By Eliana Duran

A quiet time, or devotional time, can look very different from one believer to another. It might include an hour with your Bible, a devotional book, and a prayer journal in a cozy chair at the crack of dawn. Or perhaps it is twenty minutes in the parking lot before work, reading Scripture on your phone and asking God to help you display his love. It could also be listening to an audio Bible on your earbuds during an evening run and praying before bed.

Devotional time is simply a daily routine intended to help us quiet distractions and, as the name suggests, devote ourselves to seeking God. Christians spend time with God in a special and intentional way when we read his Word and talk with him.

However, as simple as it sounds, finding quiet time is not always easy. When I was a new believer, it was a struggle to set up a regular habit of reading the Bible every day or even to know what to say when I prayed to God. Life transitions, such as going to college or becoming a parent, can also make it difficult to establish a regular routine.

Yet we read in Psalms 1:2 that those who are righteous “delight in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night.” We can also see Jesus’ example in how he “often withdrew to the wilderness” (the most quiet, desolate place he could find!) “for prayer” (Luke 5:16). So, we know that quiet time is important. But how do we get started?

Four Simple Steps to Reading the Bible Regularly

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. With a task as big as reading the Bible, you have to take it step by step. Here are four simple steps to build strong Bible reading habits.

1: Decide where in your Bible to start.

As the old song goes, starting at the very beginning is a very good place to start. You can start with Genesis and read through the Bible in the order the books have traditionally been arranged. But there are other options as well. The Gospel of John is never a bad choice if you are new to the Bible or want a (re)introduction to Jesus and his life. Or you could read through the Bible in a year with a One Year Bible. There are One Year Bibles that allow you to read through the Bible in chronological order (notably different from the traditional order of books!), and there are others that break up the readings so that you get a passage from the Old and New Testaments every day.

2: Choose a doable goal for how much you will read each day.

Author Pete Greig writes that it’s “much better to set yourself an achievable target, aiming initially for perhaps just fifteen minutes a day at a convenient time in a conducive place. You will be pleasantly surprised by how easy this is and how often your quiet time overruns.”

But also remember that you’re under no pressure to read at a certain pace. Any Bible reading plan (even the One Year Bibles) can be adapted to best fit the amount of reading time you have.

3. Make your devotional time enjoyable.

“Most days, I look forward to my moments of quiet, alone with the Lord, clutching a big mug of coffee in the morning,” says Greig. “There is an excitement about opening my Bible and thinking, I wonder what the Lord is going to say to me today!” If you can learn to enjoy your quiet time, it will become a much more sustainable habit in the long term.

4. Tame your distractions.

In Be Still: A Simple Guide to Quiet Times, Brian Heasley describes different actions we can take when we notice distractions impeding our quiet times: we can dismiss, delay, or respond to them. For example, you are trying to focus on a chapter of Isaiah but then you think of a friend from high school. You could dismiss this distraction and refocus your attention on your Bible reading. You could delay this distraction by writing your friend’s name on a sticky note to call and catch up later. Or you could respond to that distraction; perhaps that friend is on your mind because you should be praying for them.

A Practical Tip for Knowing What to Pray

As a new believer, the biggest struggle in my prayer life was coming up with the words to say! My prayers always felt stilted and unnatural. It was hard to have a conversation with God. But sometimes, all it takes is a little prompt. Just as writing prompts can help you defeat writer’s block, prayer prompts can help you defeat a prayer block.

In How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People, Pete Grieg provides a useful format for prayer by through the acronym PRAY: Pause, Rejoice, Ask, Yield. This framework doesn’t have to restrict our prayers, but it can provide an easy way to start.

Pause

• God, today I am distracted by…
• Lord, please quiet my heart so that I can see how you are…
• Rejoice
• Father, I am amazed by your attribute of…
• God, today I am especially thankful for…

Ask

• God, for my mom I pray that…
• Father, I am thinking of my friend today…
• Savior, I pray for your help to…
• God, I pray that you open my neighbor’s eyes…

Yield

• Lord, I am reminded of my recent sin…
• Savior, would you forgive me for…
• God, today I am struggling with…
• Father, help me to trust you completely when…

When we are still stuck on what to say, the good news is that we can even pray without words and the Holy Spirit will pray for us. As Romans 8:26 says, “The Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words.”

Conclusion

Cultivating regular quiet time is not always easy. But what a blessing and privilege it is that we have 24/7 access to God through prayer and his Word! While though establishing these habits felt like a chore at first, I have realized that the more I read the Bible and the more I pray, the more I enjoy this time I get to spend with God. We can never exhaust the riches of the truths contained in Scripture or the patience of our God who listens to us. The incredible thing about having an infinite God is that we can always grow in knowing him more.