DAILY QUIET TIME GUIDE

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1 DAILY QUIET TIME GUIDE BREVARD COMMUNITY CHURCH BEST DAY EVER 09/03/2017 HOW TO HAVE A DAILY QUIET TIME The QT Guide is designed to help you MOVE with God through Bible Reading, reflection and prayer. It can be completed in a about 7 mins. ½ Minutes Preparing Your Heart: Invest the first 30 seconds preparing your heart. You might pray, Lord, cleanse my heart so You can speak to me through the Scriptures. Make my mind alert, my soul active, and my heart responsive. Surround me with Your presence during this time. 4 Minutes Listening To God: Take the next four minutes to read the Bible. Your greatest need is to hear a word from God. Allow the Word to strike fire in your heart. Meet the Author! 2 1/2 Talking To God (Prayer): After God has spoken through His Book, then speak to Him in prayer. DAY 1 LABOR DAY ENJOY YOUR DAY OFF DAY 2 Genesis 1:1 / Genesis 1:26-28 / Ephesians 2:10 God s Innovative Heart In the twenty-sixth verse of the Bible, God creates humans in His image" or likeness. In the twentyfive verses that precede this, we get a glimpse into the power of God s imagination as He creates the richly textured world around us. So, if God created us in His likeness, I think it follows that each of us is endowed with an innate desire to create. Interestingly, I think that even people who don t believe in God sense this fundamental longing. While some people may choose to express themselves through singing, dancing, painting, or writing poetry, many more people desire to express their creative reflection of God in their professional occupation. Sadly, many of us have been taught by our schooling to leave our creativity outside the office door. Creativity guru Roger von Oech illustrates this with a powerful story. When Roger was in the tenth grade, his English teacher drew a small dot on the chalkboard and asked the class what it was. After a few seconds of nervous silence and many wondering whether it was a trick question, one student finally answered, A dot on the blackboard. Relieved, the class sat silently and waited for the teacher to go on. The teacher explained that, one day earlier, she had done the same exercise with a kindergarten class.

2 She got fifty different answers, including everything from an owl s eye to a pole or a squashed bug. Roger explains: In the ten year period between kindergarten and high school, not only had we learned how to find the right answer, we had also lost the ability to look for more than one right answer. We had learned how to be specific, but we had lost much of our imaginative power. While it may be true that formal education dimmed some of our natural imaginative power, I fully believe that it can be restored in each of us. For Christians, this restoration is essential to being able to fully reflect God s image. The first step is to stop limiting creativity to something exclusively done by professionals. Creativity is inherent in everyone, not just the worship team on Sunday or that artist neighbor down the street. I think we reflect God s creativity in our careers by having an entrepreneurial mindset, or creating the world the way it ought to be by commercializing innovative solutions to the problems we encounter in our everyday lives. You may know a successful entrepreneur that created a profitable venture, but that s the end of a story that probably started with his or her vision for some fundamental improvement needed in the world. This definition of the entrepreneurial mindset goes far beyond twenty-somethings building the next great mobile app in Silicon Valley. Any of us can choose to act like an entrepreneur within our organization, be it a Fortune 500 company, a mid-sized nonprofit, or a high-growth startup. So, how do you start developing this entrepreneurial mindset and vision? Pray for God to restore this imaginative spirit within you, then start looking for opportunities in your professional context to introduce new products and services to make things better. DAY 3 Matthew 25:14-30 / Luke 19:12-27 Don t Bury Your Resources If your first thought is Great! I ll start thinking like an entrepreneur, your most likely second thought will be What if I fail? This is natural, and particularly potent because of how most people respond to making versus losing money. In behavioral economics, there is the concept of loss aversion, which explains that we feel roughly twice as bad about losing money as we feel good about making a similar amount of money. 2

3 When it comes to innovation, this very-human tendency is problematic because innovation is an asymmetric activity. You risk the maximum of the money and time invested into the experiment of creating a new product or service. If the market loves your product or service, great! There is no inherent limit to the return on your investment. If it doesn t, the most you can lose is the time and money invested (and you still gain valuable knowledge or perspective). In today s Scriptures, we are going to read two parables where Christ uses the illustration of a master asking his servants to work with some monetary resources (talents or minas) on his behalf while he is away. Scholars believe that Jesus taught this parable at least twice, given the differences between accounts recorded by both Matthew and Luke. Given that Christ made the point at least twice, I believe it s a concept that the Lord really wants us to understand. In both parables, one of the servants hides the resources he was given and returns back to the master exactly what was given to him, while the others work with their resources to grow them. In both parables, the master is furious with the one who buries his resources. The message version translation of Luke s parable does a great job summarizing the key point. It quotes Christ as saying, That s what I mean: Risk your life and get more than you ever dreamed of. Play it safe and end up holding the bag (Luke 19:26) In these parables, let s not focus on whether any one servant succeeds or fails, but on who takes the risk and who plays it safe. God s message is to embrace the talents with which He has imbued you and have faith that they are enough to meet the challenges He calls you to take. Instead of burying your talents like the servant who plays it safe, spend some time in prayer asking the Lord what risks he is calling on you to take. I think this principle goes far beyond achieving financial rewards. In fact, I know many Christians who have taken entrepreneurial risks in their careers and failed, losing money and missing out on other opportunities. Many times, the Lord uses such an experience to teach and enable them to do other great things. This principle is not a guarantee of making money or being successful it s about taking risks and wholeheartedly reaching to achieve the dreams that the Lord has put on your heart. In the next two days, we ll focus developing those dreams and thinking through appropriate ways to take those risks. DAY 4 Numbers 13:1-3 / Numbers 13:21-33 / Numbers 14:6, 1, 3-5, 2, 7-11 / Matthew 7:9-11 Dream Big Once you ve committed to not burying your gifts, the next step is to DREAM BIG. Google co-founder Larry Page recently commented: 3

