A lot of people take advantage of their entertainment streaming services to binge-watch multiple episodes of a particular TV show in one sitting.

How long would it take to spend the same amount of time reading … the Bible?

A few years ago, Crossway.org published an article titled “You Have More Time for Bible Reading Than You Think.” The results are rather interesting. (The chart below is from that article.)

To binge-watch all five seasons of Breaking Bad (I do not recommend you do!) would take 62 hours. On the other hand, if you don’t binge-watch, but “only” watch TV 30 minutes a day, you are still sitting there for 182 hours a year.

According to the chart below, reading the entire Bible would take an average reader 74.5 hours. Think about that for a moment.

If you read daily for 30 minutes at a slower speed of 170 words per minute (half a page), that is about 5,000 words or 16+ pages. At that rate per day, in one year, you could read the Bible (about 750,000 words) and still have 215 days left in the year.

Thirty minutes a day, at a rate of 170 words per minute, allows you to read 1.8 million words in 365 days. To make yourself feel very guilty, the site How Long to Read calculates the time to read any of the thousands of books in their database. Then compare that to the chart below.

The point is that you can be reading the most important book of them all, every day, and still have time left over for the rest!

In other words, be wary of binge-watching! The time spent could be time better spent.