Reader Story

I Called Myself a Christian for 30 Years. I'd Never Actually Read the Bible.

By Sarah M. Updated this week 6 min read

For forty days, twice a day, a nine-foot man in bronze armor walked into a valley and screamed for someone — anyone — to come and fight him. And for forty days, an entire army of grown, trained soldiers stared at the ground and said nothing.

Not one of them moved. For six weeks.

You know this story. And I'd bet almost anything you've never actually read it.

I hadn't. Thirty years calling myself a Christian — church every Sunday, grace before dinner, four different Bibles on the shelf — and I had never once read that story on the page. Only the version from childhood. The boy, the slingshot, the lucky rock.

What's actually written is darker, and stranger, and so much better. And it had been sitting in a book on my nightstand the whole time, waiting.

01Every year I started. Every year I quit in the same place.

Every January, like clockwork, I swore this was the year I'd finally read the whole thing. And every year, I did the one thing that guarantees you fail.

I opened to page one and started marching.

Genesis grabs you — creation, the flood, a man walking away from everything to follow a voice. Exodus keeps the momentum. And then, a few weeks in, the road runs straight into Leviticus.

And Leviticus is a wall.

Laws about grain offerings. Rules about mildew and skin conditions. Which fabrics you're allowed to wear. Page after page after page of it. That's where I stopped. Every single time — not because I'd lost my faith, but because I'd hit the driest fifty pages in the book, and fifteen tired minutes before bed could never carry me over them.

So the book went back on the shelf. And I added one more quiet mark to the pile of evidence that the problem was me. Not disciplined enough. Not spiritual enough. Not a real Christian.

02I was quitting right before the best parts

Here's what I didn't understand back then: everything worth reading is on the far side of that wall.

David walking into that valley with five stones — hundreds of pages past Leviticus. Daniel, sealed in a pit of lions overnight, answering the king from the dark at dawn — past it. The day one man drenched his own altar in water and then called fire down from the sky in front of four hundred and fifty people — past it. The sea splitting open, walls of water on both sides, a whole nation crossing on dry ground — past it.

Every one of those would keep you up at night. And every one of them sits just beyond the exact spot where nearly everyone quits.

That's not a faith problem. It's a design problem. Someone stacked the hardest, driest stretch of the book right at the front gate — and never told me there was another way in.

There is another way in. And the day I found it, thirty years of quitting ended for good.

03Nobody ever told me you don't have to read it in a straight line

The whole Bible can be arranged so you never stand at that wall.

Instead of one endless march from page one, it's laid across 365 days. And here's the piece that changes everything — each day, you don't read one thing. You read four.

A short piece of the Old Testament. A Psalm. A Proverb. A piece of the New Testament. Four short passages, braided together, every single day.

Sit with why that beats the wall. On the day the Old Testament piece drops you into the worst of Leviticus — it's short. A few minutes. And while you're in it, a Psalm is landing in your day, a Proverb is handing you something you can actually use, and the New Testament piece is three sentences into something you don't want to stop reading.

You're never stuck in the dry book, because you're never only in the dry book. The wall that beat me for thirty years never even gets built.

04You don't start on January 1. You start today.

No reading plan to track. No bookmarks. No math about where you're supposed to be. You open it to today's date and read. About fifteen minutes. Tomorrow picks up on its own.

Miss a day? You just read the next date. There's nothing to fall behind on, and nothing to catch up on — ever. The single thing that made me quit for three decades simply isn't possible anymore.

05What it actually is

It's called the Life Principles Daily Bible. It takes the complete Bible and lays it out in 365 daily readings — and every reading comes with Dr. Charles Stanley's notes right alongside it, so the hard parts finally land instead of flying past you.

Over 400,000 copies are in people's hands. And the reviews all tell the same story I just told you: people who tried for ten, fifteen, twenty years and never finished — reading the entire Bible in a single year with this. And then flipping back to day one to start again, by choice, because they couldn't stand for it to be over.

What readers keep saying

A year from today

You'll have read all of it. David in that valley, in full. Daniel in the dark. The fire falling on a soaked altar. The sea standing open. And every other story you've heard your whole life and somehow never actually reached.

Or you close this page, and next February looks exactly like the last one. The stories were always yours. You've just never had the version that finally lets you read them.