4 Over time I ve learned, surprisingly, that it s tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious It s why we ve put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you ll usually get there. And even if you fail, you ll probably learn something important. What would you try to accomplish professionally if you knew with 100% confidence that success was the only option? Today s readings focus on one of my favorite stories of the Bible. Joshua and Caleb, along with 10 other spies, go out ahead of the Israelites to investigate God s promised land over 40 days. When they come back, they all agree that the land is breathtaking, but only Joshua and Caleb want to move in. Everyone else is so focused on the giants currently occupying the territory that fear overtakes them. Caleb interrupts the group and says, (paraphrasing) God has this under control, but the Israelites choose to focus on fear instead of faith and don t embrace this reality. Jason Warman, the pastor at my church Coast Life in Venice, Florida, recently preached a sermon series based on this Scripture and said something that stuck with me. Don t treat yourself as common if God has called you uncommon. It s easy to read this story and think that maybe the Israelites are being kind of chicken. God led them out of Egypt, protected them from the plagues, parted the Red Sea, and they DON T BELIEVE THAT HE WILL DELIVER THIS LAND TO THEM?!?!?! This was very much how I used to read the story of the twelve spies, but I ve ended up with a different perspective on this one. God s done amazing things in my life regularly and yet I am still sometimes unwilling trust His new promises for me. We need to be more like Joshua and Caleb, choosing faith not fear. The other point is that we need to stop putting God in a box. We need to ASK him for what we really want to do and accomplish. In another of today s readings, Christ compares God s love for us with the love of our father. I realize that each of us has uniquely experienced the way our earthly father loved us. I am blessed with amazing parents, and so this story has always resonated with me. When I became a parent myself, this story took on an even deeper meaning for me. I remember getting up in the middle of the night to feed my 9-month-old son. I was warming up his bottle and he was looking up at me with his big eyes, screaming to communicate Why won t you feed me? I m hungry! Of course, I knew he was hungry. I also knew that I couldn t give him the bottle until his mom s milk was warm enough to not bother his stomach, but he didn t know that. All his 9-month old brain could grasp was I m hungry and you re not fixing it. We are all just like my son. We need to remember that, if the things we are asking God for are good and holy but they don t seem to be happening fast enough, He has reasons for the timing that we don t know. He may be looking down on us and saying, Not yet. It will make you sick." At the beginning of today s reading, I asked what you d do if you knew you couldn t fail. Have you asked God to be a part of and bless that big dream? 4

5 DAY 5 Nehemiah 2:11-18 / Proverbs 16:3 Getting Started The most valuable resource each of us has is time. You can t buy more of it. Once you ve invested time into commercializing one idea, there is no way to go back and allocate it to a different one. Unfortunately, we often think of an innovative professional as someone who constantly is jumping from one idea to another. We picture them at desks stacked with projects in mid-completion. This isn t being innovative it s wasting time. Steve Jobs famously said, Great artists ship. However, the solution is not to simply finish every idea that you come up with, but to be very deliberate about how you iterate on them. The key is to break your big vision down into discrete steps, then make sure you are validating your core hypothesis at every step. As you progress, ideas that continue to validate your hypothesis remain in focus and moving toward completion. For those discrete steps that fail, you either iterate on the vision or kill the project. Remember, your time is incredibly valuable. Don t continue to invest in an idea that won t work. In today s Scripture, we are going to look at the story of how Nehemiah starts to fulfill his dream of restoring Jerusalem. While I believe the entire book of Nehemiah would make a great MBA case study, we are going to focus today on just a few verses as we wrap up this study. (If you read the entire book, you ll see many of the principles we ve explored.) When Nehemiah hears about the terrible conditions of Jerusalem from his brother, he stops, prays, and ultimately approaches his boss (the King) about going to restore it. After getting approval and resources from the King, Nehemiah travels to Jerusalem. He spends three days investigating the situation, finishing up with detailed due diligence by inspecting the wall carefully in the middle of the night. This is the lesson I want to focus on today. Nehemiah does his homework before he starts talking to people about his vision and recruiting them to collaborate with him. As a venture capitalist, I m constantly having people pitch me ideas for their businesses. The most frustrating pitches are full of vision but with no evidence to back them up. I ended up hanging a sign on my office wall that says, The facts are outside the building. In other words, the important information about your idea won t be discovered simply by brainstorming in a conference room at your office. Get out of your building and do interviews or focus groups or presales to try and see if any of those magical people we like to call customers are interested in your solution. No matter how smart and creative the idea you have is, you should ground that vision in the reality of the marketplace. 5

6 Once you ve got it, take that feedback from the market and use it in your narrative to recruit people to join your cause. When Nehemiah starts telling people why he s arrived (after his three days of diligence), he weaves the things he s observed and experienced up to that point directly into his message. You have been working and praying through your vision over the last few days. Now it s time to get started! Leave the building and talk to people about your ideas. If you validate your critical assumptions, start recruiting people and resources. Support your story with evidence for what you ve learned. If you do this, you will build products and services that make the world the way it ought to be. Just as or even more important, you will find more purpose in your career by moving closer to a reflection of God s innovative heart. 6