The Quiet Time: Let’s Get Specific (final part)

This is the last post (for now, at least) about having a quiet time.  I hope the previous six posts have been helpful in even a small way.  I want to close with someone else’s experience with their quiet time.  This is just one look at how time spent with God can change our life.  I hope these words from a friend bless you as much as they did me!

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The experience that happened to me in the summer of 2008 was one I have longed for and prayed for but I never really knew that it actually could or would happen.

First, let me describe my normal attempts at having daily devotionals with God. I have always fallen short in this area. I have great bursts of time when I am diligent to be in the Word (I read the whole Bible in a year a couple of years ago) and then I have these long periods of time when the only Bible reading I do is for my weekly preparation for my Life Group. My prayer is always that I will be excited to be in the Word and that I will eagerly anticipate that time of day. But, as many of us know, this does not usually happen on its own. Having a quiet time in the Word with God takes great discipline and sacrifice and it is an action not a feeling, just as love is. So, this past summer I was choosing daily to be in the Word and God truly blessed my time.

Let me also interject that the way that I usually feel God’s Holy Spirit is through praise to God through music. I have always been musical and so this has been a natural path for me to connect to God. So, what I will describe below is even more powerful because it is not the “normal” way that I connect with God.

My experience with God during my daily quiet times was going along in my normal fashion. I would read one or two chapters from the Old Testament and then one or two from the New. For the first couple of weeks, nothing out of the ordinary was happening during these times. I was enjoying my time with God and everything was good. Then, a wonderful thing started to happen. As I was reading in Proverbs, a recurrent theme kept jumping out at me and I thought that it was neat but I didn’t think much about it. Then, as I was reading in Matthew 6 (specifically 1-4) I was hit with a very powerful feeling that I can’t describe. For the next couple of weeks, everything I read in the Bible or thought about kept bringing me back to that passage and I was really troubled as to what to do with it. Since Matthew 6 is very specific in it’s command, I won’t go into detail, but some things started to happen that lead me to some actions that I felt were directly led by God through the words written in those scriptures. I don’t know if I will ever experience God talking to me directly through His Word again, but I pray that I will because it is a wonderful and powerful feeling and connection with our Creator.

To close, I wish I had some great words of wisdom as to how to make this happen again, but I don’t and I wish I could say that I was more diligent about being in the Word because of that experience, but I am not. I am a flawed human being, but the beautiful thing about our God is that He loves us more than we will ever be able to comprehend and He is eagerly waiting for each and every one of us to connect with Him.