hurried devotions
I need to spend more time in my private devotions. Spending more time would be pretty useless though, if my devotions aren’t also filled with deep, full, and joyful communion and fellowship with God. I must not settle for anything less than that. I ought to wrestle with God in prayer until I’ve experienced that sweet and profound sense of God in my soul.
This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours! I suspect I have been allotting habitually too little time to religious exercises, as private devotion and religious meditation, Scripture-reading, etc. Hence I am lean and cold and hard. I had better allot two hours or an hour and a half daily. I have been keeping too late hours, and hence have had but a hurried half hour in a morning to myself. Surely the experience of all good men confirms the proposition that without a due measure of private devotions the soul will grow lean. But all may be done through prayer—almighty prayer, I am ready to say—and why not? For that it is almighty is only through the gracious ordination of God of love and truth. O then, pray, pray, pray!
—William Wilberforce
Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of their essence. The ability to wait and stay and press belongs essentially to our intercourse with God. Hurry, everywhere unseeming and damaging, is so to an alarming extent in the great business of communion with God. Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, and strength are never the companions of hurry. Short devotions deplete spiritual vigor, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations, and blight the root and bloom of spiritual life. They are the prolific source of backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial piety; they deceive, blight, and rot the seed and impoverish the soil. . . . Hurried devotions make weak faith, feeble convictions, and questionable piety. To be little with God is to be little for God. To cut short the praying makes the whole religious character short, scrimp, niggardly, and slovenly.
—E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer
daily reading
| February 1, 2025 |
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| Judg. 16; Acts 20; Jer. 29; Mark 15 |
| WCF 6, 9.3; WSC 13-19, 83-85; WLC 21-29, 150-154 |
| The Apostles’ Creed |