Practical QTSample

 #19 Biographies can help too

Quiet Times are devotional times that centre around hearing God's Word and worshipping Him.  A Quiet Time is primarily reading the Bible, reflecting on our lives and spending time with God, and so it is with great hesitation that I have written this section...

Sometimes I find that I have fallen into a rut in my devotional time.  (It is usually when God is challenging me in an area that I don't want to be challenged and my heart hardens).  It is then that reading the biographies of significant Christians can be very helpful and inspiring.

Reading of the lives of Wesley, Wilberforce, Corrie Ten Boom, Brother Andrew, Mother Theresa, or more contemporary “saints” can help me a great deal to get back to a closer walk with God.

During my early varsity years I had a very close friend who confessed that she valued spending time with me because she was “jealous” of my closeness to God and it made her want to be closer to Him.  The amazing thing was that I experienced the same “jealousy” or “hunger” for God when I spent time with her!!

Reading the biographies of significant Christians can and should bring us to a place of greater spiritual hunger. The danger is that the reading of biography can become an end in itself and we can simply endlessly read books about other people's faith without ever applying it to our own lives — this becomes “spiritual voyeurism”.

This is where our text for today is so important: The Hebrews-author urges us to consider and imitate the Godly faith and habits of others to inspire our own devotions.

Reading about any significant Christian should make me want that closer walk with God — it should make me want to get my QT right.