Devotions

A 2025 report from the American Bible Society suggests that Bible use is rising—especially among young adults who, until recently, were among the least likely to open a Bible at all.

According to State of the Bible: USA 2025, the percentage of U.S. adults who read the Bible outside of church at least three times a year increased from 38% to 41% in the last year. That’s roughly 10 million more adults engaging with Scripture—marking the first increase in Bible use since 2021.

The sharpest rise appears among millennials, where reported Bible use jumped by 29% in a single year. Gen Z also showed noticeable movement. It’s a striking turnaround, especially considering that both groups have typically lagged behind older generations in religious activity. But the numbers may not be as clear-cut as they seem.

The study also found that Scripture engagement—a metric that factors in not just Bible reading, but how much Scripture influences someone’s choices, relationships, and worldview—rose from 11% to 15% among Gen Z, and from 12% to 17% among millennials.

The study defines Scripture engagement broadly, factoring in a range of self-reported behaviors and attitudes. It also relies on a survey sample of just 2,656 adults—a relatively small group to draw sweeping generational conclusions from, especially when measuring a spike as large as 29%.

Still, even if the numbers are more hopeful than definitive, they point to a growing spiritual curiosity among younger Americans. You can read the full report here.

Some of the most successful people in history have done their best work in coffee shops. Pablo Picasso, JK Rowling, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bob Dylan. Whether they’re painters, singer-songwriters, philosophers, or writers, people across nations and centuries have tapped into their creativity working away at a table in a café.

There are many ways coffee shops trigger our creativity in a way offices and homes don’t. Research shows that the stimuli in these places make them effective environments to work; the combination of noise, casual crowds, and visual variety can give us just the right amount of distraction to help us be our sharpest and most creative. (So, no, it’s not just that double espresso.)

Some of us stick in our earbuds as soon as we sit down to work in a public setting. But scientists have known for years that background noise can benefit our creative thinking. Several studies have shown that a low-to-moderate level of ambient noise in a place like a cafeteria can actually boost your creative output. The idea is that if you’re very slightly distracted from the task at hand by ambient stimuli, it boosts your abstract thinking ability, which can lead to more creative idea generation.

And while that “Goldilocks” level of noise is different for everyone, audio stimuli in the background also help us improve decision making. Some have even dubbed it “the coffee shop effect.” So, the jazz music, light conversation, and barista banging coffee grounds out of the grinder aren’t a nuisance, they could help you come up with your next magnum opus.

There’s also the fact that in a coffee shop, we’re surrounded by people who’ve come to do the same thing as us, which acts as a motivator. “It’s analogous to going to the gym for a workout,” says Sunkee Lee, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “One of the biggest things about coffee shops is the social-facilitation effect: you go there, you see other people working and it puts you in a mood where you just naturally start working as well. Just observing them can motivate you to work harder.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Bible Study; Planning; Small Groups; Togetherness - There several intriguing applications here that range from the benefit of small group Bible studies in contrast to solo devotional times, to the benefit of having board meetings away from the usual setting. We all could benefit from surrounding ourselves with fellow believers who come together to motivate each other just by being in the same room.

There’s a particular trend that has come to dominate videos on social media. It’s called “retention editing,” because of its ability to keep users visually engaged, and it’s typified by quick pacing, loud sound effects, and cutting the natural pauses that typify live speech. With the rise of short-form video on apps like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, the style is everywhere.

Dara Pesheva is a teenager who moonlights as a video editor for content creators. “Every clip should be under two seconds,” says Pesheva, who says that flashing graphics, subtitles, and movement are staples in the average user’s video diet. Noah Kettle of Moke Media Company, refers to this as the “Beastification of YouTube,” referring to influencer superstar Jimmy Donaldson, known on his channel as “MrBeast.”

MrBeast uses a similar style, punctuated by ambitious action sequences, and with over 250 million subscribers, his aesthetic choices have a huge trickle-down effect as many other users copy it hoping for similar success.

“It’s designed to be addictive,” says David McNamee, who heads a social media brand agency. “It’s like a slot machine with bells and whistles that are keeping you entertained because the [video] is so bright and it’s loud. It doesn’t matter what the content is, because your brain is being told this is entertaining because it’s flashy.”

