Did You Have
Your Quiet Time?

What this is about

Picture two men. The first gets up at half past five, reads three chapters, writes in a journal and prays for forty minutes. He is also short with his wife, distant from his children, careless with the truth at work, and has not spoken to his neighbours in years. The second has no fixed routine. He prays in the car and at his desk; he hears the Bible read and preached on Sunday and reads it with his children at the table; he is patient, honest, generous, and known in his street for it.

Ask most congregations which of the two is Spirit-filled, and in practice the answer will be the first — because the first has the thing that gets measured.

The short answer

What the passages actually name

The teaching usually rests on Galatians 5 and Romans 8, and those are the right places to look. Here is the teaching, in words this page has made up because it quotes no living teacher:

And here is the passage: “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22–23). Go down the list and ask where you would have to be standing to see each one. Love has an object. Peace is with someone. Longsuffering is suffering someone, for a long time. Gentleness, goodness, faithfulness and meekness are all done to people. Only self-control is mainly about yourself.

The list it is set against is the same in reverse: hatred, variance, wrath, strife, envyings. Paul is not contrasting a disciplined inner life with an undisciplined one. He is contrasting a person who is good to be near with a person who is not. And he says so two verses later: “Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another” (5:26).

Romans 8 is the same. Its tests are what you set your mind on, whether you put the deeds of the body to death, and whether you are “led by the Spirit.” The only mention of prayer in the chapter is “we know not what we should pray for as we ought” (8:26).

What happened next

Luke is the writer who uses the phrase “filled with the Spirit,” and he uses it thirteen times. It is almost always the start of a sentence about what somebody then did.

• Elisabeth is filled — and cries out a blessing (Luke 1:41–42).
• Zacharias is filled — and prophesies (1:67).
• The disciples at Pentecost are filled — and speak; three thousand are baptised (Acts 2:4, 41).
• Peter is filled — and addresses the council (4:8).
• The praying church is filled — and speaks boldly, and in the next verse nobody calls his possessions his own (4:31–32).
• Seven men “full of the Holy Ghost” are chosen — to serve food to widows (6:3–5).
• Stephen, full of the Spirit — is stoned, and forgives (7:55–60).
• Saul is filled — and is baptised, eats, and preaches (9:17–20).
• Barnabas, “a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost” — exhorts them all, and “much people was added” (11:23–24).

Speech, service, suffering. The fourth option — went away to read and pray — is what the modern teaching would lead you to expect, and it does not occur. The one solitary case in the whole record is Jesus in the wilderness (Luke 4:1), which is forty days of fasting under temptation, not a quiet time, and it ends with “he taught in their synagogues.”

The one command

Only once does the New Testament command Christians to be filled with the Spirit. Paul writes “be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18) and then finishes the sentence: speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things, submitting yourselves one to another — and then, without a break: wives, husbands, children, fathers, servants, masters, to the end of chapter 6.

The right-hand list is a church service and a household. There is nothing on it that a person does by himself. The modern teaching has kept Paul’s verb and attached its own list.

The household, and the Pharisee

The Bible puts more explicit instruction on marriage, children, parents and work than on any devotional practice, and it puts it inside the passages about the Spirit. And it says of a man who neglects his own house that he “hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8). That is the strongest language in the pastoral letters, and it is about a domestic duty.

There is exactly one case in the Gospels of a religious act being used to excuse a family obligation: a man declares his property “Corban,” devoted to God, and his teachers release him from supporting his parents. Jesus says this makes “the word of God of none effect” (Mark 7:11–13). Devotion that cancels duty is condemned in the one place Scripture addresses it.

And the people Jesus criticised most were the most devout men alive. They tithed garden herbs and “omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith” (Matthew 23:23). They searched the Scriptures and would not come to him (John 5:39–40). The Pharisee in the temple could truthfully say “I fast twice in the week” (Luke 18:12), and it was the other man who went home justified. Religious discipline can coexist with spiritual blindness, and a discipline can become the thing that is measured while what God asked for goes undone.

Jonathan Edwards, the strictest Puritan of his century, wrote a whole book after the Great Awakening on how to tell real spiritual experience from false. Among the things he listed as no sign either way: that people are disposed “to spend much time in religion, and to be zealously engaged in the external duties of worship.” And the chief sign of all, he said, is “Christian practice” — a holy life.

The two things Jesus commanded

Ask what practices Jesus himself commanded his followers to keep doing. There are two. “Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19). “This do in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Neither can be done alone at a desk. The Supper, in particular, is corporate by definition: “when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another” (1 Corinthians 11:33).

The New Testament attaches strong language to both. “Be baptized… and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38). “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27). “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16).

The Reformation churches, which threw out everything without scriptural warrant, kept these and gave them a name. They called Word, sacraments and prayer the means of grace: “through the Word and Sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Ghost is given” (Augsburg Confession, 1530); “the outward and ordinary means… are his ordinances, especially the Word, sacraments, and prayer” (Westminster Shorter Catechism, 1647); and Wesley, who put private prayer and Bible reading on the same list, warned that a means “separate from the end” is “less than nothing and vanity” (1746).

Means, or evidence?

A means is something God works through — a channel, an instrument. Evidence is how you can tell he has worked — a fruit, a mark. Sort these ten. Several are traps.

Where the quiet time came from

Daily disciplined prayer is as old as the church. The first Christians said the Lord’s Prayer three times a day; the monasteries kept seven hours; the 1549 Prayer Book cut it to Morning and Evening Prayer so the whole parish could keep it together. All of it was set prayer, at set times, usually with others.

Private Bible reading became possible for ordinary people only with cheap printed Bibles. The Puritans wrote the case for the “closet” (Thomas Brooks, 1665) — as a benefit, not a test.

The specific thing this page is about — a solitary morning slot kept as the mark of a Spirit-filled Christian — has a birth certificate. The “Morning Watch” began with the principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, in the 1880s. The Student Volunteer Movement carried it round the world from 1898. A booklet called Quiet Time for university students in 1945 gave it its modern name and shape, and mass evangelism in the 1950s made it universal. About a hundred and forty years. A good practice with a traceable history — and not what Paul meant by walking in the Spirit.

Check it yourself

Five things. About forty minutes in total, all free.

1. 1. Galatians 5:13–26. Three minutes. List the nine fruits and beside each write where you would have to be standing to see it.
2. 2. Ephesians 5:15 to 6:9, as one paragraph. Five minutes. Find the command in 5:18 and read to the end of the sentence.
3. 3. 1 John, whole, with a pencil. Fifteen minutes. Mark every “hereby we know” and list the tests.
4. 4. Every “filled with the Spirit” in Luke and Acts — Luke 1:15, 41, 67; 4:1; Acts 2:4; 4:8, 31; 6:3, 5; 7:55; 9:17; 11:24; 13:9, 52. Ten minutes. Read the verse after each one.
5. 5. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, free at CCEL. Part II, sign IX and Part III, sign XII. An hour, and the best thing ever written on this question.