DOES THE BIBLE REALLY SAY …

THAT IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A ‘QUIET TIME’ YOU WILL HAVE A BAD DAY?

Many Christians are burdened down by this non-biblical assumption. Many church leaders and Christian writers teach and expect that ‘good’, ‘spiritual’ Christians have regular ‘quiet times’, preferably first thing every morning, ‘starting the day right’ or ‘starting the day with the Lord’. The clear inference is made that if you don’t follow this practice you are not ‘spiritual’. The expected (stated) result of not having a quiet time is a ‘bad day’ of some kind.

One sad thing is that it is the guilt and self-negation caused by omission of a ‘quiet time’ actually results in the ‘bad day’ that its advocates warned would happen. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is not the lack of a quiet time that has caused the bad day, but the guilt the harassed believer feels in the presence of those who practise and/or command it. Another sad thing is that those adversely affected by this non-Biblical teaching are usually those who are most sensitive in their consciences or most vulnerable in their circumstances, or both.

A number of issues are relevant here:

[1] It is good to spend time alone with God. It is good to pray. It is good to study the Bible, assuming that one has a Bible. We are commanded to pray (Ephesians 6:18; Matthew 7:7-12). We are encouraged to know the Scriptures (2Timothy 2:15; 3:16,17). We are commanded to seek God, his kingdom and his righteousness (Matthew 6:33). None of these are being questioned. The practice of prayer and Bible study is biblical. Our lives as Christians will be impoverished if we consistently neglect them both: our knowledge of God and his salvation and his requirements will stagnate and fade, and our consciousness of our relationship with him in Christ will dim, if we do not talk to him in prayer and allow him to speak to us by his Word.

But this importance of prayer and Bible study does not authorize the church to go beyond the Scripture in encouraging it, and it especially does not validate guilt-generating, gospel-destroying perspectives.

[2] The Bible doesn’t gauge the ‘spirituality’ of a believer by the amount of time spent, or the specific time spent (e.g. early morning), in prayer and Bible study. It is not our religious exercises that are significant in God’s eyes, but our attitude to him and to our fellow human beings:

‘He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.’ (Micah 6:8).

Jesus Christ confirmed this in Matthew 25:31-46, where he states that on the last day he will judge people on the basis of their treatment of those in unfortunate circumstances. James affirms it in James 1:27:

‘Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.’

True spirituality is an extremely practical, down-to-earth thing. It does not consist in religious exercises but in so loving God that we love our neighbour in the same way that God has loved us (John 14:15; 15:12).

[3] When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray (Luke 11) he had nothing to say about time or frequency. If daily early morning quiet times are as important as they are made out to be, this was an opportunity for him to tell us so. But he didn’t, neither here or anywhere else.

[4] The concept of ‘quiet time’ includes both prayer and Bible reading. Given that private individuals have only had access to the Bible in their own language in the last few centuries, and given that there are many people who still do not have that access, the mentality that gauges spirituality in terms of whether or not one has a ‘quiet time’ immediately judges large historic and geographic groups as unspiritual, and, in terms of holiness teachers’ rhetoric, condemns them all to ‘bad days’.

[5] The Samaritan woman in John 4 tried to involve Jesus in a discussion of the right place to worship God. Jesus refused to be drawn into such a debate. Rather than tie worship to a specific place he stated: ‘A time is coming and now has come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.’ (John 4:23,24) The same principle applies to the time at which we worship God. Time, like place, is irrelevant. The worship God seeks is in spirit and in truth, a worship which transcends both time and place, that is present at all times and in all places of our lives.

[6] The threat of a ‘bad day’ to those who do not have a ‘quiet time’ ignores the completeness of Christ’s work on the cross. He bore the sin. He bore the guilt. He bore the shame. God is no more going to punish the believer for not praying on any given morning than he is going to put Christ back on the cross. The cause/effect, sin/judgement relationship which is made between failure to have a quiet time and having a bad day is an effective denial of the good news which says ‘there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8:1). Yet there are countless believers living with church-generated condemnation and guilt because of the omission of their ‘quiet time’. Such an omission is not even identified by the Bible as a sin; but even if it were a sin, it would have been nailed to the cross and its condemnation and guilt already borne by our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.