What I Learned from Reading the Psalms in 21 Days: Advice for a Busy Person

I’ve had a hard time getting back into daily scripture reading since having kids several years ago. 

The past few Lents and Advents I’ve done daily devotionals with supporting verses (The Benefits of Using a Bible App). While it was what I needed at the time, this past year I wanted to go further. 

During our Ash Wednesday service, I felt really convicted that I needed to read through a single book of the Bible, so I committed then to reading through the Book of Psalms daily during Lent.

Starting a New Routine

Now how was I ever going to find the time to read Psalms when I’ve struggled to do daily reading the past few years?! I knew that I needed to change the way I was going about my reading.

Instead of trying to read first thing in the morning and last thing before bed, like I did years ago but had been struggled to do recently, I decided that I would give up Facebook while breastfeeding my new baby and would read scripture during this time if I was on my phone.

Now, Facebook was just mindless and numbing anyway but had become my go-to for passing the 15 minutes of feeding. I didn’t like to get into any more serious reading because my older son usually interrupted us.

I knew that I could read a psalm in that amount of time, probably more. So I set out to do it.

Here’s what I learned from reading the Psalms daily:

1. Committing to reading a psalm a day is pretty easy. In fact, I ended up averaging 7 psalms a day.
2. Reading them in succession lends to seeing larger themes in the book.
3. Reading them in a short time period (21 days in my case) helps you see repeated phrases and words throughout the whole book of Psalms (and therefore the larger themes).
4. God speaks uniquely to you through the words of the psalmists.
5. Making a specific plan for when to read helps with follow-through. I needed to get back into the daily routine of reading scripture. I just needed to find a different way to do it that works for my life where it is now. So, I found a consistent pocket of 15 minutes in my day and claimed it for my scripture reading time.
6. God is not just our Father and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but God is our rock, our comforter, our hiding place, and our refuge… (Psalms reveals so richly who God is!)
7. You really can read through the psalms quickly. That was surprising!
8. By reading straight through, you learn in different ways than if you read one psalm a day devotionally.
9. The psalms encourage us to cry out to God, to get angry, to pray, to cry, but ultimately to find our hope and rest in God. It’s good for me to know I can get angry with God (the psalmists did! but they ALWAYS come back to his faithfulness and goodness).
10. Jesus is on the pages of all these psalms. He is the first and the last. The scriptures speak about him and point us to him. He fulfills them.

How about you? Have you done a daily reading of Psalms? What holds you back from doing it? Or, what did you learn when you did?

If you liked this post, you might also like: The Benefits of Using a Bible App

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• Meatless Fridays in Lent: Teaching Kids about Faith
• The Benefits of Adding a Spiritual Discipline for Lent
• 4 Things to Do for Lent in a Pandemic
• How Observing Lent Helps You Find Time for God
• What You Need to Do to Prepare for Lent
• The Way of the Cross: Ash Wednesday Homily by Father David Miller