Topic : Quiet Time

Andrew Bonar, a great man of prayer, had three rules:

1. Not to speak to any man before speaking to Jesus;

2. Not to do anything with his hands until he had been on his knees;

3. Not to read the papers until he had read his Bible.

Keith L. Brooks, Essential Themes, (Moody Press, Chicago; 1974), p. 6

Far from the world, O Lord, I flee,
From strife and tumult far;
From scenes where Satan wages still
His most successful war.

The calm retreat, the silent shade,
With prayer and praise agree;
And seem, by Thy sweet bounty made,
For those who follow Thee.

There if Thy Spirit touch the soul,
And grace her mean abode,
Oh, with what peace, and joy, and love,
She communes with her God!

There like the nightingale she pours
Her solitary lays;
Nor asks a witness of her song,
Nor thirsts for human praise.

Author and Guardian of my life,
Sweet source of light Divine,
And,—all harmonious names in one,—
My Saviour! Thou art mine!

What thanks I owe Thee, and what love,
A boundless, endless store,
Shall echo through the realms above,
When time shall be no more.

Olney Hymns, William Cowper, from Cowper’s Poems, Sheldon & Company, New York

In a letter to his friends, hymn writer Wendell P. Loveless related this story:

One evening a speaker who was visiting the United States wanted to make a telephone call. He entered a phone booth, but found it to be different from those in his own country. It was beginning to get dark, so he had difficulty finding the number in the directory. He noticed that there was a light in the ceiling, but he didn’t know how to turn it on. As he tried again to find the number in the fading twilight, passers by noted his plight and said, “Sir, if you want to turn the light on, you have to shut the door.” To the visitor’s amazement and satisfaction, when he closed the door, the booth was filled with light. He soon located the number and completed the call.

In a similar way, when we draw aside in a quiet place to pray, we must block out our busy world and open our hearts to the Father. Our darkened world of disappointments and trials will then be illuminated. We will enter into communion with God, we will sense His presence, and we will be assured of His provision for us. Our Lord often went to be alone with the Heavenly Father. Sometimes it was after a busy day of preaching and healing, as in today’s Scripture reading. At other times, it was before making a major decision (Luke 6:12).

Our Daily Bread

A recent survey of Discipleship Journal readers ranked areas of greatest spiritual challenge to them:

1. Materialism

2. Pride

3. Self-centeredness

4. Laziness

5. (Tie) Anger/Bitterness

6. (Tie) Sexual lust

7. Envy

8. Gluttony

9. Lying

Survey respondents noted temptations were more potent when they had neglected their time with God (81 percent) and when they were physically tired (57 percent). Resisting temptation was accomplished by prayer (84 percent), avoiding compromising situations (76 percent), Bible study (66 percent), and being accountable to someone (52 percent).

Discipleship Journal, 11-12/92

Bakersfield, Calif. (AP)—The telephone keeps ringing; other workers keep asking questions; the boss schedules another meeting. It’s hard to work or think efficiently surrounded by such normal but distracting interruptions, so a “quiet hour” has been set aside for accounting workers at Contel Service Corp., Western region headquarters for Continental Telephone Co.

They reserve 8 to 9 a.m. to work on long-term projects, research, reports or other creative work that requires concentration.

The quiet hour,” officially called “Achieving Maximum Potential,” was started this fall because the accounting department staff works in a large open area, making it hard t sneak into a quiet corner to concentrate.

“It’s like an invisible force field we can create to allow us one hour of quiet time, said Ted Carrier, Contel’s staff manager for general accounting.

“The managers can close their doors to get a quiet moment,” added Carrier, chief architect of the project. “The rest of us don’t have offices and don’t have doors we can close.”

The Bakersfield office is Contel’s headquarters for 10 Western states, and employees throughout the region are accepting the idea that they can’t telephone the accounting department between 8 and 9 a.m., Carrier said.

“During AMP hour, employees aren’t involved in meetings, errands, running printers or other distracting activity,” Carrier said.

Spokesman-Review, January 6, 1985, p. E3

Let me meet you on the mountain, Lord,
Just once.
You wouldn’t have to burn a whole bush.
Just a few smoking branches
And I would surely be …your Moses.

Let me meet you on the water, Lord,
Just once.
It wouldn’t have to be on White Rock Lake.
Just on a puddle after the annual Dallas rain
And I would surely be…your Peter.

Let me meet you on the road, Lord,
Just once.
You wouldn’t have to blind me on North Central Expressway.
Just a few bright lights on the way to chapel
And I would surely be…your Paul.

Let me meet you, Lord,
Just once.
Anywhere. Anytime.
Just meeting you in the Word is so hard sometimes
Must I always be…your Thomas'

Norman Shirk, April 10, 1981, KQ (Dallas Seminary)

• Out in front of us is the drama of men and of nations, seething, struggling, laboring, dying…but within the silences of the souls of men an eternal drama is ever being enacted. On the outcome of this inner drama rests ultimately, the outer pageant of history. - Thomas Kelly
• William Wilberforce, Christian statesman of Great Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, once said, “I must secure more time for private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The shortening of private devotions starves the soul. It grows lean and faint.” Following a failure in Parliament, he remarked that his problems may have been due to the fact that he spent less and less time in his private devotions in which he could earnestly seek the will of God. He concluded, “God allowed me to stumble.”
• The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day. - H. W. Beecher

Early African converts to Christianity were earnest and regular in private devotions. Each one reportedly had a separate spot in the thicket where he would pour out his heart to God. Over time the paths to these places became well worn. As a result, if one of these believers began to neglect prayer, it was soon apparent to the others. They would kindly remind the negligent one, “Brother, the grass grows on your path.”

