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The Quiet Time Performance
- 04/20/09
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Like all Christians, I love my quiet time. I am always thrilled at the prospect of sitting down for a few quiet moments before a busy day to spend some time alone with God—a few moments one-on-one with my Creator. I love to open the Bible and to carefully and systematically read the Word of God, allowing it to penetrate my heart. I love to sit and think deeply and meditatively about the Scriptures and to seek ways that I can apply God’s word to my heart. I love to pray to God, pouring out my heart in confession, praise, thanksgiving and petition. It is always the best and greatest part of my day. I couldn’t live without my quiet time.
But that’s not reality, is it?
I sometimes love my quiet time. I am sometimes thrilled at the prospect of sitting down to spend some time with God; too often, though, I dread it. I’d rather catch up on the news or spend some time writing or reading a good book or find out how badly the Blue Jays beat the A’s the day before. My quiet time is often invaded by little children, demanding my time and attention. Too often I hate to make my way through a difficult book of the Bible and dread spending another day reading through the prophecies of Isaiah. Thinking requires more time and effort than I am willing to give and it usually seems that a quick, cursory prayer is enough to make me feel that I’ve done my duty and asked God to bless my day and to forgive me for being a jerk with my kids the night before. I skim Scripture, breathe a prayer, and settle down to my breakfast.
That’s a little closer to reality, right?
In The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges provides two scenarios and then a question. In the first, he describes a good day. “You get up promptly when your alarm goes off and have a refreshing and profitable quiet time as you read your Bible and pray. Your plans for the day generally fall into place, and you somehow sense that presence of God with you. To top it off, you unexpectedly have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is truly searching. As you talk with the person, you silently pray for the Holy Spirit to help you and to also work in your friend’s heart.” We’ve all had days like that. But we’ve also all had days like this: “You don’t arise at the first ring of your alarm. Instead, you shut it off and go back to sleep. When you awaken, it’s too late to have a quiet time. You hurriedly gulp down some breakfast and rush off to the day’s activities. You feel guilty about oversleeping and missing your quiet time, and things just generally go wrong all day. You become more and more irritable as the day wears on, and you certainly don’t sense God’s presence in your life. That evening, however, you unexpectedly have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is really interested in receiving Christ as Savior.” Bridges then asks if you would enter into those two witnessing opportunities with a different degree of confidence. Think about it for a moment. If you’re like most Christians, I suspect you would feel less confident about witnessing on a bad day then on a good day. You would feel less confidence that God would speak in and through you and that you would be able to share your faith forcefully and with conviction.
Why is it that we tend to think this way? According to Bridges, we’ve come to believe that God’s blessing on our lives is somehow conditional upon our spiritual performance. In other words, if we’ve performed well and done our quiet time as we ought to have done, we have put ourselves in a place where God can bless us. We may not consciously articulate this, but we prove that we believe it when we have a bad day and are certain that on this day we are absolutely unworthy of God’s blessings. This attitude “reveals an all-too-common misconception of the Christian life: the thinking that, although we are saved by grace, we earn or forfeit God’s blessings in our daily lives by our performance.”
Perhaps you, like me, have too often turned quiet time into a performance. If you perform well for God, you enter your day filled with confidence that God will bless you, and that He will have to bless you. You feel that your performance has earned you the right to have a day filled with His presence, filled with blessings, and filled with confidence. And, of course, when you turn in a poor performance, you feel that God is in heaven booing you and heaving proverbial rotten vegetables in the form of removing His presence and, in the words of a friend, “dishing out bummers.”
Quiet time becomes tyrannical when you understand it as a performance. Bridges provides a pearl of wisdom. “Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.” Whether you are having a good day or a bad day, the basis of your relationship with is not your performance, for even your best efforts are but filthy rags. Instead, your relationship is based on grace. Grace does not just save you and then leave you alone. No, grace saves you and then sustains you and equips you and motivates you. You are saved by grace and you then live by grace. Whether in the midst of a good day or bad, God does not base His relationship with you on performance, but on whether or not you are trusting in His Son.
