God Misses You Too

Written by Doy Cave

This article is courtesy of Christian Single magazine.

It’s easy to feel like you’re the only person in the world who struggles with having time with God, whether it’s finding the time or knowing what to do when you’ve got it.

“I sit here like a fool and, hardened in leisure, pray little,” someone once wrote. “I do not know whether God has turned away from me…Already eight days have passed in which I have written nothing, in which I have not prayed or studied; this is partly because of temptations of the flesh, partly because I am tortured by other burdens.”

Have you ever felt that way?

Martin Luther sometimes felt that way too. Yes, that Martin Luther. The man who founded Protestantism, the foundation for all the evangelical denominations across the world. The one who was almost killed because he believed in the Bible more than the all-powerful church of that time. The man God used to impact the world. That Martin Luther sometimes felt discouraged with his spiritual walk too.

It’s easy to feel like you’re the only person in the world who struggles with having time with God, whether it’s finding the time or knowing what to do when you’ve got it. It’s also easy to feel, as Luther did, that God can be distant and somehow angry with you for not checking the quiet time ritual off your list. Before long, your love relationship with God can seem more like a set of chores.

I’m sure God never intended our relationship with Him to be that way, but I need reminding as I’m sure you do. So I went running to four devotional writers, asking them about their quiet times with God, hoping to glean something new and inspirational for myself and you.

Dealing with Time

Although these writers have their schedules packed to the gills, they make time for God.

Rebecca St. James, Christian recording artist and author of Wait For Me, either finds herself in the studio, on the phone, or in meetings with interviewers like me, on a stage in a huge auditorium, or tucked away on a computer somewhere meeting a book deadline.

“My schedule is different every day,” she says. “That’s the most frustrating thing.”

Though she rarely has time to crawl into a prayer closet for more than a few minutes at a time, she says she always tries to start the day with a devotion to “set her eyes on God.” And while her devotion time isn’t nearly as long as she would like, St. James says she tries to compensate in other ways.

One commitment she’s made is to pray – out loud and with whoever is with her – before she does anything dealing with her ministry or with her life. She says the practice keeps her life focused on the Lord. In fact, one of her first requests for this interview was that we pray. And while it may seem a simple enough task, she says there have been times she has suffered for it.

“Sometimes that commitment has actually cost me,” she says. “I do several newspaper interviews with the secular press, and some have refused to pray with me when I’ve asked them.”

Why does she persist in the practice, then? “Prayer is really, really important to me,” she says. “Prayer is so powerful. I know that if I don’t seek God – if I don’t do things in His strength – I’m a goner.”

Henry Blackaby’s schedule is no lighter. The author of Experiencing God and several other books has a speaking schedule that includes a Bible study with businessmen in the Atlanta area, as well as conferences and other engagements all over the world.

Though his schedule surely wouldn’t seem to allow it, Blackaby says he made a commitment years ago to have an unhurried time with God. This commitment has naturally meant getting out of bed earlier – a lot earlier.

“I get up now between 4 and 5 a.m., and if I find that I’m hurried in my time with the Lord, I get up earlier,” he says. “The greatest timesaver I know is to have an unhurried time with God.”

“Unhurried” for Blackaby generally covers a minimum of three hours of Bible study and “dialogue” with the Lord, but he says that time is “his life,” and all the instruction he receives during that time serves as preparation for life and ministry.

“I never come out of a quiet time without having met (God),” he says.

Approaching the Throne of God

It can be an awkward task to begin a conversation with God. since it often takes a long time to get our minds truly focused on the Lord. Mary Kassian relies on technology to help her focus.

“I’ve started using my laptop,” she says. “When I’m going through a time of meditation or confession, I write out my prayers on my laptop. When I’m thanking God for His attributes, writing it helps keep me focused.”

Kassian, author of Conversation Peace and In My Father's House, says she has compiled a list of names for God, which she finds herself meditating on often. Because she wants to know Him and who He is, she’ll often spend time thinking about Him, preparing her heart to meet with Him.

After a time of meditation, Kassian says she will often enter into a time of confession to God, yielding herself to Him in earnest prayer and then spending time in Scripture, all the while typing away on her keyboard to keep her mind focused on what she’s doing.

Ken Gire, author of Intimate Moments with the Savior and several other devotional books, prepares his mind by spending a little more time in bed. He doesn’t rush to his devotional time each day.

“I don’t jump out of bed,” he says. “I thank God for another day. I’ll pray, ‘Help me love You more at the end of this day,’ and I’ll pray for the opportunity to see and hear Him during the day.”

Blackaby says he spends some time before God “releasing (his) mind and heart to whatever God wants to instruct (him) about.”

The idea, he says, is not so much to get ourselves awake so we can begin to talk with God, but so we can clear our minds of what we want and learn from Him. “I try to get my mind and heart before the Lord so that what He says to me is more important than what I have to say,” Blackaby says.

Saturating Yourself in Scripture

It’s interesting to hear that these devotional writers rarely depend on a devotional when spending time with God.

“Sometimes using devotionals is like getting regurgitated food,” says Kassian. “Somebody chewed it first. I wouldn’t make devotionals my only fare. We should be in the Word.”

Although using devotionals is sometimes helpful in unveiling a particular point in Scripture, they should not be our focus. St. James notes that you should “saturate yourself in the Bible.”

While that prospect sounds easy enough, Scripture can be intimidating, and it’s sometimes a daunting task to know where to begin.

Gire and Blackaby say they often return to the Gospels, mainly because they want to know Jesus more and be more in love with Him every day.

“I want my life to be preoccupied with the life of Christ,” says Gire. “I know that if my love and passion for Christ grows, everything else will fall into place.”

Blackaby often returns to Psalms and Deuteronomy, mainly because they are the books of the Bible Jesus quoted the most. He figures that if they meant that much to Jesus, he would do well to know them.

St. James and Kassian say they will often work through a book of the Bible with a commentary and a “good concordance” at their side.

“When I’m reading and something jumps off the page, or when I just don’t understand the verses, having a good concordance really enriches my study,” says Kassian.

St. James is presently reading through 1 and 2 Timothy, accompanied by William Barclay’s commentary on the books. Kassian recommends concordances such as Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, an extensive Bible dictionary, and even a Greek lexicon (if you really want one) to help make the Bible come alive in your study time.

“They don’t take the place of the Bible,” Kassian says. “They shed light on it.”

Relationship, Not Ritual

What all this advice boils down to is having a relationship with God. It’s the reason for which we were created and for which Christ died. When we see our quiet time as anything other than an extension or a deepening of that relationship, the relationship quickly becomes a chore.

“It can become a really dutiful thing,” says Gire. “Once it becomes dutiful, it becomes legalistic, and then becomes motivated by guilt.”

Guilt is a hurtful thing, often taking the best of relationships and withering them. The times when we avoid Christ because of guilt are the times when we doubt our salvation the most, feel distant from God the most, and think that we could never be reconciled to God.

And coming out of those bad times often makes us realize how important it is to stay close to God through those quiet times, listening for His heart to transform ours.

“Quiet time to me is my life,” says Blackaby. “There is no way to measure what we miss when we don’t have that time.”

Are you missing Him? Seek Him out in some quiet time today.

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