Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee (Isaiah 26:3, KJV).
Have you noticed how easily precious nuggets from our spiritual disciplines slip away from us? We may discover the truth of God’s Word, come across enlightening scriptures, and feel elated about these insights. Yet, along the way, we often lose focus on these biblical truths, and they seem to fade from our minds. How many times have you diligently observed your quiet time, memorized your selected scriptures, and while doing your morning chores, reflecting on that scripture verse, suddenly lost concentration? It’s often challenging to identify exactly when that loss of focus occurs.
Our Lord explained the parable of the sower, highlighting the importance of having a heart receptive to God’s Word. The right heart is like good soil, which is honest and open; when it hears the Word, it retains it and produces fruit with patience (Luke 8:15). After completing a fruitful quiet time in the morning and memorizing your scripture, how frequently do you meditate on that verse throughout the day?
Daily routines can easily distract us and disrupt our consistent fellowship with the Lord through His Word. As a result, our quiet time scripture becomes stale by evening, as if we had dedicated significant time to it a week ago. This occurs primarily because we fail to cultivate the spiritual fruit of patience in this discipline. How many times have we memorized a verse, only to struggle to recall it by midday, feeling frustrated? As a result, we might give up on this mental exercise or resort to checking our quiet time book for reference.
This experience is quite common. Often, it isn’t that the scripture has completely left our minds; rather, it’s the result of a noisy mind. Amidst mental noise, it becomes easy to drift away from intentional fellowship with the Lord through our quiet time scripture. The Bible, in its Basic English version, translates patience as “a quiet mind” (Galatians 5:22, BBE). Maintaining a quiet mind is a fruit of the Spirit, essential for maximizing the benefits of our quiet time throughout the day. A quiet mind is not merely a practice; it is a state of being that the Holy Spirit provides for fellowship. This is how the Holy Spirit helps us embody God’s Word in the face of daily temptations and challenges (Matthew 6:34, KJV).
By cultivating the fruit of the Spirit of patience through a quiet mind, we will sustain our fellowship with the Lord all day long through His Word. When you lay hold on that verse of scripture in the quietness of mind, it floods the heart with perfect peace.