But even MrBeast is now having second thoughts. On X he tweeted out a plea: “get rid of the ultra-fast paced/overstim era of content.” His most recent videos have trended toward better storytelling, yelling less, and letting scenes breathe more. Though these have resulted in longer videos, his views have only increased.

Pesheva says retention editing is problematic long-term because of its prolonged impact on the end user. “People around my age can’t focus. They have very short attention spans. They’re used to TikTok, and so editors have to adjust for Gen Z. They have to adjust to the fact that people can’t keep their attention on something for more than a second if it’s not entertaining.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In this frantic world of information overload competing for our attention, it is crucial to learn to slow down and take time to evaluate and absorb the information we are consuming. This is especially true in our reading and meditating on the Word of God.

When researchers for the American Bible Society’s annual State of the Bible report saw 2022’s survey statistics, they found it hard to believe the results. The data said roughly 26 million people had mostly or completely stopped reading the Bible in the last year.

“We reviewed our calculations. We double-checked our math and ran the numbers again … and again,” John Plake, lead researcher for the American Bible Society, wrote in the 2022 report. “What we discovered was startling, disheartening, and disruptive.”

In 2021, about 50 percent of Americans said they read the Bible on their own at least three or four times per year. That percentage had stayed more or less steady since 2011.

But in 2022, it dropped 11 points. Now only 39 percent say they read the Bible multiple times per year or more. It is the steepest, sharpest decline on record.

According to the 12th annual State of the Bible report, it wasn’t just the occasional Scripture readers who didn’t pick up their Bibles as much in 2022 either. More than 13 million of the most engaged Bible readers—measured by frequency, feelings of connection to God, and impact on day-to-day decisions—said they read God’s Word less.

Currently, only 10 percent of Americans report daily Bible reading.

Do you have a habit of picking up books that you never quite get around to reading? If this sounds like you, you might be unwittingly engaging in tsundoku - a Japanese term used to describe a person who owns a lot of unread literature.

Proffesor Andrew Gerstle of the University of London explains the term might be older than you think. It can be found in print as early as 1879. The word "doku" is a verb meaning "reading" and "tsun" means "to pile up.” So, when put together, "tsundoku" has the meaning of buying reading material and piling it up.

Does it only work for books? You might not be surprised to know some people have applied the term to other aspects of their lives. In a popular post on Reddit people discussed how this term could explain their relationship with films, television shows, and even clothing. One of the most popular interpretations concerned video games, with various people referencing their "vast, untouched software libraries" on game distribution platforms like Steam.

Possible Preaching Angle:

How many of us find ourselves with the tsundoku habit of buying Christian books or new versions of the Bibles but never reading them? Or going to Christian seminars, taking copious notes, but never referring to them again? Let’s be “doers of the Word and not hearers only!” (Jam. 1:22).

Cameron Perrin, a 26-year-old software engineer, talks about his experience with the productivity hack known as "monk mode:"

As a person who can easily fall into procrastination and a lack of focus, I found myself constantly struggling to achieve my goals — and I couldn't afford to be so distracted. Every workday, I would start strong but would soon get derailed by scrolling social media, reading articles, or just aimlessly browsing the Internet. By the time I caught myself, my train of thought would be gone and I'd have to spend five minutes just figuring out where I left off.

Then I came across an article about "monk mode," which is a method for giving your full attention to whatever you are working on for a set period of time. (The article describes “monk mode” as adopting the isolation and self-discipline practices of monks).

I began by committing to two-hour blocks of monk mode at a time. I eliminated as many distractions as I could. I turned off my phone notifications and blocked social-media sites on my laptop since I knew I was spending way too much time on these activities. I calculated I was (wasting) one to two hours a day. And when factoring in the time it would take to refocus and pick up where I left off, it was roughly three hours of time wasted.

To help maximize my results with the technique, I created a strict routine. The night before each workday, I made a list of the tasks I needed to accomplish the next day and set a time frame for how long I would commit to “monk mode.” Then I woke up at 5 a.m., had coffee, read my Bible, and then entered “monk mode” to begin tackling that list.

