The quiet time is a daily period alone with Scripture and prayer, usually in the morning, kept by evangelical Christians around the world.
Tagged: Prayer Scripture Study
How It Is Practiced
The practitioner sets aside a fixed period — commonly fifteen minutes to an hour — before the day's work, with a Bible and often a notebook. The pattern is simple: a short prayer, a passage read slowly (often following a reading plan), reflection or journaling on what it says and requires, and prayer that moves through adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and requests. The time and place are kept deliberately constant so the habit does not depend on inclination.
Purpose and Meaning
The quiet time rests on the conviction that the Christian life is a relationship maintained by daily attention: God speaks in the Scripture read, and the reader answers in prayer. Popularized by the student movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it made the devotional disciplines of earlier centuries portable for laypeople without a prayer book or a director.
References
- Quiet Time — Wikipedia Free / open access
Related Practices
- Journaling and Commonplace Books — Generations of Christians have kept notebooks of Scripture, prayer, and self-examination as a daily devotional discipline.
- Devotional Reading Plans — Reading plans lead the reader through the whole Bible, or a book of it, in daily portions across a year or a season.
- Scripture Memorization — Christians memorize passages of Scripture word for word so that the text is carried in the heart and available at need.
Related Across the Site
- Family Worship Devotion — Family worship gathers the household daily or weekly to read Scripture, sing, and pray together at home.
- Journaling and Commonplace Books Devotion — Generations of Christians have kept notebooks of Scripture, prayer, and self-examination as a daily devotional discipline.
- Scripture Memorization Devotion — Christians memorize passages of Scripture word for word so that the text is carried in the heart and available at need.
- The Rosary Devotion — The Rosary is a meditative prayer that moves through the life of Christ and Mary on a circle of beads.
- Al-Fatiha Prayer or Creed — The opening chapter of the Qur'an, recited in every unit of the ritual prayer.
- Metta Sutta Prayer or Creed — The Buddha's discourse on loving-kindness, chanted as a blessing and a protection.
- Nitnem Prayer or Creed — The daily banis (hymns) prescribed for Sikh devotion: morning, evening, and night prayers from the Sikh scriptures.
- The Lord's Prayer (Our Father) Prayer or Creed — The prayer Jesus taught his disciples in Matthew 6 and Luke 11, shared by Christians of every tradition.