Quiet Time, Real Strength

No intro music, no polished setup, just a needed reset. I’ve had a heavy week watching several families fight through crisis and even life-and-death moments, and it pushed me to talk about something simple that most of us say we want but rarely protect: quiet time with God. Not “praying while I’m busy,” but distraction-free time with the Father when the phone is away, the noise is off, and my heart can actually settle.

We walk through why that connection matters when life takes a sharp turn and the road gets bumpy. I share the difference between multitasking prayer and focused communion, plus the surprising way scripture memorization can reshape your thoughts throughout the day. We also trace the pattern in Jesus’ life: getting alone to pray early (Mark 1:35), withdrawing often (Luke 5:16), spending real time with God before big decisions (Luke 6:12), and clinging to the Father when overwhelmed with sorrow in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36–39). If you’ve ever wondered how Jesus stayed grounded, I think the answer starts with how deeply He stayed connected.

I also lay out my own quiet time routine: a short opening prayer for focus, a small passage read slowly, prayer and meditation, praying for others, and then quiet stillness to listen. Then I challenge you to bring accountability into your spiritual life through a mentor, pastor, or trusted friend who will ask specific questions and help you grow with honesty and healing.

If this helped, subscribe, share it with someone who needs steadiness right now, and leave a review so more people can find it. What’s the biggest distraction that keeps you from quiet time?

Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay

Transcript

Why The Format Changes Today

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, welcome to Kingdom Chaos. My name is Troy. This is going to be a different episode. You probably already can tell because there was no intro. There's no intro music. There's no me talking, telling you what Kingdom Chaos is about. So this is going to be an unplugged episode. And it's really kind of a mirror to life where you're kind of trucking down the road. This ep this uh podcast has gone through about seven episodes. It's early on, and all of a sudden we're going to take a real hard, sharp turn to the left. It's going to be different. Uh, it might even sound a little preachy, a little more than what I usually do, uh, because we're going to walk through Jesus' life and his connection with uh with God and how we should mirror that. And maybe a little bit less of my story in this is going to be a little bit of my story, but not a lot. So it's going to be different. Uh, and the reason for that is because this week for me has been really heavy. And it's not heavy because of what's going on in my own direct personal or professional life, but it's people that I've interacted with over the past week, and there's about four or five families that are really going through it right now. They're really struggling. And honestly, some of them have family members that are fighting for the life, literally fighting for their lives, and going through surgeries and different things like that. And so I want to talk about preparation for those trials that happened in our life, those valleys, those dark valleys in our life. And I know we've talked about mine and Amy's testimony through the last you know few episodes, part of you know my story individually within that, and some of the scriptures and how Jesus has you know brought us through that and the promises we cling to. And I want to look at Jesus' life and how he actually connected with his father because you know, there's this thing we call quiet time. And if you don't know what quiet time is, it's something that you really need to take advantage of. Quiet time is your distraction-free time with God. Quiet time should be a time where the kids are either asleep or taken care of in some other way, your phone's away, you have distraction-free, you know, 15, 20, 30 minutes, however long your quiet time is, but it should be distraction-free where you know your spouse isn't going to come in. They know you're you're spending time with God, and it's just this one-on-one time. Too often I hear from people when I talk to them about quiet time, they tell me they pray in the car or in the shower or while they're mowing the lawn or whatever they're doing. But but prayer wasn't meant to be something that we multitask. It was meant to be something that we we can do during those times because we should always be connected with our Father, but our quiet time should be distraction-free. It shouldn't be something that we are trying to do something else, and we just have this, you know, prayer in our heart. So um that's fine. I don't want to, you know, take you away from your prayer in the car or prayer in the shower, prayer and you know, washing dishes or prayer whenever. You should always, you know, pray, but uh our quiet time is different. Our quiet time is distraction-free. We're not multitasking, we're not worrying about changing lanes or you know, all these different things that pop up, a notification on our phone, uh, uh, you know, a conversation starts up with a spouse or a child comes in, barging in or something like that. We need to have a secure, uh, you know, quiet time with the Lord, 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes, whatever it is that I mean, there's there's people that do three hours. I mean, I'm not saying you have to do that. That'd be great. It's awesome. If you have three hours to do that, get up at four o'clock and finish at you know seven or seven thirty, eight o'clock, whatever. That's great. But I know that that's not something that everybody's gonna do. So let's start with 10 minutes. You know, let's start with 10 minutes, but let's walk through this. So typically in a podcast, what I do is I write out my script and then I go ahead and put those in the bullet points, and I practice it a few times so that I know what I want to say and I don't skip over important points and things like that. This time I kind of just wrote out some bullet points so I can stay on task, but I want this to be free-flowing, I want the Holy Spirit to take over in these moments. Not that I don't want to in the other ones, but I want this to be different, sound different on purpose. I want this to be slower. I know sometimes I talk pretty fast, so maybe you have to speed this podcast up, but I want this to be different on purpose because sometimes, like I said, we're trucking down the road through life, and then all of a sudden there's a really hard, sharp turn, and life is just shaky and it goes down a bumpy road, bumpy path, and it's just different. So, this is gonna mirror that, and this is just a different episode on this podcast. So, one thing I struggled with early on in my Christian faith is how did Jesus being fully human, if he was fully human, how did he not sin? I believed what the Bible says that he was sinless. I just didn't understand, I couldn't wrap my head around how he could do that because yes, he's supposed to be fully God, but also fully human. I believe that when Jesus, you know, was born, he didn't have all knowing knowledge. He had to you know be taken care of. He he was vulnerable as a as a little baby boy. He had uh be fed, he had to learn how to walk, he had to uh you know be changed, so had to learn how to um how to use the bathroom, you know, be potty trained, um, and he went to school. He had to learn the scriptures, they weren't just you know immediately in his head just because he was fully God. I believe he withheld those godly powers from himself so he could be fully human and experience uh humanity in its fullest so that he can relate to us. I believe that there are things that he learned throughout his um ministry as well, and there's that there's things in the scripture that I can point to that I believe that he learned through that, and people might think I'm wrong in that, and that's fine, you can have your opinion. But I just believe in order for him to live a true human life that he had to uh separate himself from those those godly powers that he had. But nevertheless, I didn't understand how he could be fully human and not sin. So there was this one moment in my life where I wanted to memorize scripture more, and so I decided I was gonna memorize the book of James. Uh it's for a couple reasons. One, it was only five chapters. I wasn't gonna, you know, you know, memorize Genesis and all 50 chapters. So James was a shorter book, five chapters, but also because James was really to the point and practical, so I wanted to memorize that book. And when I did, when I was about 22 verses in, I wasn't even through with the first chapter yet, I realized something, something hit me with my connection to God through that, because I I started to it, it was uh my eyes were open to what I was doing. It was more than just memorizing scripture, it was that God's word was on my heart and on my mind all the time. If I was cutting grass, I was trying to memorize the scripture. If I was washing dishes, I was memorizing the scripture. If I was driving to work, I was memorizing the scripture. So every moment of the day, every time you