“Monk mode” changed my life by showing me how powerful my time really is when I'm disciplined and sticking to a routine. By eliminating distractions, I was able to dramatically increase my work productivity and truly enjoy my downtime.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This technique is not only important for a career, but it can also apply to our spiritual life. Distractions can easily divert us when we are trying to read the Bible and pray. Intentionally isolating ourselves from the phone, internet, social media, and other interruptions can help us focus and enhance our time with God.

One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki. They had the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.

The experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone proposed that perhaps quiet wasn’t such a bad thing. That got them thinking.

A few months later, the delegation issued a slick “Country Brand Report.” It highlighted a host of marketable themes, (but) one key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or berries. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”

People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.

The next year, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption “Silence, Please.” Eva Kiviranta, who manages social media for VisitFinland.com, explains “We decided, instead of saying that it’s really empty and really quiet and nobody is talking about anything here, let’s embrace it and make it a good thing.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Bible also emphasizes the need for occasional restful silence in our pursuit of God. Prayer (Luke 5:16), seeking God’s will before making decisions (Luke 6:12), and rest from a busy ministry (Mark 6:31) all led Jesus to model withdrawal to quiet places (Matt. 14:13).

Sometimes, all it takes is a minor inconvenience to ruin your whole day. It has been revealed that the most stressful time of the day is 7:23am. On average people will experience three dramas each day, with the first drama of the day typically happening by around 8:18am. These stressful situations could be anything from being stuck in traffic or waking up late, to spilling things on clothing, and tripping in public which are also likely to make people feel foul.

The research found that tiredness, an interrupted night's sleep, and a busy day at work were among the top causes of such dramas. Zuzana Bustikova, a spokesperson for a wellbeing brand, said: "Often when we think 'drama' we think big, but the research shows how much of an impact seemingly small niggles can have on our daily moods.”

According to the survey, the following are some of the top everyday “dramas” adults experience:

• Getting stuck in traffic
• Spilling something down clothing (food, drink, make-up, toothpaste)
• Waking up late and being late for work
• Struggling to find a parking space
• Forgetting bags at the supermarket
• Public transport being cancelled
• Sending a text message to the wrong person
• Checking your bank balance and having less money than you expected
• Clothes you want to wear being in the wash
• Realizing an email you thought you’d sent is in your “drafts”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Taking small steps to build our emotional resilience, even on those difficult days, can make a huge difference in helping us live life to the fullest. For a Christian these small steps can include having a regular quiet time with God every morning. This will center our thoughts on him and give us resources to meet life’s frustrations and stresses that are inevitable each day.

Bible reading dropped dramatically in 2022. It is unclear why. Roughly 50 percent of American adults reported opening Scripture at least three times a year every year from 2011 to 2021, according to American Bible Society surveys. Then, in 2022, that number declined to 39 percent.

That means that amid record inflation, threats of nuclear war in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and ongoing debates about the state of democracy, there were about 26 million Americans who stopped reading the Bible.

More than half of Americans say they wish they read the Bible or read it more, however, creating an opportunity for Christians to invite their neighbors to deeper engagement with God’s Word. Younger people, in particular, say they are drawn to Bible reading plans and Bible studies that look at whole chapters or complete stories.

Of the 39% of Bible readers:

27% Read the Bible in print

19% Read the Bible on an app

18% Read the Bible online

11% Listen to the Bible on a podcast

In an interview with Denzel Washington, it noted that the actor has been getting more explicit about his Christian convictions. In 2019 Washington called himself “a vessel of God.” Privately over coffee with the interviewer Washington added:

The enemy is the inner me. The Bible says in the last days — I don’t know if it’s the last days, it’s not my place to know — but it says we’ll be lovers of ourselves. The No. 1 photograph today is a selfie, “Oh, me at the protest.” “Me with the fire.” “Follow me.” “Listen to me.”

We’re living in a time where people are willing to do anything to get followed. What is the long or short-term effect of too much information? It’s going fast and it can be manipulated obviously in a myriad of ways. And people are led like sheep to slaughter.