Greg Johnson of St. Louis Center for Christian Study wrote an interesting tract entitled “Freedom from Quiet Time Guilt.” Johnson wrote about something I had only recently realized myself. “That half hour every morning of Scriptural study and prayer is not actually commanded in the Bible.” Imagine that. He goes on to say, “As a theologian, I can remind us that to bind the conscience where Scripture leaves freedom is a very, very serious crime. It’s legalism rearing its ugly little head again. We’ve become legalistic about a legalistic command. This is serious.” We have somehow allowed our quiet time, in its length, depth or consistency, to become the measure of our relationship with God. But “your relationship with God—or, as I prefer to say, God’s relationship with you—is your whole life: your job, your family, your sleep, your play, your relationships, your driving, your everything. The real irony here is that we’ve become accustomed to pigeonholing our entire relationship with God into a brief devotional exercise that is not even commanded in the Bible.” So what, then, does Scripture command? It commands that the Word of God be constantly upon your heart. You are to pray, to read the Scripture and to meditate upon it, but you are to do so from a joyful desire, and not mere performance-based duty. You are to do so throughout your whole life, and not merely for a few minutes each morning. Like Johnson, you will come to realize that the “goal isn’t that we pray and read the Bible less, but that we do so more—and with a free and needy heart.”
So do not allow quiet time to become performance. View it as a chance to grow in grace. Begin with an expression of your dependency upon God’s grace, and end with an affirmation of His grace. Acknowledge that you have no right to approach God directly, but can approach Him only through the work of His Son. Focus on the gospel as the message of grace that both saves and sustains. And allow quiet time to become a gift of worship you present to God, and a gift of grace you receive from Him.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
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Comments (28)
“Quiet time becomes tyrannical when you understand it as a performance”
Amen. Great book by Jerry Bridges. I was jsut reading it the other day.
Excellent post as well. Edifying and encouraging.
It’s an ever perpetual thing, learning to live by faith, and not sight, or feelings. Faith in the Spirit’s grace and power brings liberty. The works of the good law kills.
Amen!Time with the Lord should be our privilege. I will say that I feel that is indeed our duty to commune with God, but we should not feel it as a duty but as the pleasure that it should be. Even conviction during quite time brings peace, so why do we resist?
Furthermore, why do we think that in God’s eyes, our merit is now based on spiritual performance? When we were not saved, and dead in sin, complete heathens, God saved us and drew us by His gracious mercy and love. But now that we are saved, and His sons, and co-heirs with Christ, he holds us to a higher standard to continue receiving that mercy which was given undeservedly in the first place?
Heck no! :D
Could i chance suggesting something which might make me missunderstood?Though i would vehemently fight against legalism or guilt-driven disciplines. Doesn’t there seem to be a growing trend on subjects like this, that only relieve stress but don’t really lead us to greater pursuit of God? Certainly not arguing for a ‘performance’ lifestyle. Yet there IS a connection between life and devotion. And it’s even more fearful to be a young guy who sees a downward spiral in a pursuit of God, the older godly generation (not to mention those who are dead) and their emphasis on pursuing God seems to be fading. Young guys (a great many) just want to go to seminary, conferences, and pic the brains and methods of these guys leaving their practices behind.Is there no use to the means of grace (can we NOT bear more fruit with a greater pursuit of God?). Imagine i wrote a book to ease the condemnation pastors feel when they haven’t prepared for a sermon (not looking at the languages, historical context, checking the commentaries) and i tell them it’s by grace they minister and not to worry about the legalism of preperation since it’s not about performance.I hope i’m not misunderstood, I just think if we continue to take away from one means of grace that will lead to other areas as well (like many parents who claim ‘train up a child…’ to mean no matter what i do God will bless them)
Wonderful post. Thanks Tim! I’m refreshed immensely.
