A few days ago, during my regular session with someone whom I have been having weekly discussions over the weekly devotional guides that I have been writing, he told me that he usually spends some time before the session was to start to go over the guide and answer the questions, to prepare for our discussion. I had been assuming that he had been using the guides as they were intended, over the week, spent in the context of time alone with God.
I did not require him to be using my guides as the basis for his own quiet time—he is free to have his own structure—and so I asked him to describe his quiet time and basically his answer was that he did not have such a structure in his life.
Whenever he feels like he needs spiritual food he would read a book of the bible and either study it or meditate on it. Now and again he would spend time in worship, singing Christian songs. And of course he often prayed, for his needs and concerns, but also in thanksgiving and praise. These were the underpinnings of his spiritual life. My sessions with him were, to him, basically bible study and discussion.
It seemed to me that he had set aside this traditional form of spiritual endeavour and worked on what he understood to be the key elements and it is undeniable that he has a lot more content in what he was doing than many Christians; but I still asked whether he has a time that he considers to be the quiet time and that was when he said no. He asked me what I understood “the quiet time” to be.
I shared with him the analogy of the family dinner time.
The family dinner time is a family gathering and the agenda is food. The most major requirement is that everyone is together at the same time. The conversations however may vary, depending on what happened during the day, issues that needed to be discussed, plans to be made, concerns that accumulate over time—you get the idea. The parents may sneak in a command or two, or raise their concerns, or even respond to the matters raised or the incidents shared. However, they may also be just times when everyone is just having fun enjoying each other’s company. Because the family is gathered, these conversations could happen.
Families do not disintegrate if they don’t regularly have such times. Communication can still take place in many other ways. But such regular occasions keep family bonds fresh, maintain and repair possible conflicts and deepen family ties with thousands of life threads that bind them together.
This, for me, is what it means to have a regular time alone with God. It is a place where a Christian regularly meets with his God and conversations take place. God, through the Word that is a part of that time, may share his concerns, or emphasise a command, or comfort, or encourage, or rebuke. Because the time is also the occasion for the Christian to share with God about the things that are happening to him or around him, about people that are impressed on his heart, about the community that he is a part of—his church brothers and sisters, his friends, his family, his workmates—when God speaks there is a context where his Word may speak to.
I have been using my own “time alone with God” (TAWG) devotional guides ever since I started writing them. As I have shared, I make a copy on my Google Drive and I use Google Docs to write my thoughts. There are those who are very old school and use pen and paper and the printer.
Usually there is something to write about—something happened, someone spoke to me about something that I am concerned about, my own personal issues have flared up again, someone asked for prayer, a sermon on Sunday gave me food for thought, a conversation about church matters burdened me, work is stressing me out, I am feeling depressed—but sometimes nothing comes to mind. Sometimes the time is spent on writing out prayers for the concerns and people that burden me. When I pray I try to share my thoughts and concerns about the matter. It is after all a conversation with God.
I rarely could have my time alone with God every day but I aim to finish all my TAWG questions a session at a time, meaning that most weeks I have at least 3 days where there is a TAWG session. 3 days out of 7 I think is about minimum. Once a week is too sparse and there will be a disconnect with the life that is going on in and around you.
What I have found is that after some time these TAWG sessions become real conversations, as Word begins to interact with Life, and these conversations are not limited to the sessions. I become more responsive to God’s word and also more attuned to the life that is happening around me. God finds a way to speak to me through the Word that I am reading, the truths that I am drawing from the Word, the conclusions that I come to as characters in the Word interact with their God that now I am challenged to consider in my own interactions with my God and what he wants of me.
In this TAWG structure, the frequency is simple—at least 3 times a week. The agenda is simple—life as it is happening. The choice of the text is simple—whatever text is set in the guide.
Precisely because I wish to maintain a loose hold over the agenda in the devotional guides that I write here, I try to vary the text for the week between Old Testament and New Testament, narratives and discourses, Gospels and Psalms. I have found it more profitable to follow the text as an idea unfolds and so more often these days you will find that 2-3 weeks may be spent on the text in a particular chapter or book or letter (4 weeks on Revelation 2 is probably the longest) but I usually would then choose some other text that is a break from what was being used.
The questions seek to help the user get into the text. Usually it is difficult, even for me, to start on any given text, not knowing where to begin. The questions help me to just start by answering them. I don’t allow the questions to dictate where my thoughts flow as I get into the text although I usually try to answer them all because they may lead me to points of view that I have yet to consider. I confess that I have found that when my questions are too neutral they are not helpful but I try not to inject my thoughts and ideas into the questions. However, often they will force you to make conclusions because in doing so you will have to take a position (which you can always change because that is part of the learning process).
But it is important to appreciate that time alone with God is not meant to be a bible study although at times it may be just that. It is a conversation between you and God, interacting over the matters in your mind and on your heart, and those that are in God’s mind and on his heart and the frequent merging of the two, when you begin to care about what he cares about, and you begin to realise that he cares about what you care about.
The quiet time, or time alone with God as I see it, is a neutral structure that God can use, unlike when the interaction is fully under the control of the Christian disciple, as in the case described above.
The question to consider is whether such a structure, where time, context and content is dictated by “life as it happens” but the principal participants, you and God, come together on a regular basis to have conversations, is important for the health of your spiritual life.
The next question is whether you have such a structure or an approximate equivalent.
Personally I think that it is a vital part of any spiritual life and in another article I will expand on it further. But for now I just need to point to Mark 1:35: Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.
If our Saviour and Lord, the Son of God who has a perfect relationship with the Father, maintains such a structure in his life while on earth, how much more we.