- find God
- discern, enbrace, and act upon God's presence in their lives
- experience life as a sacred journey
- learn to live an intentional and meaningful spiritual life
Even the man who knows not Christ but knows himself is bound to love God, for his own innate common sense cries out that he owes all to God.
- St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Stand at the crossroads and look;
Ask for the ancient paths, ask where the
good way is, and walk in it, and you will
find rest for your souls. Jeremiah 6:16
Maybe you have "just said no; but daily quiet time still eludes you. The problem may not be priorities, but instead goals. One of the great destroyers of consistent quiet time is
a lack of realism in setting daily goals. We all have different demands on our daily lives. These demands are not constant and will change during different seasons of our lives. Because of work schedules or the way our bodies function, we each have daily high and low times physically and mentally. Choose your quiet time according to your daily schedule and body clock.
Another unrealistic goal that causes quiet time failure is filling up our half-hour or hour quiet time with two or three hours of prayer and Bible-reading commitment. When planning a quiet time, we must remember our primary motive: relationship! Any effective quiet time must be relationship based and not performance drivcn. If we don't intimately know Him, then all of our effort is wasted.
The following are some general goals that can guide us in our quest for quiet time:
1) Start small. If you are just beginning the quiet time discipline or have experienced habitual failure, start with a manageable time period, say 10-15 minutes a day. You can always increase your time as you deepen in intimacy with the Father. Consistency is the goal, not quantity.
2) Start your quest at your best. For some, this may bc early morning, for others pcrhaps late evening when the children are in bed and the house is quiet. As mueh as possible, be con-
sistent in your meeting time. If you miss a day, put it behind you and go forward. God is not counting, neither should you.
3) Try to find a place apart from others. This minimizes distractions and interruptions. But be flexible, remembering that God is with you even in the midst of a busy city park.
4) Keep a short account of sin with God. What God convicts us of we must deal with on a daily, even moment-by-moment, basis. To do otherwise is to risk hardening our hearts to the
Holy Spirit's work in our lives and distancing ourselves from God.
5) Worship God! Sometimes we get so caught up with needs, ours and others', that we forget momentarily who we are meeting with. This is God, our Creator! He spoke and formed the stars. His hands carved the mountains and valleys. He
loves us and His Son died for us because of that love. Take time to worship Him and delight yourself in Him.
6) Meditate on Scripture. I enjoy using the Psalms during quiet time. The verses can easily stand alone for memorization and often lead me into praise or confession.
7) Set your prayer goals realistically. During my quiet time I follow a general priority list, leaving time for the Holy Spirit to open my heart to a person, situation, or event that He
desires me to pray for. Our priority lists will differ as much as our lives and ministries do.
Our quiet times have now become not just a few minutes of prayer and praise with God each day, but a gateway to a life of intimate relationship with our Creator and Lord, filled with powerful, Spirit-directed prayer for those things revealed to us by our loving, all-knowing Heavenly Father.
Jim Drake is the Senior Editor at YWAM Publishing, a ministry of Youth With A Mission
Go Back
Quiet Time Motive
When we decide to have a quiet time, our motive may not be the same as God's motive. Often we enter quiet time with a long list of needs concerning ourselves and our loved ones as well as a prayer agenda spanning the globe.
We must allot time for confession and repen tance, worship, reading God's Word, resisting the enemy, and praying for the lost. We proceed to segment our quiet time into short sections that must be hurried through lest we run out of "quiet time." Is this what God has called us to do'?
The Christian experience can be summed up in one word: relationship. Restored relationship with God and other people. When we repented and received Christ by faith, He forgave our sins, returning us to right relationship with God. I do not believe that our Father God then placed the weight of saving the world upon our shoulders. There is only one Savior and only one redeeming sacrifice-the Cross of Christ. Therefore, our motive must be that of a child in the presence of a loving Father. This can be defined as being in right relationship with God (allowing no known sin to come between us and Him), hearing His voice (quieting our hearts and laying down our agendas for His), and praying as the Holy Spirit leads us (in childlike faith).
Lifestyle Priorities
Life at the end of the twentieth century is vastly different from life during any other period in history. The space and information age has given us the ability to travel anywhere on the globe in a day and an unimaginable access to limitless vistas of information on the Internet. With all of this timesaving technology, why is it, then, that we seem to have less free time than any generation before us'?
Just because "it's there" doesn't mean weI have to experience "it." One of the great, camouflaged dangers facing Christians at the beginning of the 2lst century is allowing ourselves to have our dally priorities set tor us.
With head phones in our ears and our eyes dazzled by the
newest virtual reality game or evening sitcom, we find our quiet time slowly consumed .by harsh taskmasters that only take, giving nothing in return. The grim reality facing many of us is that our times of a quieted heart, and consequently, our intimacy with the Father, suffer
from an unwillingness to "just say no."
Could it be that our technology-driven world has succeeded in cluttering our lives with the unimportant and the unfulfilling? Perhaps we have unwittingly surrendered to slickly packaged and marketed diversions that steal our minutes, hours, and days. Perhaps our question to God should be, "Father, is there anything filling my hours and days that is spiritually unhealthy? Are unimportant diversions robbing me of valuable, intimate time with you?"
