Brothers, I thought it would be humbling for us and helpful to our brothers and sisters in Christ if we shared our experience with the practice and priority of private worship. At Redeemer we use the term private worship, which I think is very helpful, but you may know it as “quiet times” or “devotions.”

Private worship is the act of setting aside our preoccupation with our daily responsibilities to put our focus on the Lord. When I teach on worship I often mention the various ways worship should manifest itself in our lives – in public or gathered worship, in family worship (whoever we live with), in private worship, and in all-of-life worship. When one is missing the others will suffer as well. I have found that most of the time when someone has endless complaints about public worship along the lines of “our public worship just isn’t doing anything for me, isn’t helping me connect with God” that they have a non-existent private worship life. How can we expect to have intimate times of God on Sundays if we never seek Him during the week? Pardon the frankness, but it’s like a husband expecting passionate sex when he has lived in the same house as his wife but not spoken to her all week.

Private worship incorporates several spiritual disciplines including bible reading, bible study, bible meditation, bible memorization, and prayer. I also think that a vital part of private worship is singing, even if one can’t sing well or can’t even carry a tune. They can still pour their heart out to the Lord in song and have the added benefit of not having an audience besides the Lord!

The humbling part about this post is for me to share that as a pastor (in training) I struggle to be disciplined in my practice of private worship. I struggle to have these times, to have them to the depth that I know I need, and to not trust in my private worship as that which is keeping me in favor with God. All of my life I have struggled to be disciplined. Rather, I prefer to live by my feelings. Anyone who knows me wouldn’t say that I’m an emotional person, that is, I don’t display my emotions outwardly very strongly. For me living by my feelings means that I am tempted moment-by-moment to choose what I want to do based on what I feel like doing rather than what I know I should be doing. So I often do not feel like having private worship and give in to temptation to do other things. Or I am tempted to focus on one aspect of my private worship (Scripture, prayer, or singing) to the exclusion of others based on how I feel. Thankfully, I have so much accountability and am surrounded by believers that even with these tendencies don’t go more than a day or two without private worship. In honesty I’d say that I have regular private worship 4 to 5 days out of 6 (Sunday is a little different). I’m not proud that I can’t say 6 out of 6, but I also recognize how much I’ve grown in consistency and in my thinking about private worship.

Let me explain what I mean by that. It’s easy to feel great about our relationship with God when we’re having regular and emotional private worship. We can feel like God is really moving and working in our lives, like God approves of us, like God is going to bless us. And subtley we begin to think that it is because of our performance in such things as private worship. Alternatively, if we are not having private worship we can carry guilt and shame that drives us away from the Lord and compounds our problem. We can feel like a failure in God’s sight and in other believers’ sight. This is particularly pertinent to myself as a pastor since I am called to a life devoted to the Word and prayer. I have a solemn obligation to pray for my sheep and minister the Word to them and should rightly feel guilty when I fail to be striving towards growth in this area. But the problem isn’t guilt, it’s what we do with that guilt. If we run to Jesus with our guilt and remember that he removes our guilt and accepts us as the failures that we are, we will be restored to fellowship and remember the joy of what it means to be forgiven and accepted in God’s sight by the work of Jesus alone, not our own works.

I also want to mention the fact that I’ve met Christians, even pastors, who minimize the need to have private worship each day. I can tell you from my own experience and from scripture how devastating forsaking this practice can be spiritually. We don’t have a record of Jesus’ daily devotional habits, but we certainly have record of his regular and passionate private worship. He obviously needed these times with His Father desperately. We also have instruction from Paul several times about praying without ceasing.

So brothers, are you willing to share your private worship habits? Do you agree that daily private worship is vital for growing deeper with the Lord? Any more insights into how to think rightly about private worship?

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