Don’t play with God. Don’t play with God. You hear what I said? Don’t play with God. You heard what I said? Don’t play with God.

Then the interviewer mentions that Washington urged her to download and use a daily Bible reading app. Washington said. “You have to fill up that bucket every morning. It’s rough out there. You leave the house in the morning. Here they come, chipping away. By the end of the day, you’ve got to refill that bucket.”

TikTokers have remarkably short attention spans. Nearly 50 percent of users surveyed by TikTok said videos longer than a minute long were stressful; a third of users watched videos online at double speed.

The average TikTok user—of which there are one billion worldwide—spends an hour and 25 minutes on the app every day, according to data shared by TikTok. The average TikTok user opens the app to watch videos 17 times a day.

TikTok quoted a speed-watching young man in his 20s. He said, “It’s not because I don’t have time, but because I can’t concentrate. I can’t concentrate.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The hunger for faster information, new content, and exciting daily trends is only continuing to grow. In a world where we have access to more knowledge than ever (Dan. 12:4), how do we slow down enough to gain wisdom?

In his recent book, The Wisdom Pyramid, Brett McCracken shares the following story about his father:

I will always remember my dad's Bible. As a kid, it was a fixture in our house. Thick, black leather-bound, with gold leaf edges; stuffed full of church bulletins, Scripture, memory cards, and who knows what else. The well-worn pages were adorned with underlined verses, variously colored highlighted sections, and scribbled margins. I saw dad with it almost every day—studying during his quiet time, preparing a Sunday, school lesson, or maybe leading our family in a dinnertime devotional. The presence of dad's Bible nearby was a comfort. I think it made the Bible more credible to me that, for my dad, it wasn't just a prop to bring to church on Sundays. It was his beloved source of guidance for everyday life.

My life was full of the Bible: learning Old Testament stories on flannel graph in Sunday school; memorizing the order of the Bible's sixty-six books in Vacation Bible School; doing "sword drills" in Awana; memorizing the "Romans Road"; singing songs that went:

The B-I-B-L-E

Yes that's the book for me!

I stand alone on the Word of God: the B-I-B-L-E!

The Bible was the book that shaped my life more than anything else, which is odd looking back on it: an Oklahoma kid being profoundly shaped by an ancient collection of Jewish literature and two-thousand-year-old Mediterranean letters. But I was, and I am.

And my story isn't unique. The Bible has been a treasured source of truth and life all over the world, across countless generations. It manages to speak to the soccer mom in San Diego as much as the truck driver in Taipei; it guides the life of a skateboarding teenager in 2020 Buenos Aires as much as it did the blacksmith in 1520 Liverpool. Everywhere you go in the world, people who share almost nothing else in common can say in unison: "The B-I-B-L-E Yes, that's the book for me!" This can be said of no other book in the world. No other source of truth is as universally beloved and consistently cross-cultural as the Christian Bible.

London cabbies have been an iconic fixture in any London street scene for decades. Now the black taxi cab and their extraordinary cabbies are the focal point of a new expedition into Alzheimer’s research.

Cabbies have an incredible knowledge of London streets that seems to confer some protection against Alzheimer’s Disease—this could be clinically relevant to struggling patients, or those seeking to mitigate their risks.

Since 1865 London cabbies have been required to pass a difficult test known as “the Knowledge” to prove that they can find 100,000 businesses and landmarks in a labyrinth of tens of thousands of streets.

The series of exams — which take three to four years to complete — have been hailed as possibly the most difficult memorization test in the world. To be fully licensed to drive anywhere in London, a cabbie needs to know how to plot routes without a GPS on about 26,000 streets spanning a six-mile radius from London’s center point.

But London cabbies’ skills are now being tested for a different reason: to determine whether their brains hold clues that might be applied to Alzheimer’s research. A project called Taxi Brains is underway at University College London to study the brains of London cabbies as they map out taxi routes while undergoing MRI scans. The hippocampus regions of taxi drivers’ brains — which play an important role in learning and memory — appear to grow larger the longer the drivers are on the job while the same region is known to shrink in people with Alzheimer’s.