Today in the Word, June 29, 1992

I have found, in my own spiritual life, that the more rules I lay down for myself, the more sins I commit. The habit of regular morning and evening prayer is one which is indispensable to a believer’s life, but the prescribing of the length of prayer, and the constrained remembrance of so many persons and subjects, may gender unto bondage, and strangle prayer rather than assist it.

Charles Spurgeon, in Wycliffe Handbook of Preaching & Preachers, W. Wiersbe, p. 235

I met God in the morning,
When my day was at its best
And His presence came like sunrise,
Like a glory in my breast.

All day long the Presence lingered;
All day long He stayed with me;
And we sailed in perfect calmness
O’er a very troubled sea.

Other ships were blown and battered,
Other ships were sore distressed,
But the winds that seemed to drive them
Brought to us a peace and rest.

Then I thought of other mornings,
With a keen remorse of mind.
When I too had loosed the moorings
With the Presence left behind.

So, I think I know the secret,
Learned from many a troubled way;
You must seek Him in the morning
If you want Him through the day.

Author Unknown

One hour of quiet concentration in any business can be worth two hours of normal working time, according to the management of a Denver business, quoted in a Success magazine item.

“Interruptions are the biggest enemy of creativity,” says Gary Desmond, a principal of Hoover Berg Desmond (HBD) a $30 million a year architectural firm. To minimize the inevitable interruptions in the firm’s large, open offices, Desmond came up with the idea which is more familiar with kids than corporations—the quiet hour. Every morning from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., no one at HBD including the principals, may communicate with anyone else inside or outside the office. “Basically, we’re sitting at our desks for that hour,” says Desmond, who makes allowances for emergency phone calls. “We try to focus totally on our clients’ designs.” Initially, HBD’s 25 employees balked at the concept. “Management had to explain that this was not a response to bad work habits. It was a vehicle to make us concentrate even more rigorously,” says Desmond, although he now concedes that quiet hour is an excellent crack-the-whip technique too. But what do the clients think of it? At first, the firm chose to hide the policy from the outside world.

“Businesses that found out used to ask if we served milk and cookies at quiet hour,” says Desmond. “But we stuck to it and now those same firms respect how much we’re trying to accomplish every morning.” Quiet hour has worked out so well, in fact, that HBD wants to start a second one, perhaps in midafternoon. “Our employees all wish they had more quiet hours,” says Desmond. “It gives us what most businesses need so badly, a little time to think.”

Management Digest, Vol. 1, No. 4 (July, 1989)

A research psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health was convinced he could prove his theory from a cage full of mice. His name? Dr. John Calhoun. His theory? Overcrowded conditions take a terrible toll on humanity. Dr. Calhoun built a nine-foot square cage for selected mice. He observed them closely as their population grew. He started with eight mice. The cage was designed to contain comfortably a population of 160. He allowed the mice to grow, however, to a population of 2200. They were not deprived of any of life’s necessities except privacy—no time or space to be all alone. Food, water, and other resources were always clean and in abundance. A pleasant temperature was maintained. No disease was present. All mortality factors (except aging) were eliminated. The cage, except for its overcrowded condition, was ideal for the mice. The population reached its peak at 2200 after about two-and-a-half years. Since there was no way for the mice to physically escape from their closed environment, Dr. Calhoun was especially interested in how they would handle themselves in that overcrowded cage. Interestingly, as the population reached its peak, the colony of mice began to disintegrate. Strange stuff started happening. Dr. Calhoun made these observations:

1. Adults formed natural groups of about a dozen individual mice.

2. In each group each adult mouse performed a particular social role…but there were no roles in which to place the healthy young mice, which totally disrupted the whole society.

3. The males who had protected their territory withdrew from leadership.

4. The females became aggressive and forced out the young…even their own offspring.

The young grew to be only self-indulgent. They ate, drank, slept, groomed themselves, but showed no normal aggression and, most noteworthy, failed to reproduce. After five years, very mouse had died. This occurred despite the fact that right up to the end there was plenty of food, water, and an absence of disease. After the research psychologist reported on his experiment, a couple of significant questions arose.

Q: “What were the first activities to cease?”

A: “The most complex activities for mice: courtship and mating.”

Q: What results would such overcrowding have on humanity?”

A: We would first of all cease to reproduce our ideas, and along with ideas, our goals and ideals. In other words, our values would be lost.”

Swindoll, Quest For Character, pp. 35-36

Noise affects human behavior. In one experiment carried out by psychologists, a student leaving a library intentionally dropped an armload of books. In 50% of the cases, a passerby stopped to help the student pick up the books. Then the experimenters brought out a lawn mower without a muffler and started it near where a student would again intentionally drop the books. This time, only about 10% of the people who passed stopped to help. It was clear that behavior changed because of the earsplitting sound of the nearby lawn mower. In experiments in Los Angeles, researchers found that children who lived in neighborhoods near the airport could not complete certain tasks undertaken when jets were landing and taking off as easily as children who lived in quiet neighborhoods. Some studies of prison conditions have shown that the high level of noise causes more complaints by prisoners than the food or other prison conditions do.

Source Unknown

“Carry some quiet around inside thee,” the well-known Quaker, George Fox, used to say. “Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit, from thy own thoughts, and then thou wilt feel the principle of God to turn thy mind to the Lord from whence cometh life; whereby thou mayest receive the strength and power to allay all storms and tempests.”

Source unknown

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power of judgment…Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller, and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and lack of harmony or proportion is more readily seen.” These are the words of Leonardo da Vinci, and no idler he; he excelled as a painter, sculptor, poet, architect, engineer, city planner, scientist, inventor, anatomist, military genius, and philosopher.

Source Unknown