Although I must admit, I DO genuinely love my quiet times in the morning. To read the Word and pray freely to God is just something I can’t live without. And although God doesn’t grant us power, grace, and mercy according to how strong our daily QT performance levels are, I find it helps to have some sort of discipline in this area. Jesus set a good example by getting up early in the morning to pray (Mark 1:35) although you’re right, we are not commanded in the Bible to have a strict QT.
However, when so much of the day conspires to distract and pull me away from God, I find it helpful to devote time in the morning to the Lord. It’s not so much about earning God’s blessings with my deeds; I know he freely gives His grace regardless of who I am or what I do. Rather it’s about beating my body into subjection, offering myself as a living sacrifice to God through daily acts of worship. I sometimes feel like David who didn’t want to offer God a sacrifice that cost him nothing (2 Samuel 24:24).
My QT is precious and something I would like to develop more and more. Thanks for reminding us though that God is faithful even when we’re unfaithful. Despite my best efforts, I can never have a perfect stretch of QTs. But just because I fail now and again to have a reasonable time alone with God doesn’t mean the Lord will send retaliatory bummers to thwart my days. God is good!
Thank you for this thoughtful post.
I have often thought about this. While I enjoy my time with God in the morning, there are times when I war with myself over it. My flesh frequently wants to take a wonderful time of blessing and make it a perscriptive duty. On the inevitable day when I miss that time I am plagued with guilt so I have to keep preaching the cross to myself throughout that day.
It is amazing how our sinful flesh can take any wonderful, God blessed activity and turn it into a legalistic standard.
I’ve not read Bridges’ book yet, but it sounds like one that I should get and read soon. Thanks again for these thoughts.
Good food for thought, Tim. Thanks. Although I cannot think of a command in Scripture to practice daily quiet time, I am constantly aware of the Greatest Command to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength”. It has certainly been the testimony of Scripture, saints of old, and saints of contemporary that the human heart is stirred with affections for God through daily Scripture study, meditation and prayer. I guess that’s how I view daily devotions, a means to the greater end of what I was created for.
Tim
Thank you very much for this post. One of the best blog posts I have read in a long time. We as Christians so often view our devotional time as striving to gain God’s approval/acceptance and then the rest of the day we don’t even give God a second thought because “Well we completed our devotional time in the morning so I’m good to go.” What a foolish attitude that is and I am most guilty of it. Once again Tim, this was an excellent post.
Interesting post! You can read a great book about this very subject here: http://www.dhp.org/Products/Devotion-Explosion%e2%80%94Getting-Real-with-God__UX522.aspx
The book is Devotion Explosion: Getting Real with God by Christy Bower.
WOW! So often I feel the same way. If I forget to have my quiet time or too busy to sit down and do it I get a guilty feeling like God is not going to bless my day in the same way that He would have if I would have had my quiet time. This reminded me that no matter what, God is blessing my day.
I do enjoy my quiet time though it is sometimes cut short by a busy morning. I know see how legalistic we get if we do not get our quiet time. However, some people might see this as a way to get out of quiet time. Though we are only hurting ourselves because we lose out in growing closer to God.
I have such a hard time finding the balance here. I admit that most days I do not leap out of bed in anticipation of my quiet time. I set a schedule for my daily reading and I mean to keep it. But what is my goal? Is it to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ? That’s part of it. However, is it also so that I can say that I’ve read through the Bible a certain number of times? Frankly, there’s a part of me where that is true too.
I do not think that ditching the QT is the answer, nor do I think that going with a feelings-based approach is the answer either. If I only read Scripture when I felt like it I wouldn’t read it very often. However, I also know that we must not get into the performance mentality either.
I appreciate the reminder that this is yet another area of my life where I need to pray for the right approach. I can do this great in the flesh, but that’s not how I want to live.
Tim:
Thanks for pointing me to Jerry Bridges’ The Discipline of Grace. I will definitely be getting that book. His thesis—Gospel-centered sanctification—is exactly where the Holy Spirit has been leading me through conviction these last few weeks.
