Jason Helopoulos

There are things worth contending for.

The faith is chief among those things.

It's not if you pray.

There's an expectation of his disciples as he's preaching the Sermon on the Mount.

He says, when you pray, go in to your closet and shut the door.

When?

It's the expectation that those who are his, those who are following after him, that have fallen in love with him, will want and will spend time in prayer and in the word.

As we're looking at worshiping with all of our life, our Lord and our God, we're going to come to that last sphere of worship as we talk about secret worship, or what has been called private worship.

or as evangelicalism in some ways has been very helpful in its kind of encouragement for you and I to have daily devotions or those quiet times as it is often called.

And that's what we want to look at and spend some time thinking about today.

As we do so, I want to encourage you that this is not something that's new with evangelicalism.

Quiet times, daily devotions is not something that just started in the last hundred years or even the last couple of hundred years.

Rather, it's something that we see in the Scriptures, if you want to think upon it that way.

When Moses has died and has ceased to be in the land with the people before actually they entered the land, Joshua is commissioned by God.

And there in Joshua 1, the Lord tells him, you are to meditate upon the law day and night.

Every day and every night he commissions Joshua to do this.

We continue through the scriptures.

We all know the story of Daniel, how Daniel was willing to give his life to spend time in prayer with the Lord and be willing to be persecuted for such.

We observe it in the Psalms.

Throughout the Psalms, there is this constant refrain of thinking upon the Lord, even through the watches of the night and meditating upon his word, finding it sweeter than honey, going to him in prayer.