Kickstart Your Quiet Time with Rachel Jones

at all the avocado toasts that I eat religiously. Anyway, that's not what we're talking about today, we are talking instead about Rachel's new book, which is called The Quiet Time Kickstart Six Weeks to a Healthy Bible Habit. I love this the book cover. Not that you should judge a book by its cover, but I just want people to know, especially as this is a podcast, people probably can't see the cover. I'm going to hold it up in case I have a clip mix and what's the

way on to social media. It's got a really fun cover that suggests the sort of beginning small and growing over time is what I'm taking away from that. And I'd love to hear first Rachel, kind of what motivated you to want to write a little bit like this, and also what on earth is a quiet time? For those who are less familiar with that particular piece of Christian jargon, Yeah, it's a.

and to pray. And I would say, if you've like grown up going to church or have been around churches, a while, you probably have this impression that, like having a quiet time is a thing you're meant to do, it's a thing that it's a thing that Christians do, and you know, often, you know, there's a sort of a joke or a trope or whatever that you know, like every every talk at youth group ends with the application that you need to reach a Bible and tell

your friends about Jesus. And that's kind of where we start. But it is a helpful thing to do. But it's a thing actually that quietly, quite a lot of Christians aren't doing a lot of a lot of my friends, you know, a lot of people at my church. They have this sense that they're meant to be in the Bible. They want to read the Bible and pray each day,

but it's just not part of their routine. And so it really grew out of that observation and what would what would a resource look like that would help people who wanted to develop that habit to actually do that. And the inspiration really came from the couch to five K program. I don't know, do you have that there?

you know. It tells you to run for sixty seconds and then you like walk for ninety seconds, and you've got like this celebrity coach in your ear who's like saying, yeah, you can do it, and you sort of gradually, you know, you gradually increase the amount of jogging you do and like reduce the rest times you have until like you're

running for like thirty minutes. And I had done touch five k. Like family members at Christmas, you know, and everyone's like vegging out on the sofa on like the twenty eighth of December, and you know, my sister would go up for a run and then she'd just come back as like this whole new person. And I say, but it's really hard to develop a habit like that. It's really hard to sort of know where to start

or how to get there. And I figured that for lots of people It's pretty similar with this kind of discipline of reading the Bible and having a time to pray. You kind of want to do it, but it's hard to develop the habit. So in the same way, this little booklet, it's got readings that you do each day, and they start really small, just with like a couple of sentences, and then they build up and kind of

gradually kind of increasing the time that you're spending. And yeah, I'm the one saying, WHOA, you can do it and kind of helping people, giving people pointers as to how to understand scripture as they go.

and I'm increasingly concerned about you. Yeah, I really like this this analogy to exercise, because my guess is for folks who are listening, regardless of how they would identify religiously, that probably all of us know that we should be exercising, that that's something that you know, healthy people do, and that even there's a there's a whole narrative around the fact that if you exercise actually makes you happy, that there are sort of I don't know, and orphans firing

off or whatever when you exercise and that even though we might have a mental barrier to exercise because it takes effort and it's often more comfortable sitting on the couch than it is, you know, running down the street, that there is going to be this kind of payoff in terms of not only our like overall long term physical health, but also even people who exercise tend to have sort of less LIGHTLYHD depression and better kind of overall happiness and mental health and physical health and kind

of all the all the things. So it's like it's something that's can be hard for us to implement, but we know that there is this sort of promised land of betterness on the other side of it. Yeah, and that it's not just about like, Okay, you know, let's go to the gym one day and exercise our hearts out and then sort of exhausted for a month and

never do it again. It's there's something about the consistent rhythm of exercise that is what really makes the difference, rather than just kind of the daily sort of a random burst that doesn't follow through to consistency. Is that true? Also, would you say of Bible reading and kind of prayer time, This this sort of mysterious quiet time that that we're talking about in this book.

you know, if we are people consistently dwelling in God's word and and speaking to him in prayer, then then we will find ourselves changed by the process.

things stem from the heart, and not most things. And so I think often it comes down to, you know, there's there's there's part of us maybe that doesn't want to because of what we're expecting of God and who we what we think he's like, and what we think he'll say. Sometimes I think there's a part of us that thinks we don't need to because of, you know what,

what we think about ourselves. And you know, we're generally kind of competent individuals maybe who who who kind of get on with life okay, And sometimes you know, we think that we we can't, you know, And I guess those those are the people who I was really thinking about as I as I wrote this little resource, this idea that the Bible is a big and really intimidating book. You know, how do you how do you even like, yeah, get started where you know which bit, which bit do

you read first? And then you read it and it's weird or there's you know, there's people killing each other, or you know, there's there's some there's some odd stuff, and you know, how can I be how can I be confident that you know what what I think it means is really what it means. I meet a lot of people who kind of have that, that's that fear. So yeah, I think some of the are some of the big barriers to people having a quiet time regularly.