Wow, thanks for this! My “times” are all spread out through my day and life and are seldom quiet. Though I spend lots of time in Scripture, devotional reading and discussion, and begin most mornings in prayer, I don’t routinely have the proverbial “quiet time” and often feel strangely un-spiritual when folks throw that term around: “during my quiet time the Lord showed me this…”, or worse “I missed my quiet time and then everything went wrong”. I, for one, have had the experience of spending plenty of “quiet time” before the Lord right before everything falls all apart.
Great Post, but @Julius (I couldn’t resist!) makes a good point. There is a sense in which devotion plays a role in our growth in grace. One book that wonderfully deals with this is “Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life by Don Whitney” (reviewed on here a few years back). An SBS prof, he reminds us in the book that God uses means of grace to help us. Where is the balance? I can sympathize with Julius. I have had trouble with a worship leader at our church who basically wings it. There’s little practice, and our results are less than what our Lord deserves or demands. Some thoughts for now. I’m sure I’ll develop this on my blog later on today.
Wow, how refreshingly simple and exceptionally profound.
Great post. We don’t do devo’s to gain favor with God, we do them because our life depends on it. (And by devo’s I just mean time in the Word and in prayer).
It reminds me of something my pastor said last year in regard to the “duty” of prayer:
“It’s a duty the way it’s the duty of a scuba diver to put on his air tank before he goes underwater. It’s a duty the way pilots listen to air traffic controllers. It’s a duty the way soldiers in combat clean their rifles and load their guns. It’s a duty the way hungry people eat food. It’s a duty the way thirsty people drink water. It’s a duty the way a deaf man puts in his hearing aid. It’s a duty the way a diabetic takes his insulin. It’s a duty the way Pooh Bear looks for honey. It’s a duty the way pirates look for gold.
Here’s the link for the whole message:http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Sermons/ByDate/2008/3468/
I’m only a semi-regular reader of blogs, and it wasn’t a coincidence that I stopped by here today. Thank you for writing this— what a clear, convicting, thrilling message of grace!
Hi Tim,
I read the entire post (but not the comments). I identified with what you wrote until the paragraph beginning with “Why is it that we tend to think this way?”
I don’t link obedience to blessing. Its not because I’ve been good that I’ll be able to tell that unexpected person about Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Rather, because I rushed into the day, I feel distant from God, out of touch, disconnected from the Lord the of the Universe. Perhaps you’ll say its just a state of mind, that God is always as near. But how often my getting up in the morning is a sign of my spiritual temperature.When God and I are doing well, I feel the necessity of getting up to synch with Lord God. How many times have I felt equipped and ready to witness because of the strength of my relationship with God.
“…to bind the conscience where Scripture leaves freedom is a very, very serious crime. It’s legalism…”
The ‘weaker brother principle’ needs to be applied here, but I completely agree that all kinds of pharisee-ical legalisms are running rampant throughout mainstream Christianity.
It is impossible to know another Christian’s true level of devotion to God, including their own salvation. Wayward covenant children and pastors who have publicly renounced the faith for a life of sin prove it. Real devotion is purely personal, driven by conviction and passion. By definition it will look different throughout the body of Christ.
Christ’s model of rising before the sun to pray is to be emulated but it is not the best way to devote. There is no across-the-board best way. Each Christian must follow his own passion and conviction to devote himself to God. Discipline in our spiritual devotion is Scriptural and must always be tempered with grace for no one Christian is at the same exact level as another. For one to burden another’s conscience with an outward standard of personal devotion is legalism and harms the Church.
Wow. This is exactly how I’ve felt about my quiet times through the years.
I think a lot of Christians will feel like you’ve read our minds. How often have I felt God would not bless me or answer prayers on those days I didn’t get up early to have my quiet time. Amazing.
