What Is a 'Quiet Time' For?

I grew up in an evangelical church. The folk there believed the Bible. They had worship, Sunday school and a youth group as regular events along with the occasional special something. I suppose that it had a good reputation as an evangelical church. But no one ever told me that it would be a good idea if I regularly read my Bible. That didn’t happen until I went off to college. I was involved in a Christian campus ministry. That’s where someone finally told me that reading my Bible was a good habit. So, that’s what I did. Each morning I had what our group called a ‘quiet time’. And doing that was really good. But I had this persistent question which, I suppose, reflected an aspect of my personality which is still with me. ‘Why am I doing this? What’s the goal? What am I trying to accomplish?’ I read little booklets on the topic of the ‘quiet time’. I read articles about it. I looked for an answer to my question. But I never found an answer. And that bothered me. I wanted to have an answer for that so that I could work at this ‘quiet time’ thing in the right way and, as a result, achieve the goal, whatever it might be. But I found myself quite frustrated. I wasn’t finding an answer. 

For any of you who might find yourself in a similar situation, I’d like to offer what I hope will be a helpful answer. To do that we’ll need to ask a different question. What’s the goal of the Gospel? There are many good answers to this question, depending on the particulars that you are looking at. Here’s one of them: to have our communion with God restored. Sin destroys communion with God. This is shown quite graphically with the first sin. Adam and Eve enjoyed God’s special presence in the Garden. But that was lost because they sinned. Communion with God was destroyed. Jesus has come to restore that communion. And His work of restoration will be completed after our resurrection when we see God face to face. His work will be completed then, but He is working at it now. 

And that gets us to this ‘quiet time’ or whatever you want to call it. (I call it ‘morning prayer’.) It’s our time to enjoy a taste of communion with God. It won’t be as good as it will be later. But it can get to be very good. That means that this time isn’t about reading your Bible so you can learn stuff from some passage of Scripture, aka ‘education’. And it isn’t about working through the next few names and items on your prayer list. It’s about enjoying a bit of communion with God. To be sure, reading and thinking about Scripture just might be a part of this, as long as it is about communion and not mere knowledge. And obviously, there will be prayer. But it will be a kind of prayer that is about being and feeling close to God. 

Now, it’s true that with an ‘educational’ quiet time you can tell yourself that you learned something new from your Bible reading. And you can check off some items on your prayer list. As a result, you can tell yourself that you made some progress and feel good about the time you spent. But progress toward what? Remember, a key goal of the Gospel is for you to enjoy God. That will take something more than Bible education and a prayer list with lots of check marks. It will take spending time communing with God.