You and Your Precious Quiet Time

Eternal souls each need,

God, and for him to lead,

Because of the divine gap,

That sits awkwardly in our lap.

Reconciling our sin,

Is about going deep within,

In order to reconcile our doubt,

And to discover what’s life all about.

Now finding a safe place,

Is about seeking our Lord’s face,

Inviting us to discover,

The Lord’s really our lover.

***

“The place to begin is to take to heart our spiritual bankruptcy, our propensity to love the little idols more than we love God, and our unbelief about the transformative power of God’s Spirit.”

— Theresa Ip Froehlich

It is for each human being to discover, for themselves, their unique need of God – reconciling and accepting the eternal fabric of their soul.

We need God, quite frankly, because without him we need so much else. When we have God, we have need of nothing else, and life is simpler and there is more straightforward and direct effect with our lives. But ‘having God’ is a situational state – for we may easily go the world’s way, forgetting God and therefore our intrinsic need, and flounder, really without knowing it. We may be blinded to the fact.

When we have God we have no need of the little idols that foist their way into a consciousness. We see them for what they are; threats to our vital integrity. When we have God – as in a situational possession (when God has us) – we have oneness with ourselves and with the truth. We can accept our sinfulness and simultaneously believe in the transformative power of God’s Spirit such that we may grow in the state of Christ-likeness. We accept what we are, but we are not happy to remain that way forever.

To grow in such ways we need to know Christ, having studied and meditated over his character. The Spirit communicates in ways that no teacher can. The Spirit compels us to love and to exact grace over impossible situations. We come to understand the grace is a very unreasonable thing. We see the miracles of grace in and through our behaviour as we surrender to the Spirit in our living situations. We see the evidence and it encourages our souls.

This requires of us the certitude of focus borne on the wings of an essential quiet time.

You and your quiet time are precious. You are precious, indeed. God knows it and you may concur. But God needs to deal with us preciously, by impelling us forward on our journey with him into our depth and into the depths of eternity as it prevails in the realities of everyday life. God wants us to be real with ourselves in the midst of our lives. He needs us to accept where we are at. He needs us to be real with ourselves, which requires of us, courage and humility.

We can only know these things through the precious possession of our quiet time. Through quiet time we gain the impetus for poise to actuate courage and humility in the realness of our lives.

***

You and your precious quiet time are important to God. The Lord loves you and desires to communicate his extravagant love to you through your quiet time with him. God desires that we go deep into him and into ourselves to receive our healing, our power, our confidence, and our redeemed identities, so we may live capable lives – lives of truth and grace.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.

Image credit: thepowerofintroverts.com