Quiet Fire Devotional | TLDR - The Word

TLDR - The Word

We live in the age of TLDR—Too long, didn’t read. It’s shorthand for our impatience. It’s the way we signal that we’ve seen something, maybe even glanced at it, but don’t have the patience for the whole thing. Headlines instead of articles. Clips instead of conversations. A summary instead of a story. In some ways, it’s funny. In other ways, it’s frightening. Because TLDR is not just about reading habits—it’s a window into how we are training our attention, our desires, and even our souls.

Think about it. We now live in a world where we can get the gist of almost anything in seconds. Want to know the news? There’s a headline for that. Want to know what happened in a two-hour game? Thirty-second highlight reel. Want to know the plot of a book? Someone online already wrote a summary for you. And honestly, sometimes that’s helpful. Nobody has the capacity to sit with everything in full detail. But here’s the danger: what happens when that instinct—skim, scroll, skip—becomes the default way we engage with God’s Word?

Do we skim the Psalms like status updates? Do we breeze through the Gospels as if they were newsfeeds? Imagine sitting before God and saying, “Sorry, Lord… your Word was too long. I didn’t read.” That lands differently, doesn’t it? Suddenly TLDR doesn’t sound witty. It sounds empty. It sounds like a confession of misplaced priorities.

Here’s the thing: the Bible does not bend itself to our cultural impatience. The Scriptures don’t work on a TLDR setting. They are not quick hits of content designed to amuse us for a moment. They are bread for the hungry, water for the thirsty, truth that cuts, and comfort that heals. They don’t just inform; they form. They don’t just give us bits of wisdom to scroll past; they demand to be heard, wrestled with, meditated on, and carried into the marrow of our days.

Listen to how God Himself describes His Word: “Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?” (Jer. 23:29). That is not TLDR material. Fire cannot be skimmed; a hammer cannot be ignored. God’s Word is disruptive, weighty, and consuming. You don’t scroll past a hammer breaking stone. You stop. You notice. You either resist it or you are reshaped by it.

Of course, the resistance rises quickly in us. We say: “I don’t have time.” “It’s too hard.” “I already know the basics.” But what if those excuses are just the echo of a culture that has trained us to believe that only the quick is worthwhile? That if it doesn’t fit in a notification or a soundbite, it doesn’t deserve our energy?

Psalm 1 paints a different picture. The blessed person is not the one who skims, but the one who meditates on the law of the Lord day and night. That word meditate doesn’t mean “glance” or “get the gist.” It means to chew, to turn over, to murmur, to let it echo until it shapes you. In other words, the opposite of TLDR.

And this is not just about personal Bible reading. It also speaks to how we present the Gospel to others. In a TLDR culture, we can feel pressure to reduce the good news to a slogan: “God loves you,” “Jesus saves,” “Grace wins.” True? Absolutely. But the Gospel is not just a tagline. It’s not a bumper sticker or a marketing campaign. It is the story of a God who enters history, carries a cross uphill, rises from the dead, and calls us into a kingdom that will never end. That story cannot be reduced to five words without losing its gravity. Christ does not save with a headline; He rescues with a whole life, a whole death, a whole resurrection.

So what are we to do in a TLDR world? We can’t escape it. We can’t rewind to some imaginary past where everyone read slowly by candlelight. But we can resist its pull on our souls. We can learn to linger. To slow down. To give God’s Word the time and space it demands. To actually read—not skim, not scroll, not rush, but read.

That doesn’t mean we turn Bible reading into a new form of performance or guilt. The point is not to make sure we consume three chapters a day as though we’re earning credits toward spiritual achievement. The point is to dwell with God, to hear His voice, to let His truth soak into places in us that headlines never reach.

It may feel awkward at first, like learning how to breathe deeply in a world that only breathes in short gasps. But over time, the Word changes us. It grounds us. It steadies us. It reshapes us into people who do not just snack on God’s truth but feast on it.

So maybe the call of the Gospel in a TLDR world is not to compete with it, not to make God’s Word shorter, snappier, or easier. Instead, maybe the call is to invite people into a slower way. To remind them—and ourselves—that some things can’t be skimmed. Some things, like truth, like grace, like the voice of the Living God, must be read, heard, and lived in full.

TLDR may work for headlines. But eternity is not a summary. And His Word? It is never too long. It is our life.