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If you are like me, you base much of your walk with God on how good you are doing with your quiet times. You might even take it a step further and base your acceptance before our holy God on how often and how good your quiet times have been recently. Thankfully, God has been destroying this dangerous notion.
Tim Challies recently wrote a post entitled The Quiet Time Performance. It is particularly helpful for those of us who base our walk with God on our quiet times, of which we so often fall short. In the post, Tim notes how we have turned quiet times into a measure of our relationship with God.
"Perhaps you, like me, have too often turned quiet time into a performance. If you perform well for God, you enter your day filled with confidence that God will bless you, and that He will have to bless you. You feel that your performance has earned you the right to have a day filled with His presence, filled with blessings, and filled with confidence. And, of course, when you turn in a poor performance, you feel that God is in heaven booing you and heaving proverbial rotten vegetables in the form of removing His presence and, in the words of a friend, 'dishing out bummers.'"Whether you have had 200 quiet times in a row or are struggling do one a week, know that God does not look at you based upon your merit. No. When Christ died on the cross for you, he completed the Great Exchange - your sin for his righteousness. Christ took upon himself all of your sins and, in exchange, gave you his perfect righteousness. So that, now, when God looks at you, he does not see the person who struggles with his quiet times, and he doesn't see the person who thinks that his continuous quiet time streak merits his relationship with God. No, when God looks at you, he sees the righteousness of Christ. And that, alone, allows you to draw near to the throne of grace. Your relationship with God is "all of grace from beginning to end."
"Quiet time becomes tyrannical when you understand it as a performance. [Jerry] Bridges provides a pearl of wisdom. "Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God's grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God's grace." Whether you are having a good day or a bad day, the basis of your relationship with is not your performance, for even your best efforts are but filthy rags. Instead, your relationship is based on grace. Grace does not just save you and then leave you alone. No, grace saves you and then sustains you and equips you and motivates you. You are saved by grace and you then live by grace. Whether in the midst of a good day or bad, God does not base His relationship with you on performance, but on whether or not you are trusting in His Son."
