By Marcus McCormic
It’s been said several times that the habits students build in college will be the ones they carry over into life after graduation. In a time that’s growing ever-increasingly busy with classes, work, friends, extracurriculars and even sleep, it’s tough to find a time to sit down and read the Bible, even on a Christian college campus.
This issue only gets further perpetrated when something so refreshing is treated as something so laborious. Whether it’s reading a chapter of Isaiah each night, or reading Galatians a couple verses at a time, the practice of daily quiet time can often seem like more of a chore than a joy.
However, Christian college students need to realize that out of all the responsibilities they have, the most important habit they need to build and maintain from their college life is a daily devotion to reading and meditating on the Bible.
To James Street, a graduate from The Master’s University with degrees in biblical languages, biblical counseling and graduate degrees in divinity and theology from The Master’s Seminary, quiet time is a crucial part of the Christian’s everyday life that should not be overlooked.
“Quiet times, I believe, as I see in Scripture, are something that we should always be doing,” Street said. “It’s something that primarily has been created by our Christian culture over the years to allow believers concentrated time to spend hearing from God through His Word, then responding back to God through prayer.”
According to Street, the importance of the practice lies in the belief that all humans who have ever lived have been completely dependent upon God in their daily lives.
“To be able to survive, we need food every day. We need water, we need air, we need interaction with other people and we need spiritual connection, and our ultimate spiritual connection is primarily found in God alone,” Street said.
Another reason Street sees quiet time as such a significant daily practice for believers comes from the doctrinal belief that the world and all creatures within it, including humans specifically, are broken from sin.
“We are in constant need of recalibrating our minds and our hearts to God and His ways. We are bent naturally toward sin,” he said. “What a quiet time does is it allows us to be able to submit and surrender ourselves, without any distractions, to what God is saying so that we might start being more conformed to the image of Christ.”
Some common interruptions and hindrances to finding a quiet time include designating the morning as the set apart time but failing to get up for it, constant use of phones or computers to fill downtime, socializing with others and even focusing on work that needs to get done.
When these activities take greater importance than daily devotion to reading the Bible, they should be examined because they may actually be idols.The remedy to this issue, Street believes, lies in the implied importance of quiet time throughout the Bible.
“In Scripture, oftentimes, like in Psalm 119, you’ll see how the author says, ‘Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation day and night’… Joshua chapter one, verse eight even talks about that, where he calls on Israel to meditate on God’s Word day and night,” Street said.
Additionally, he quoted a passage in Colossians which says “Let the Word of Christ dwell richly within you…” asserting that believers can’t follow this passage if they aren’t reading their Bible consistently.
“It can’t really have an impact upon your soul if you’re not actually taking regular time, undistracted time, to be able to get into God’s word,” Street said.
Street went on to further make a point that while having a quiet time is never commanded in the Bible, it is greatly encouraged, and a lack of one will show in everyday life. To him, quiet time begins with making a concrete plan and choosing a reading plan that excites the soul.
“Do something that you are really passionate about, and then have a concrete plan to accomplish that,” Street said. He also added that if the original idea is too much to read, adjust it to the preferred liking.
In Street’s mind, meditation and reflection on the reading is the next important step. “Think about ‘what was it saying? What does it mean? What’s maybe one good question to ask yourself? What’s the main idea? How can I live differently today because of what I just read?”
Even starting a quiet time can open the possibility to studying books more in-depth later on down the road.
Quiet time can be characterized in three statements. According to Street, “It’s critically important to our spiritual livelihood and our interaction with the Lord…It’s not something that has to be strict and rigid to a template, it’s something that you make of it… It’s a joy.”
The ultimate problem lies in the warped view that believers have of this special time, which Street pointed out saying, “The more we stop thinking about it as a duty, like you gotta check this thing off, and the more we think of it as communicating with our Creator, then this becomes a lot more of something that we want to do.”
The TMU Mane 