By this account, Borther Lawrence’s Practicing The Presence of God must be heretical then. I know a pastor who continually emphasizes, preaches and writes about ‘intimacy with God’. Such excessive focus on this aspect borders on the mystical for me.
Wouldn’t ‘regular’ devotions be more realistic than ‘daily’ devotions? We all admit that some days just get out of control.
You say that “According to Bridges, we’ve come to believe that God’s blessing on our lives is somehow conditional upon our spiritual performance. ”
Spiritual performance is a vague term. No rewards in the next life nor blessings of this life are ever “merited” by us; if they are true rewards or blessings they were merited by Christ and are by grace. But upon that foundation and that foundation alone, God does GENERALLY (yes, I’ve read Job, its a tricky calculus in this life) emphasize over and over again that blessing is tied to His and our use of means, (ESPECIALLY the classic means of grace and our diligent appropriation of those means) to provide different levels of blessing/grace to different children. Why is it that 95% of the time whenever (modern American) intelligent Christians write about these, they like to RELIEVE pressure of the need to appropriate these means more as a means for more reward in the next life, more blessing in this life, and more glorification of Christ in the process? Perhaps a better diagnosis of the problem and angst we feel is NOT that we are placing unnecessary pressure on ourselves because of a crass legalistic link between the amount of quiet time and the amt of blessing, but rather a constant attempt of the Holy Spirit to convict us of how little in our affluent lives with affluent resources we spend in meditative time with God in prayer and the Word.
At the respected evangelical Reformed seminary I went to for my M.Div, whenever “quiet time” or “devotional time” was ever brought up by a professor in class or a chapel sermon, it was mockingly brought up only to warn about these dangers of “legalism” and the great “sin” of thinking there was a connection with that and our being blessed. How far in our modern evangelical wisdom we have “grown” from those simplistic views that God blessing is linked with our disciplined efforts motivated by faith as consistently expressed by Puritan, evangelical, and Reformed forefathers (see e.g., this essay by B.B. Warfield in “The Religious Life of Theological Students” http://tollelege.wordpress.com/2006/07/21/the-religious-life-of-theological-students-by-b-b-warfield/ ) .
Many, many, many who read this blog claim to be big fans of Jonathan Edwards. But where is the preacher today (I’ll except Piper with quotes like the one a few comments above) like this greatest of American theologians willing to go so far not only to refuse to comfort men in their laziness and lack of regard for their desperate need for God’s continual means of grace in personal “secret” prayer, but to typically make comments like this to their congregations:
“I would exhort those who have entertained a hope of their being true converts - and who since their supposed conversions have left off the duty of secret prayer and ordinarily allow themselves in the omission of it - to throw away their hope. If you have left off calling upon God, it is time for you to leave off hoping and flattering yourselves with an imagination that you are the children of God.”…and from the same sermon, clearly linking general blessings of God mightily with the practice of the discipline…”“Consider the great benefit of a constant, diligent, and persevering attendance on this duty. It is one of the greatest and most excellent means of nourishing the new nature, and of causing the soul to flourish and prosper. It is an excellent means of keeping up an acquaintance with God, and of growing in the knowledge of God. It is the way to a life of communion with God. … It is a duty whereby strength is derived from God against the lusts and corruptions of the heart, and the snares of the world. It hath a great tendency to keep the soul in a wakeful frame, and to lead us to a strict walk with God, and to a life that shall be fruitful in such good works, as tend to adorn the doctrine of Christ, and to cause our light so to shine before others, that they, seeing our good works, shall glorify our Father who is in heaven. …if it be constantly and diligently attended, it is one of the best means of leading not only a Christian and amiable, but also a pleasant life; a life of much sweet fellowship with Christ, and of the abundant enjoyment of the light of his countenance.”
I encourage many of you to read the whole sermon at www.whatsaiththescripture.com/Fellowship/Edwards.Hypocrites.in.Duty.html Then, resolve the inconsistency of your highest praise for Puritans and Edwards by weighing-in more with more modern developed softer evangelical and Reformed views that would look down upon such substandard expressions that “don’t GET grace”… or like me, consider whether the older view is a MORE apropos diagnosis to today’s broad Christian culture than it was when they preached and wrote.
