How many times have you asked a student, “How are you doing spiritually?”
How many times has a student responded, “I’m doing OK—I mean, I haven’t been reading my Bible as much as I’d like…”
Do you see the disconnect here? You didn’t ask them how their Bible reading was going. You asked them about their spiritual life. What that tells me is that we have trained our students to equate spiritual health with having good quiet times.
What’s a Quiet Time?
I have been asking people for years where the term “Quiet Time” came from, and I still don’t have an answer. It certainly isn’t found in the Bible.
I get that the idea is inspired by the fact that Jesus got away to a solitary place to pray, and there is no question that a robust spiritual life includes regular time in the Word and in prayer. I have been distributing daily reading plans for years, as well as follow one myself. It can be no less than that, but it must be so much more.
Are we training good Pharisees or good Jesus-followers? If what we’re teaching our students about spiritual growth is that it relates only to Bible study and time spent in prayer, the result merely will be a group of teenage Pharisees-in-training. Our goal should be to produce committed disciples, not just people who display outward righteousness.
My fear is that when we tell students they must read their Bibles every day, a couple of things can happen. The first is guilt. Many of them lack the desire to read the Bible; but instead of pushing through that indifference, they’ll simply feel shame about not doing it. Then they carry this weight around with them that God is mad at them.
In these situations, we should pray for the Holy Spirit to move in the students’ lives. As one pastor pointed out, “We can lead a horse to water; we can even make the horse drink the water; but we can’t make the horse say, ‘I love this water.'” Only the Spirit of God can do that. In the meantime, we can continue to be present in their lives and perhaps encourage a more creative approach to reading the Bible. (I will take a closer look at Bible-reading strategies in next issue’s column.)
The second thing that can happen is that the students who do read their Bibles will do so as a means of “getting it over with.” In essence, they read because they’re “supposed to.” Once they’re done, they don’t feel refreshed or feel that they’ve met with God, but rather that they’ve simply gotten God off of their backs for the day.
Avoid the Perfunctory
Encouraging students to pursue a relationship with God must be presented as an invitation, not as a threat. We shouldn’t counsel students to spend time with God because He needs it, but because we need it. God invites us into a relationship with Him in which we surrender to Him in worship and come to Him hungry and thirsty, eager to be filled.
Our message must be that God is inviting us into a life of interaction with Him, which certainly includes reading His Word and finding time to be alone with Him; but our spiritual lives are also about how we treat our neighbors and our enemies, how we fight temptation, how we care for the poor, and even the mundane moments of life. God cares about our every moment, not just those when we’re alone with Him.
