Long Devotions--Soul Healthy

While the term "pious" generally suggests hypocrisy or pretense, it used to mean something very good. My huge Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary gives it's first meaning as "having or showing a dutiful spirit of reverence for God, or an earnest wish to fulfill religious obligations." This is the meaning I'd like to use along with E. M. Bounds (1835-1913) to promote our having "long devotions." In Power Through Prayer, Bounds writes:

Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of their essence. . . Hurry, everywhere [improper] 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 soul.

When I was growing up in Richmond, Virginia, it was not uncommon to hear from church leaders something like, "at least give God five minutes a day in devotions." Accepting that they meant well, their advice can promote a wholly inadequate view of God, and if followed, lead to nothing short of a vacuous relationship to Jesus Christ. We should be calling for a kind of devotional life which is in keeping with the majesty of the One to whom we are devoted. Perhaps one reason so many fell away in those days (and today) is because too little was expected of them as disciples of Jesus. Loving God with ALL the heart, soul, mind, and strength really cannot be yoked together with selfish convenience. 

May God open the eyes of this generation to "seek great things of God" by pursuing the deeper things of God--piously.