good place to start. When we begin with ABC, I'm refraining from singing only just And when we read the Bible, we begin with Genesis chapter one, and I think for a lot of people, you know, Genesis chapter one goes swimmingly, and then chapters sort of two and three start to become a little bit confusing because we have all sort of stuff about how human beings are made, and people, you know, questions come up about what about relationship between the first woman even the first man, Adam, And then

what happens in chapter three we have this serpent coming along, and there's the curiousness of the Bible starts pretty early on, and people might have a lot of questions, and then I think, you know, as people progress through the narrative, they might find, you know, Genesis, they see a lot of things described that we would recognize as bad things,

and then an exodus. You know, the narrative continues highs and lows, and then by the time we're getting to Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, the sort of third, fourth, and fifth books of the Bible, I think people are often kind of come completely unstuck because they're harder to figure out, like, how does this fit into an overall kind of understanding of who God is and how this

all works. Would you recommend that people start at the very beginning and work through the Bible from there, or would you recommend that they start with a New Testament and seat of set the Old Testament aside. What are your thoughts on starting points?

what we're seeking to do. When we read any bit of the Bible, including the Old Testament, there's this idea that it's that all of it is pointing to Jesus Christ and what he would come and do. And so yeah, I guess if you if you open up Mark's Gospel, it's kind of easier to get to the point and see Jesus. Then maybe if you're if you're working through Genesis.

So yeah, I think I think if there's someone here, you know, listening, wanted to wanted to start reading the Bible, it might be a good idea to start with one of the gospels. Yeah, yeah, I think.

about and interested in the treatment of the marginalize. That's a particular focus in Luke though. It's the longest of the gospels, John, if you're philosophically minded, John is an absolute riot in the most wonderful possible way. And our mutual friend Rachel thinks that Matthew's Gospel is top of the tree in terms of I guess you get. You get some really significant teachings of Jesus in Matthew's Gospel.

I mean you do in all four of them, of course, and you also get a lot of ties back, great explicit ties back to the narrative of the Old Testament. And I think it's sort of worth saying that even if you do start with one of the Gospels, which could be a really great place to start if you've never opened the Bible and sort of read before, then what you'll come to find is that in order to understand the New Testament, you actually need to dig into

the Old Testament. And conversely, from a Christian perspective, in order to understand the Old Testament, you have to dig

into the New Testament. So it's not actually I think an either or approach is not going to be helpful to us in terms of building a around it sense of of how God has revealed himself in the world, and I think it's it's unfortunately a lot of Christians actually start with the New Testament and really basically continue with the New Testament and never really dive into the Old Testament, and actually that way you're missing a massive

amount of what happened. It's a little bit like I absolutely love Jerr R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings sort of trilogy, and it's only really the New Testament is a little bit like starting with the Return of the King. You kind of need you need, you need the story up to that point to really understand it. And I do think we're selling ourselves short if we don't submerge

ourselves also in the Old Testament narratives. But we're going to need to have a different approach to different parts of the Bible, depending on what kind of genre they're written in. So you're fine parts of the Old Testament that are our narrative, you'll find parts that are poetry. If you know, for example, the Book of Psalms, which is sort of sort of the hymn book of God's people, and the Old Testament the Jewish people, and you know,

strongly framed around poetry. You'll find prophecy, and the prophetic books are actually quite poetic as well. So you'll find you'll find all sorts of different ways of writing in the Old Testament, and you'll need to approach them in different ways in order to understand the world kind of just like we do in our you know, normal reading in other parts of our lives. You wouldn't open a book of poetry and expect to read it in the same way as you would open a sort of history

of the United Kingdom, for example. Like you just you'd

know that you were expecting different kinds of things. And I think sometimes people come to the Bible expecting only one kind of writing, and so they're throne by the fact there's actually a vast diversity of different kinds of writing that we're going to find there, but all of them, according to the Christian claim, all of them actually the inspired word of God and pointing us as you've pointed out, Rachel, to the person of Jesus in one way or another.

