How to Add a Bible Verse Widget to Your iPad Home Screen

The iPad's screen is big enough to hold more than app icons. There's usually a quiet corner of it that never gets used — and that corner is a good place for a verse to live.

Unlike a phone, where a single Lock Screen widget is often all the room you have, the iPad gives you a few different ways to keep a line of Scripture in view while you work, read, or just pass through. Here are the three easiest, from the one you'll use every day to the one that stays furthest out of the way.

1. The everyday way: a Home Screen widget

If you have Bible Clock installed, its verse widget can sit right on your iPad Home Screen, sized to actually fit a full verse and its reference.

• Touch and hold an empty spot on your Home Screen until the icons start to jiggle, then tap the + in the top corner.
• Search for Bible Clock and pick a size — the medium and large widgets both leave room for the whole verse, not just a fragment of it.
• Tap Add Widget, then drag it to a page you actually look at, not one you swipe past.

2. The glanceable way: a Lock Screen widget

iPadOS also lets you add widgets to the Lock Screen, so a verse can be there before you've unlocked anything at all.

• Touch and hold your Lock Screen, tap Customize, and choose the Lock Screen you want to edit.
• Tap the widget area beneath the clock and select Bible Clock.
• It updates on its own each day — nothing to open, nothing to check.

3. The out-of-the-way way: Today View

If you'd rather leave your Home Screen exactly as it is, Today View gives the widget its own space, one swipe from wherever you are.

• From your Lock Screen, or from the leftmost Home Screen page, swipe right to open Today View.
• Scroll down and tap Edit, then tap + to add the Bible Clock widget.
• It sits one gesture away — near enough to reach, far enough that it never competes with everything else you've pinned up front.

If you split your screen while working — Split View or Stage Manager with a widget panel alongside an app — the same widget can sit in the margin of whatever you're doing, without asking for a tap of its own.

A quiet note: none of this is meant to give your iPad one more thing to manage. The widget doesn't track whether you looked at it, and it isn't waiting for you to do anything with what it shows. Some days you'll read the verse slowly before you start working. Most days you'll barely register it before opening whatever app you actually came for. Both are fine — it's there either way.

Bible Clock puts the same daily verse — drawn from 84 hand-drawn faces — on your iPad, iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch. One purchase, no subscription.