the Torah, I bet you’d also see a lot of interesting inner-biblical connections between the Torah and the Gospels).
If you’re a slower than average reader like me, but with an even tighter schedule, you might consider scaling down the amount according to the time you do have. For example, your reading for breadth might be a chapter and your reading for depth a scene in a narrative or a paragraph in a letter.
If you’re average or above, then obviously, you can also plan to scale up from what I’m able to do.
Either way, I think the important point here is to consistently read Scripture and set goals without being enslaved by arbitrary boundaries. Who cares if it takes you two years to read the Torah in-depth? What’s your hurry? Just pick a pace that will challenge, but not overwhelm you. And, if you still have time after your Bible reading, consider pairing it with some devotional reading.
Devotional Reading
This reading is on the optional side of the spectrum. If I have time after Bible reading and prayer, then I’ll try and read 2-3 pages of devotional material.5 A simple goal for me in this category is just 8 pages a week.
So, let’s do the math.
If I read 8 pages of devotional material for at least 48 weeks out of the year, that equals 384 pages of reading. And for the style book I have in mind for this category, that means about 1-2 books each year.
When you can, pairing Bible, prayer, and devotional reading can go a long way in getting your heart in the right posture for the day or week ahead.
But there’s one more category I want to challenge you to implement in the coming year… Academic reading about the Bible.
Academic Reading About the Bible
Since this area might be new to many, I want to spend a bit more time here.
When it comes to academic, or more intellectually intense books about the Bible — you know, the kind with small print, no pictures, and a boatload of footnotes — on average it takes me about an hour to read and comprehend 12-15 pages. I’m in the office Monday — Thursday, so that means I can knock out around 48-60 pages. For simplicity’s sake, my goal is to read a bare minimum of 50 pages of academic writing each week. Anything over that I consider icing on the cake.
So, if I account for taking one week off for Thanksgiving and Christmas each, plus two weeks of vacation, that translates to approximately 2,400 pages of academic reading a year. Prior to the start of each new year, then, I have a good idea of how many books I can realistically get through over the course of 12 months.
I select 1-2 small books (100-125 pages), 3-4 medium sized books (200-300 pages), and one large book (600-900 pages). I also try to read them in that order because the sense of momentum you feel after having carefully read and finished a book builds on itself over the first six months, preparing me for when I take on the behemoth around June or July (sometimes I’ll add a smaller book on the backside of the behemoth too as sort of a cool down toward year’s end). This, for me, is a realistic schedule.
If your reading ability is like mine, but you work full time with a family, then your academic reading goal could be to read 20 minutes a day at this level during your lunch break or at night after the kids are in bed. If you committed to only doing this Monday through Thursday to protect the weekend for family time and church involvement, that would translate to 5 pages a day and 20 pages a week. Also accounting for four weeks a year of time off for holidays and vacation would mean you could read 960 pages of academic writing a year!
And if you were to follow the book-length strategy that I do, that means you could read one book of 100-125 pages, another that is 200-300 pages, and, finally, one that is 600-700 pages (maybe pushing yourself a bit more if you select ones on the upper end of each scale). And let me encourage you — Engaging in that amount of academic reading would go a long way in accelerating your understanding of God’s Word at an in-depth level. And that, in turn, would also enhance your personal Bible reading that I discussed above.
20 minutes a day. 4 days a week. 48 weeks a year. 3 solid academic books.
Think you could swing that? I know you can. Because those numbers are based on the assumption that you’re slower than average at reading like me. Odds literally are, however, that you’re a stronger reader than me and could increase your count by another 5-10 pages.
Plus, imagine the cumulative effect this could have over the coming years:
10 Years = ~10,000 pages
20 Years = ~19,000 pages
30 Years = ~30,000 pages!
So why not make 2025 the year you begin this journey of reading books about the Bible at a more academic level? Don’t do it just for yourself. Do it for the sake of discipling your family or being a blessing to your church or reaching your neighbors with the Gospel. Study hard for the sake of knowing God truly so that you can live faithfully.
Putting it All Together
Taking everything I’ve mentioned above, in 2025, at a slower than average pace, you could read 384 — 768 chapters of the Bible for breadth OR around 200 chapters of the Bible in-depth, 2-3 devotional books aimed at stirring your affections for Christ, and 2-3 academic books to sharpen your own thinking about God’s Word.
And that’s all by committing to read for anywhere from 40 minutes to 1.5 hours day, 4 days a week, 48 weeks of the year.
You can do this!
In the next post, I’ll share with you my reading list based on these numbers.
Blessings!
Drew
Enjoy Today’s Article?
I write for the love of the game. But if you would like to offer some encouragement through a financial gift, you can do so by clicking the button to become a paid subscriber. By doing so, you’ll also receive my monthly “Research Notes” — Exclusive articles describing questions I’m thinking through and wrestling with. Thank you!
For those of you interested in the God’s Sovereignty / Free Will series and wondering why in the world I’ve interrupted it for this miniseries, my plan is to keep engaging in research through the end of this month and then pick that series back up in the New Year. I’m actually enjoying digging into that topic more than I even thought I would, so I want to make sure my thoughts are well-researched, clear, and organized before I share them with you for your consideration.
The ThM is sort of a weird degree. It stands for Master of Theology and is a post-graduate degree where students are introduced to doctoral-level coursework. Hence the reason for the reading comprehension test.
For a fully holistic strategy, I should include a fifth category related to reading classic literature or popular fiction or those kinds of things. But alas, I haven’t yet been able to figure out where to insert that kind of reading. For help with that, be sure to check out Jacob Allee’s Substack, Study the Great Books, where he provides practical guides for reading classical literature. I plan to myself :)
These numbers simplified. Obviously, chapters of the Bible come in varying lengths. But I’ve tried in this section to discern what the average might be.
By devotional material, I don’t mean a devotional in the traditional since. Instead, what I have in mind is a smaller book aimed at helping me live out some facet of the Christian life. For example, this past fall I read Enjoy Your Prayer Life by Michael Reeves devotionally — taking it in just a page or two at a time. I highly recommend it, by the way!
Drew, I will be praying for you this coming semester.
Thanks for sharing your reading journey and process, Drew. Over the past three years, my eyes have been opened to the fact that you can read an incredible amount of books by just being faithful in small ways to a process. There’s really no reason almost any Christian today should not be reading 20+ books a year. It’s very, very possible even for the busiest of us.