Time Alone with God Is More Important Than Busyness

Josh, Beth, Linda, and myself in northern Israel

Spending time alone with God is more important than what you do. What you do becomes more important as a consequence of spending time with God. 

If this is not in the right spiritual order, you will become irrelevant, in terms of the desires of God. You will do things, maybe many things, self-directed. You will become your own god, a god that has no time for God. Pity the poor people whom you recruit for your own doings.

Even Jesus spent time alone with the Father. If we don't, what is that about? Unbelief? Deism?

Eugene Peterson writes:

"The alternative to acting like gods who have no need of God is to become contemplative pastors. If we do not develop a contemplative life adequate to our vocation, the very work we do and our very best intentions, insidiously pride-fueled as they inevitably become, destroy us and all with whom and for whom we work.
Contemplation comprises the huge realities of worship and prayer without which we become performance-driven and program-obsessed pastors." (Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness, p. 114)



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My two books are 

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

I am now writing 

How God Changes the Human Heart 

Technology and Spiritual Formation