If we think about just the habits of our days, the kind of structure of our days. Are there any thoughts or recommendations that you have in terms of people building a Bible reading habit into their daily rhythms, Like, is it something that you can just kind of slot in at any point in the day. Is it something where your best to kind of build it around are the habits you have. I'm sort of curious for your your wisdomne on that front.

in this time, in this place. My housemate actually tells the story of when she was at college university, she had a friend who became a Christian and her dad, my friend's dad. She he said to her, oh, well, you you need to teach this new Christian how to have a quiet time. And that's less about like what to do when you do it, but just this this sense of kind of setting aside a time and a place you need to help her grow that grow that habit.

And so this friend of mine, she would cycle around to this friend's like dorm room and at seven am in the morning and you know, open the Bible with her and kind of help her get to get used to the idea of you know, reading the Bible at this end of day. So yeah, that's just to say, yeah, there these are habits that it's helpful to really build like that. So yeah, I think there's there's benefit in doing it in the morning. I tend to read the Bible in the morning. It's sort of sets you up

for the day. It means, you know, one of the one of the first voices you hear is this wisdom from God's Word. You know. It means so you can you can pray about the things coming up ahead of you. But yeah, I don't think that's a I don't think that's a must. You know, it might be that like in your lunch break from work, that's when you're gonna set aside time. It might be in the evening, right before beds. You know, maybe you've got already a habit

of you know, reading before beds. Add In adding the Bible, there maybe, Yeah, I think it's I think it's about thinking about what will what will work with your routine. You know, what are the fixed points in your day where you're always in the same place at the same time, I guess and for most of us that's at the start of the end. And yeah, adding it in there.

either for myself or for friends as follows. One is a couple of times with friends who've been wanting to start a daily bubber reading habit, I've said, hey, why don't we both read through the same books of the Bible and we'll just do it like a paragraph at the time, a couple of paragraphs, have a chapter whatever, like a little chunk at a time, and we'll text each other with a top thought from what we read.

So I've done that with a couple of friends where it's just, you know, we worked through one or sometimes two books of the Bible, and it's just been a kind of helpful starting point for helping them just sort of get off the ground in terms of byber reading for themselves and having some built in like community around that where we're able to sort of just send a quick thought back and forth of like, oh, this has struck me, or here's a question I had, or here's

something I was confused by, or here's something that I was excited to discover. But there's like that sense of kind of communal togetherness in the experience of reading the Bible, even though we're in different places and reading at different times. It's an asynchronous approach to reading together. If you can't psycle around to your friend's house at seven am in the morning and like literally sit alongside them. I think another thing that I found helpful is putting my Bible

reading before I communicate with friends. I'm very much a social being. I mean, I know we all are, but I'm a sort of extra extra social being, and one of my personal rules is that I do my by reading quiet time before I get to text my friends. And that's really helpful to me just as a sort of discipline, so that I'm not getting kind of pulled into other things and that I have ah a sense of like, actually, I'm going to put this first in my day and get things off to that start. Also, honestly,

in different seasons of life, different things at work. Like I've got three kids, and when each of them was like a small baby, I was lucky to read the Bible on my phone at like a random time in the night while I was feeding. Like it was not Oh, I get up every morning and I have a sort of set time because the baby was already crying and I was already you know, you're sort of so chronically sleep deprived that you don't even know whether it's the

morning on the night half a time like this. There'll be seasons in our lives, for one reason or another where actually it's it's a real fight to get the Bible open in any way, shape or form, and that we you know, we may need to just kind of grab what we can get. Now, I say, there's no you know, I have friends who have four children and have always maintained like the most beautifully consistent sort of Bible reading habit. And that's wonderful. And if that to you,

I know you're listening, then hoorray. You know I'm happy for you. But for somebody like me who struggles when they are severely sleep deprived to meaningfully engage with anything, I was, Yeah, I was needing to really grab what I could when I when I could, in the random sort of moments that I was feeding and kind of conscious. What would you say two people who've maybe come discouraged.

They're saying, you know, look, I've tried reading them by but before I've made it for a few days or even a few weeks, and then I've just sort of given up or fizzled out, and I just feel discouraged and like I maybe shouldn't try again. Or would you say to encourage somebody in that sport, I.

getting a streak on Strava or whatever. You know, this is about you meeting with Jesus through his written word in the Bible and speaking to him in prayer. And yeah, so I think really, you know, coming face to face with him and saying, you know, Lord, please, would you place, would you help me? And trusting that he will He

will answer that prayer when we pray and fee. So, yeah, and you know, and I think there's there's as you say, you know, you share some really great wisdom there on with our you know, help of friends, accountability, that kind of stuff. But yeah, and even if this is the time you try and fail again, you can try again, you know that.

