Tomorrow we will begin reading through the NT twice in 2010. It is my desire that we don't just read through it and say that we accomplished another religious task, but that we would take time to meet with the living God through His Word, which is Jesus Christ. Also we will be able to share our thoughts and insights that we gained from the passage for the day. Here is a worthy quote from William Wilberforce and E.M. Bounds that offers us good insight on taking time and being disciplined in regard to our devotions.
"This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours! I suspect I have been allotting habitually too little time to religious exercises, as private devotion and religious meditation, Scripture-reading, etc. Hence I am lean and cold and hard. I had better allot two hours or an hour and a half daily. I have been keeping too late hours, and hence have had but a hurried half hour in a morning to myself. Surely the experience of all good men confirms the proposition that without a due measure of private devotions the soul will grow lean. - William Wilberforce
“Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of their essence. The ability to wait and stay and press belongs essentially to our intercourse with God. Hurry, everywhere unseeming and damaging, is so to an alarming extent in the great business of communion with God. Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, strength, are never the companions of hurry. Short devotions deplete spiritual vigor, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations, blight the root and bloom of spiritual life. They are the prolific source of backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial piety; they deceive, blight, rot the seed, and impoverish the soil.—Complete Works of E. M. Bounds, The
I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts and reading yours as we take this journey together.