Growing up, I never did anything with a Bible outside of Sunday morning. At some point I began praying after my parents shut the lights out. It was a very simple prayer. Lord, please don’t let our house catch fire and burn down tonight…and forgive my sins. Does that count as the beginning of daily devotions for me? Sure.

We’ve been writing these past few weeks to encourage everyone at GCC to think about personal devotional practices. If you’re like me, all your life (or at least the part of your life you’ve spent in the church) you have had some basic questions about personal devotional practices. First of all, what do you call them? Is there a difference between a Bible study, a devotion, a devotional, a quiet time, or prayer time? I’m not going to tackle that topic except to say pick a phrase you’re comfortable with and call it that. Then know what you mean by that phrase so you can explain it to someone else.

I used to call what I did Quiet Times, but I outgrew that phrase after college. I have never liked the word Devotions (I think because it sounds too much like the word “votive”). Now I just call what I do Daily Prayer (even though it also includes reading). Other terms I have heard for practices like this are Rule of Life, Daily Office, and Lectio Divina. If you like Latin and need to come up with a special name to describe what you do to eat spiritual food, then go for it. It’s a personal practice, so it needs to have personal meaning to you.

Once you have figured out the kinds of things we’re talking about there are 3 basic questions we tend to ask ourselves:

1) Am I doing this right?

2) Is there something I can do to get more out of it?

3) What should I do?

Am I Doing This Right?

The answer is…probably.

When I was in high school I started to become spiritually hungry in a different way than before in my life, so I began picking up a monthly booklet called The Daily Bread. It was a 300-500 word daily reading with a question to ponder and a Bible verse at the bottom of the page. I ate toast while I read it. Is it okay to eat while you do your Bible reading? (Back then I called it Bible reading.) Yes, toast is allowed.

When I got to college at some point I felt like I needed to up the ante. I realized I had never done a complete Bible read through, but I was running around in a campus ministry telling people that the Bible was absolutely true. There was an integrity issue there. I believed the Bible, but I only read parts of the Bible. So I started reading a chapter a day early in the morning outside in the hallway of my dorm room. (My roommate needed the room to be completely dark in order to sleep.) Of course, I was in college and “early in the morning” was not my style. I never made it past Deuteronomy. At some point, though, I did create an entire outline of the gospel of Mark.

Did I do it right in high school? Did I do it right in college? Probably.

If you’re asking yourself whether you’re doing this right, then remember what one friend recently said to me: Blessed is the man who restarts devotions. Are you too afraid to do a Bible read-through because you might not make it through? Start anyway, and fail at it! Then restart where you left off. Did you pray yesterday but forgot to read, or vice versa? Great. Try doing it again tomorrow. As long as you’ve got the Bible as God’s revelation of himself, and you pray to God as he’s revealed in Scripture you’re probably doing this right.

Is there something I can do to get more out of it?

Again, the answer is probably.

Once you have some kind of practice that you do with some kind of regularity, you can ask yourself whether or not there is some way to get more value out of the time you spend. Tom’s article a couple of weeks ago was an answer to this question. He found his time more fruitful when he did something to slow down his reading.

For me, I had to speed something up.

I was 30 and had still never completed a Bible read-through. I felt guilty for 10 years and the guilt wasn’t working as a motivator. Then a friend presented me with a journaling Bible that had small print. Also, I was living overseas in a time of great personal stress. I was hungry in a new way, and I had a Bible with columns that made whole chapters look smaller on the page. (I never really did “journal” in it—just made a note here and there.) My reading sped up and I eventually made it through the whole Bible. It was qualitatively better than skimming, but I wasn’t pouring over every detail for deep significance either.

In baseball, they call it a change-up, right? You were pitching slow, so you change-up to pitch fast. You were pitching fast, so you change-up to pitch slow. Are your hour-long quiet times so boring that you’ve quit doing them? Do a 15-minute devotional in the morning and pray for 15 minutes before you go to bed. Throw a change-up into your routine that adds a new level of meaning for you.

Lately, my change-up has involved the Book of Common Prayer and setting aside four brief times each day to read and pray. If you got into a time machine and told my 20-year old self what I do now he’d probably faint (after telling you that Tag-of-the-future sounds like a legalist).

This leads to the last question.

What should I do?

There’s no single right answer, but I can give you several things to try.

If you need to start something, then start simple. Take fifteen minutes away from something in your day that you don’t need (e.g., social media) and give those 15 minutes to something like The Daily Bread. At first, I would suggest NOT doing something aural like a podcast because it’s too much like what you do in listening to a sermon. If you want to do something aural, then listen to the Bible itself being read. It is easy to get a decent quality Bible recording streamed to your mobile device or computer. You can even listen at the gym or in your garden (Is that okay? Yes.)

If you need a change-up, try to think about it the same way you think about other routines in your life. Do you go to the gym five times a week? How did you get that habit in place? Do you have a TV show that you never miss? How did that habit get ingrained? Use the same method to add-to or change-up your own practices. Read the Bible before you eat breakfast. Pray for your family after lunch. Look up a new theological word after you put on your makeup.

Okay, that last one sounded silly, but can I tell you something? The best drummer I ever heard gave a clinic and someone asked him about practicing. He said, “I figured the things I did to practice jazz drumming needed to sound like good reading in a book if they were really going to work.” I like that philosophy. There was one famous saxophonist who kept his saxophone around his neck and played while he mowed his lawn. (I have no idea how that worked, but he sold more jazz records than me!)

Blessed is the man who restarts devotions. Do something that is personally meaningful to you that includes God’s revelation, Scripture. Chances are you’re already doing something right. If you throw a change-up in your practice to keep it fresh or make it more meaningful I’d love to hear about it (Galatians 6:6).

May the Lord bless you as you grow in grace and knowledge of him through your Quietvotional, Divina Rula, or Prayer time.

In Him,

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