Gospel as we think about our Bible reading habits. So the gospel truth that God hasn't saved us because we are good, or because we are lovable, or because we are disciplined, or because we're religious, or because X Y or Z slash Z, depending on which side of the pond you hail from, but that God, in his mercy has saved us if we've trusted in Jesus, simply because we have trusted in Jesus, that he paid for our sin to the fullest extent, and that we're not on

like a sort of performance progress plan to where like maybe over time, if we read the Bible enough we will get to the point where God is pleased with us.

But instead that just as a parent delights in the child, so God delights in his children in spite of our inadequacy, in spite of our daily struggles with sin, in spite of our measily attempts to read His word, in spite of our you know, lack of prayerfulness often that he he loves us first, but that that doesn't and shouldn't produce in us a kind of complacency that says, okay, well, I know that I know that God loves me, and I know that Jesus died for me, and so it

doesn't depend on my performance that's true, and then I'm just going to sit on the couch spiritually speaking, and not look to grow and not look to delight in God's word. That instead, we need to sort of combine that sense of freedom that we have foo fallers of Jesus, of knowing that we're forgiven and inexpressibly loved, with a desire to grow. And I think sometimes, I mean, it's sort of interesting as we've touched a little bit on like culture and how we can help one another in

relationship with sort of accountability and encouragement. It's been striking to me in the last couple of years as I've been in church alongside our mutual friend Rachel Gilson, that my approach with a new believer, if I was getting somebody sort of started on Bible reading, would be to say, Okay, you know, let's try and get you started with like

a paragraph a day. That would be fantastic. Rachel's approaches, you know, welcome to the people of God, here's a Bible and a year plan, let's get going kind of thing. And honestly, it wouldn't have occurred to me to ask a new believer to read the Bible in a year which takes about twelve minutes of reading a day. It's actually not as much as you might think, but is you know, significant in several chapters of the Bible every day.

It just wouldn't have occurred to me. Is that Like, that's seemed like a really high standard to set for somebody who's just sort of starting out in faith. But what I've seen in a number of instances is people saying okay, great and going ahead and reading the Bible in a year, and actually it's been incredibly good for them.

So I guess what I would say, You know, if you're listening to this and thinking, okay, I don't yet have a Bible reading habit, or maybe I do, but it's it's not where I would want it to be. I don't think there's any harm in saying, Okay, I'm actually going to really challenge myself here, and I'm going to say I'm going to set aside, like twelve to fifteen minutes a day max, is what it takes to read the Bible in a year. I'm going to get

a hold of either so many different plans. You can just sort of google Bible and a year plans, and often they'll mix Old Testament and New Testament, so you sort of have both both lenses coming on a daily basis, and yeah, you can get actually a lot of God's words sort of into your bloodstream that way. I think it's important for us, as we do that in community, to not have a sense of trying to impress others or looking down on others if they fail, or thinking

that others are looking down on us. I think it's vital that we have in every aspect of the Christian life, a sensitivity to how the Gospel applies to us, and how the Gospel applies to everybody around us, and actually how Jesus consistently taught that self righteousness is disgusting in

God's eyes. Like basically, so if you know that you have a tendency to be the kind of person who reads the Bible diligently and quite enjoys looking down on all the other Christians you aren't, then that's probably something you're going to need to be consistently bringing to God

in prayer and asking for his forgiveness. And conversely, if you're somebody who thinks, do you know what, I'm a total spiritual failure, probably everybody else is reading the Bible multiple times, you know, Bible through multiple times per year, and I'm you know, struggling to even get the Bible open in the first place. Don't don't be discouraged you you don't have to stay there. That doesn't have to

be your ongoing pattern. And pray for the self righteousness of other people who might be looking down on you. What's been in your life, Rachel, what's been the most helpful thing to you as you've grown in your Bible reading habits.

going to keep this up? And you know, yeah, I did, and I don't know if that's because I'm a creature of habit or because you know, God already had hold of me. But yeah, I'm very kind of very grateful for that, and yeah, it's it's a great joy to now work for the publishing company that does those notes

and does those kind of resources. But I think as well, Yeah, people I remember as a as a student at university again that was just a really formative time and being in this Bible study with people who were just so gripped by it was the Philippians we were doing at the time, this kind of letter to Christians in the first century, and yeah, being being really really challenged by that because I had I had gone into it thinking, you know, I want to be a Christian, but I

don't want to be one of those Christians, you know, the really keen ones on campus who were lame and they're wearing their Christian Union T shirts and you know, I don't, I don't. I don't want to be one of those.