Research lead, Prof. Hugo Spiers said, “Maybe there’s something very protective about working out your spatial knowledge on a daily basis, like these guys do. It may not necessarily be spatial, but just using your brain rather than Google Maps might actually help—in the same way that physical fitness is important.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God’s Word also confirms that Scripture memorization is crucial to our spiritual health. We must not use Google, smartphones, and the Internet as a crutch in “hiding God’s Word in our hearts” (Psa. 119:11).

Breathing is not an activity that anyone is feeling confident about right now. We spend our days covering our mouths and noses with masks, struggling to inhale and exhale. COVID-19 has turned us into a planet of breath-obsessed people. But as hard as it might be to fathom now, there is a silver lining here: Breathing is a missing pillar of health, and our attention to it is long overdue.

Most of us misunderstand breathing. We see it as passive, something that we just do. Breathe, live; stop breathing, die. But breathing is not that simple and binary. How we breathe matters, too.

Inside the breath you just took, there are more molecules of air than there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. We each inhale and exhale some 30 pounds of these molecules every day—far more than we eat or drink. The way that we take in that air and expel it is as important as what we eat, how much we exercise, and the genes we’ve inherited.

Neurologists and pulmonologists at Stanford, Harvard, and other institutions found that breathing habits were directly related to physical and mental health. Breathing properly can allow us to live longer and healthier lives. Breathing poorly, by contrast, can exacerbate and sometimes cause a laundry list of chronic diseases: asthma, anxiety, hypertension, and more.

Possible Preaching Angle:

You wouldn't try to go through life holding your breath. So don't go through life without Bible reading and praying. Let your soul breathe. Oxygenate with the Bible; and breathe out the CO2 of prayer as you speak back to God your wonder, worry, and waiting. Keep the back and forth communion with him all day long.

Author Jen Wilkin writes:

I learned to cook with the most basic tools under the tutelage of my step-mother. Bacon was fried in a cast-iron skillet, turned with a fork. Pie crust was formed with a wire pastry cutter in a mixing bowl. Biscuits were cut using an empty can. Simple tools, employed faithfully, yielding all manner of goodness.

But as my interest in cooking grew, I moved on to more complicated tools that promised less work or mess. My kitchen brimmed with single-use utensils and fancy appliances, but the crispy bacon, flaky pie crusts, and warm biscuits of my early years did not improve. In many cases, they degraded, or the task of locating and employing the right implement dulled my interest.

It is possible to overcomplicate simple practices that yield good things. Just as with cooking, so with reading our Bibles. The availability of online commentaries, lexicons, interlinear Bibles, and searchable databases can make us forget basic, tried-and-true tools that serve us well. When it comes to Bible reading, avoid overcomplicating the recipe.

Consider recovering these five simple “utensils” that may have gotten lost in the drawer:

• Simple repetitive reading of a Book of the Bible without stopping to analyze it.
• Consult a map in the back of your Bible to draw you into the setting.
• Keep a Bible timeline to put events into historical perspective.
• Compare several English translations in hard-to-understand passages.
• Check an English dictionary for unfamiliar words.

Writing systems are thousands of years old and are found in ancient Sumer, China, and Egypt. But even in the most literate ancient societies only a small fraction of people ever learned to read, rarely more than 10 percent. So, when did people decide that everyone should learn to read?

The move toward mass literacy began in the 16th century with the belief that every person should read and interpret the Bible for themselves. This belief began to rapidly diffuse across Europe with the eruption of the Protestant Reformation. It was initiated in 1517 by Martin Luther’s delivery of his famous 95 theses. Protestants came to believe that children had to study the Bible for themselves to better know their God. In the wake of the spread of Protestantism, the literacy rates in Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands rose. Motivated by eternal salvation, parents and leaders made sure the children learned to read.

Religious beliefs also helped spur the beginning of state-funded schooling. As early as 1524, Martin Luther emphasized the need for parents to ensure their children’s literacy and placed the responsibility for creating schools on secular governments. In the 16th century, reformer John Knox pressured the Scottish government to initiate free public education for all children. One of his reasons was that everyone should have the skills to study the Bible.