As believers in Christ, we understand the importance of meeting with the Lord daily. Like Augustine, we know in the deepest recesses of our being that “[God] has made us for himself…and our hearts are restless until they find rest in [him].”¹

Our restless hearts ache for the Lord. We long to take hold of the fullness of joy and the pleasures forevermore that are found only in his presence (Psalm 16:11). And we know that one of the best ways to take hold of this abundant, joyful life that God created us for is to meet with him daily in his Word and in prayer.

But what happens when our desire for the life God created us for collides with the reality of living in a broken world? When we say, like Paul, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate (Romans 7:15)”?

What should we do when we desire fullness of joy, but our prayers feel forced and empty, and our Bible reading dull and difficult?

What do we do when the demands on our time are more than we can manage, and distractions lurk around every corner?

How do we persevere when suffering comes, and Bible reading and prayer feel beyond our physical or mental capacity? When we feel confused, frustrated, and angry with the world and with God?

In other words, how do we reconcile the ideal of a daily quiet time with the harsh realities of life?

We Need to be Needy

In her book, Help for the Hungry Soul, Kristen Wetherell writes of the freedom God offers to those who struggle with daily Bible reading:

I want us, right now, to feel the wonderful freedom of this reality in our bones: only God can produce hunger within us for his words. This means that all our attempts to “read the Bible well enough” or “do what we’re supposed to” or “feel all the right things” cannot on their own stir up within our hearts the hunger we so desire.²

If only God can give us a genuine hunger for his Word, then the best way to begin developing a lifelong habit of daily Bible reading and prayer is to confess our lack of hunger to God. This means dropping all pretense and telling God exactly how we feel about meeting with him. We do not need to pretend to love what we do not naturally love or desire what we do not naturally desire.

We are free to accept the reality that the desire to read our Bibles and pray is impossible to generate on our own. We are also free to acknowledge that God already knows this about us, and he is willing and able to give us the love and desire we need to meet with him in our quiet times each day. We have only to ask.

Not only are we free to tell God exactly how we feel about meeting with him each morning, but we need to tell God how we feel. We will never delight in our daily quiet times until we are willing to admit that, left to ourselves, we are utterly incapable of delighting in our time with God. We need to own our reluctance and our need for God’s help.

Kristen puts it simply, “We need to be needy.”³

How Do You Really Feel?

We do ourselves no favors when we live in denial of how we really feel about meeting with God each morning. Therefore, this week, in our reflection exercise and habit-builder activity, we will examine how we really feel about our time spent with the Lord each day and how we want to feel about that time.

Regardless of your feelings about your current quiet-time habits, there is great hope. It is God’s delight to grant our desire to know him better through his Word and prayer. We can go confidently to his throne of grace, trusting that he will hear us and answer our honest and vulnerable prayers to grow in our love for him and our delight in his Word.

Pray boldly, speak honestly, and ask God to increase your desire to know and enjoy him in his Word and in prayer. He will surely do it.

Today’s post comes from Chapter 2 of my new book, The Quiet Time Workbook. If you’d like the full set of personal reflection exercises and guided journal pages that accompany each chapter in the workbook, you can grab it from Amazon here.

Footnotes:

1. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), book 1, chap. 1.
2. Kristin Wetherell, Help for the Hungry Soul: Eight Encouragements to Grow Your Appetite for God’s Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 27.
3. Wetherell, Help for the Hungry Soul, 27.