Hey Tim, I’ve been reading for a while, but I think this is my first time commenting.
I’m terrible at having a ‘disciplined,’ ‘consistent’ quiet time. I reflected a few months ago that I always felt like a little kid sitting in front of a plate of icky vegetables for hours, trying to will himself to choke them down so he could go play videogames. The thing is, the less I concentrate on having ‘quiet time,’ the more I naturally have throughout the day! And the more productive it turns out to be!
Great stuff, keep up the good work.
This is great, Tim! My friend and I were just talking, yesterday, about this very topic. Thanks for posting about the hard stuff- the honest stuff!
Tim - Once again, a much-needed post. Thanks for the referral to The Discipline of Grace - I gotta get it! I just printed and posted this for my monitor:
“Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.”
Blessings!
So true …… Heard so many folks say “I need my quiet time to get me through the day”, when in reality, we need our quiet time to make us more like our Lord Jesus.
I posted my thoughts on my blog awhile back:
This past week, there was a discussion on the Reformed Baptist Discussion List on daily devotions/quiet times. You would not think such a topic would cause controversy. Now, some of the controversy was due to issues of semantics. Some on the list said they had a set time for prayer but it was not a “quiet time.” But I think the whole point of the issue was being missed. And I say this from my own experience and from what I have heard from others over and over again: we must not confuse “fruit issues” with “root issues.”
The Christian walk is a supernatural one. We cannot live a day, an hour, of our Christian life apart from God’s grace and Spirit. In my thinking, the question is not “am I explicitly commanded in the Scriptures to have a time set apart each day in God’s Word and in prayer?” Rather, the question is, “How can we survive without setting aside time to spend with God? And why would we not want to? Do we hunger and thirst for God’s Word? And if not, why not?” Granted, sometimes we don’t feel like it, but then again sometimes we don’t feel like being patient or feel like denying ourselves. And it’s those times that I don’t feel like doing my quiet time that I most need to do it!
In light of that discussion, here is an excellent lesson my pastor taught on the topic:
The Importance of Daily Bible Readinghttp://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=160385621
Hardly could be called “legalism,” could it?
And I think John Piper explained it perfectly:
“It’s a duty the way it’s the duty of a scuba diver to put on his air tank before he goes underwater. It’s a duty the way pilots listen to air traffic controllers. It’s a duty the way soldiers in combat clean their rifles and load their guns. It’s a duty the way hungry people eat food. It’s a duty the way thirsty people drink water. It’s a duty the way a deaf man puts in his hearing aid. It’s a duty the way a diabetic takes his insulin. It’s a duty the way Pooh Bear looks for honey. It’s a duty the way pirates look for gold.”
Interestingly enough, I was driving along today thinking about how much time I spent looking after earthly possessions and business affairs. Living in Canada, I hear how teachers and parents are struggling to reach their children, some of which have enormous struggles. I remember, after their mission trips, my own children telling me how respectful and happy children were in Mexico and Dominican Republic, places where material goods are limited, but there is more time spent with parents and family members face to face, without computers, facebook, e-mails and cell phones distracting them from blocks of continual, uninterrupted communion, communication, and time spent together. In our materialistic society, our possessions possess us (both parents and children), becoming idols, replacing uninterrupted being-in-the-presence-of God and others. Do we then need to wonder why we are relearning what it really means to know the Lord, love Him, and love others as ourselves? Isn’t that the quest of quiet time? To ultimately be so surrounded with our God, and each of us experiencing the same, that our days with family, friends, acquaintances and strangers are graced with His presence and love flowing between us like the oil of gladness and the peace that passes understanding? The issue of discussing quiet time fades when the big picture of distractions and our idols comes between us and God, between us and others, between choosing an abundant life in Jesus Christ or satisfying the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.