In Matthew 4:4 our Lord made a simple statement which brings before us the imortance of the Scriptures in our lives as Christians.  “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”.  The spiritual life that we have received from the God through our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ must be maintained by feeding upon the Word of God which is spiritual food to our spirit.  In my short experience as a Christian leader and a preacher I have come to know that the Scripture does not play a vital role in the lives of many believers.  Only a minority of believers read the Bible on a daily basis.  The devil would do everything possible to keep us away from God’s Word.  And he has effectively succeded in doing that.  Even some of the Christian leaders whom I have associated with do not have a regular reading of Scripture. 

The barriers of illiteracy among different people groups and unavailability of scriptures in certain languages is bad enough.  But the worst is that Christian believers though having the Bible in their hands still suffer from Scripture poverty.  This is because they have not understood the need of the scripture to maintain God given life in them.  The Lord says ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’.  If we do not have our lives saturated with the scripture we become ‘lifeless’, powerless and aimless.  Furthermore many of the embarrassingly strange practices among Christians in this generation are a result of the lack of the knowledge of the Word of God.  Christians are increasingly depending on their feelings in Worship and not the facts that are found in the Word of God.  The practice of ’receiving extra biblical revelations’ has further aggrevated the problem.  Christians are becoming more Pastor or Preacher dependent in receiving the truth and not Bible dependant.

To counter this growing tendancy I have always recommended that we must try to finish reading the Bible once through a calendar year.  In order to do that one needs to read about 3 chapters a day. Suggested pattern is 2 chapters from the Old Testament and 1 from the New.  It only takes about 15 to 20 minutes to do so.  Even the busiest could spare that amount of time on a daily basis.