about something. You know, I think that's what we're designed to be as humans. We're designed to be all in. We're designed to be devoted, and yeah, we were all devoted to something, aren't we? But actually, you know, the Bible says that we're designed to be devoted to the God who made us and who loves us. And seeing these seeing these other students who were that yeah, really really challenged me. And so yeah, I just I just gradually got more and more all in. And yeah, it

was it was. It was in my last year at university that I first did the Bible in a year reading plan that you've just mentioned, and again like, yeah, there was such there was such value in just sort of having this bath in the Bible over the course of the year, just kind of soaking it, soaking it all in in a way that I hadn't done hadn't you know that in that volume, in that space of shorter space of time, And I think it's I think it's impossible to do that without coming away with just

a sense of how how big God is and how sort of vast this story that he's writing is, and just kind of Yeah, that's the sort of richness of scripture as a as a piece of literature.

the best way to do it. But one of the things that that's been helpful to me, and I've just recently sort of switched over to this because I'm it's now January fifteenth, I'm on a I'm in a new kind of exercise region for the year, and my struggle has always been I'm just going to use I'm going to say this illustratively because I think it's helpful for people to think, like, Okay, everybody's in a different life situation, and maybe we've all got to think about what's going

to like work best for us in the life situation that we're in. I have historically really struggled to develop an exercise habit because I need to exercise before having my morning bath, and I hate starting work without having had my bath. And I also have three kids who, at different points in the morning kind of need little pieces of attention, so that this time period is pretty constrained. And my brain for writing is best in the morning.

And all these things have been hampering me from exercise in the last couple of years because I've had my Bible reading the morning and then I've had my bath, and there isn't just isn't time just sort of slot in exercise as well. And what I'm experimenting with this year and so far it's actually been really helpful is I've got a recording of the Bible done by Jackie ol Perry, whose voice I love and who's teaching I appreciate.

She is one of the people who Crossway had engaged to read just sort of do an audiobook version of the Bible, along with several other people, so you can sort of pick your voice, as it were. And I thought to myself, you know, given that most of Christians throughout most of history having countered God's word actually in

an auditory way rather than in a reading way. And given that I'm actually somebody who's I grew up on audiobooks and it's always been a way that I've really learned, well, I thought, oh, maybe I can crack this nut by running while listening to Jackie L. Perry reading me the Bible. And it's actually been fabulous. So I found I'm actually focusing better on what I'm hearing while I'm running than I would have been than i was when I was

sort of sitting and reading for myself. Now again, that's like purely personality type dependent, I'm sure, and we're all you know, some people are more visual learners and blah blah blah. So I'm not saying like you guys should all do what I'm doing. I'm just saying it's been helpful to me to think, Okay, here's another strategy that

I could have for reading the Bible. And even I'm now implementing a kind of walking prayer style of prayer, which I'm actually also finding I'm engaging better with prayer as I walk than when I was sort of sitting and praying something about the fact that my body is moving. And then I'm sort of praying out loud quietly to myself walking down the street, probably looking like a complete weirdo,

but like, never mind, seeah. I just encourage folks who are listening if you want to start a quiet time habit. That may be that at this point in your life, the absolutely best thing for you to do is to be sort of sitting down for ten, twenty thirty minutes, whatever it is, five minutes, like a number of minutes, and maybe sitting down on your couch, opening your Bible in the quiet. It may be running it, maybe walking at Maybe there are different ways that this can look

and actually all of these can be good. And it may be that something works for one period of your life and then and you know, switch over to something else for another period of your life. But I just encourage you. And also, if you're not yet a believer in Jesus, if you're not convinced by who Jesus is, why not make it your goal in twenty twenty to read through one of the gospel accounts of jesus life.

They're actually remarkably short. You could read even the longest gospel Luke, in the time that it takes you to watch the movie Wicked, you know, one of the longer movies and the short shortest one mark you could read in the time that it takes you to watch the average kind of Disney film. And yeah, spend some time thinking like, who is Jesus? How I actually really considered that question? Have I taken the time to read one of the first century accounts of his life and to

ask myself? Is he perhaps who he claims to be? Rachel, thank you so much for joining me. For those who are interested in grabbing a copy of Rachel's helpful little book. And when I say little, it really is quite small, so you're not going to spend a whole lot of

time reading it. It's called The Quiet Time Kickstart six Weeks to a Healthy Bible Habit by Rachel Jones, and yeah, it could be just what you need to get yourself started, get yourself off the couch, so to speak, and headed toward the five K. So thanks again, Rachel, my pleasure.