Wednesday, April 22, 2009

How Is Your Quiet Time?

From Tim Challies:
    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. ...

    ... 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.
Read the full post here.

1 comment:

Rev Michael T Wright said...

I agree that it is very easy to turn quiet time with God into a show of how pious you can be if you try. A few times I have even caught myself and thought,"Who am i kidding? God's not buying it." Sometimes it's hard to just be myself with God because He is so awsome and I am so unawsome. Instead of trying to show a phony me to God we all need to let God revael his awsome, beautiful self to us.

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