Insert Obligatory New Year Article Here

By Wayne Harmon

In my New Year’s Post one year ago I wrote of our need to spend more time with Jesus.  As I look back at 2014 I see that the times I struggled most were times that I wasn’t spending time with Him as I needed.

One of the things churchianity, religion, fails to do is to teach us HOW to spend time with God. How do we just “hang out”? Well, how do we hang out with friends? We just spend time with them.

I remember being in churches where we were told how to have a “quiet time with God”. First thing was to commit to so many minutes a day. Then those minutes were broken down into two parts: Bible reading and prayer.

The Bible reading wasn’t for the purpose of seeing what the Bible said. It was just for the purpose of saying that “I read my Bible today.” Often a suggested “reading schedule” was provided that would take the reader through the whole Bible in a year. These schedules focused on how many pages were read daily with no regard to the actual content of those pages.

The prayer time was usually facilitated with a “prayer list”. This list consisted of things we were ask God to do for us: “Give me that. Fix this. Change them.”

How do you like it when you’re with people who do all the talking and only talk about themselves? I don’t like that at all. In fact, I try to avoid those people. Does God ever feel that way about our “prayer times”?

Everything about this “quiet time” approach is performance oriented.  It’s all about the “doing” with no regard to the “being”.

Paul tells us in Philippians 4:6-7:

 “Don’t worry about anything: instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.” (NLT)

That’s good advice for the New Year, and for each new day in it.

Copyright 2015: Wayne Harmon