you can think of whenever your mind starts to wander, those moments I was trying to memorize the book of James because I had a goal of not only memorizing the book, but I had a certain time frame that I had that I wanted to memorize it in, and so I needed to speed up my memorization skills and try to really put this in action. So I was I was thinking about it all the time, and when I did that, things changed for me. Like I could feel my connection with God deepen and it just be so much closer. So when I read the gospels and I see Jesus going alone and being in solitude and praying to his father all night and before big decisions and all these different things, I'm like, man, this is how Jesus did it. He was so connected and had, you know, had such an uh intimate relationship with his father that this is how he was able to live a fully human life and not sin. And this is the pattern that we should follow. Jesus came down and he showed us a path to be connected with the Father like He was. He showed us what it meant to how to how to treat people, what it meant to love people and see them through God's eyes, and how to be connected with Him through prayer and meditation. And so let's walk through a few things that Jesus did. And the first scripture I want to point to is in Mark, uh, this is Mark chapter one, and it's verse 35. Mark chapter 1, verse 35, it says, Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went off to a solitary place where he prayed. This shows the intentionality and discipline of making sure we do this uh alone, that we're we're we don't have those distractions, but we we are having a connection with our father uh in a lonely place, not lonely as in um uh you know a negative thing, but there's nothing around us that's going to interrupt our our quality, intimate time with our father. The other verse I want to make sure we look at is Luke chapter five, verse sixteen. This says, but Jesus often withdrew to a lonely place and prayed. This shows his um consistency uh every day. He often did this, he withdrew to a lonely place and prayed. We need to make sure our daily habits mimic this that we often withdraw to a lonely place and pray. We don't have those distractions, so be consistent in it. Luke 6, 12, it says, One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray and spent the night praying to God. He spent the whole night praying to God. That's what the verse says. Spent the night praying to God. When the morning came, he called to his disciples to him and chose twelve of them. So this is the moment where Jesus called his disciples and he chose the twelve. And so in this we see that he goes to a place before a big decision in his life, a big decision in his ministry, that he calls on the Father and not just says a two-minute prayer, but he spends real time with God praying over this decision. I think it's important for us to take that time and pray over big decisions coming up in our lives. And this is something that I know I need a lot of help on is you know, when those big decisions come for me and Amy to really spend time with God and pray. The next verse we're going to look at here in the pattern of Jesus connecting with his father is Matthew twenty six thirty-six through thirty nine. Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, Sit here while I go over there and pray. He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me. I think this is important to see that when we are overwhelmed, this is a time not to withdraw from God, but to cling to him, to be more intimate with him, to have communion with God. When we are overwhelmed to the point of death Jesus said he was at, the point of death that he went and prayed to his father. So we need to make sure that we are connected him in that way in every way in consistency. So whenever those trials come, we have a reminder within ourselves that we're gonna go to our Father and seek comfort, seek guidance, seek answers, and just to be in his presence in those times of heartbreak and sorrow. Now, I do want to share with you my quality time, my quiet time with God and what I do. My routine is sometimes sporadic within the structure. So my structure is I wake up, I um I eat, I, you know, kind of try to wake myself up a little bit, I go work out, and then I have my quiet time with God. For me, I can't just wake up and start to read the Bible. Um, I I just can't, I'm not focused. It really won't, it won't be quality time for me because of I'm just not focused in the moment. I have to have some time to wake up. So that's my routine. Now, within that quality time, my quiet time with God, what I do is I have an opening prayer, and my opening prayer a lot of times is about having God reveal something to me, help me keep focused, and reveal something to me in his word that I read. Now, when I read, it's usually not a lot that I read within my quiet time. Sometimes when I study, um, I'll read a bit more. I might even read a whole book depending on what I'm doing, but my quiet time is different. In my quiet time, I'm usually reading a passage, a paragraph, maybe half of a chapter, depending on where I'm at in the context of what I'm reading. But I want to be able to meditate and think about and bring that with me throughout the day. So if I read a whole chapter or two or three or even a book, I can't grasp everything to bring that throughout the day and really meditate on that for myself. So I just I keep it short in my quiet time. And then after that, I have another prayer. I pray a little bit about what I read, kind of meditate on that a little bit. I also have some other prayers that I pray. I pray a lot for my family, myself, and my wife, my church, my pastor leaders. Uh, pray for the universal church or the body of Christ. I pray for people that are lost. I pray for some specific people that I know that are lost. Uh, and then uh at the end, before I'm done, I I leave several minutes uh to just be quiet with God, for him to talk to me, because I don't want it just to be me going to God with my burdens, my weights, my troubles. Uh, I also want him to be able to have room uh for me to be able to hear him and speak to me, because I know that he speaks to all of us. I just sometimes I think we don't sit in the in the stillness and the quiet to be able to listen to what he is telling us, and I want to make sure I I leave room for that, for him to to speak into my life and for me not to make all the noise and not be able to hear him. So that's kind of my routine and my quiet time with him. And I think that for uh Jesus, the connection with his father, it wasn't it wasn't optional. I I think that for him, it was a priority for him over the chaos that was around him. Uh that connection with God, he had to have it. It wasn't an afterthought, it wasn't, hey, it's something I'll do later or something I can multitask with. It was his fuel. It was something he could not do without. Even being the son of God, he needed communion with his father. Do you do this? That's my question to you. Is this a priority in life? And do you think you should do it? My my thing for you, here's what I want you to do is I want you to get an accountability partner if you don't have already have one, or a mentor, disciple discipler, somebody within your church community that can help you, that you can meet with regularly, that can connect with you and ask you hard, tough questions that you can trust, that can be loving to you. Get connected to a pastor in your church. You know, I myself, I know I'm not perfect. I have a pastor that holds me accountable, and we meet weekly. Uh, sometimes we miss a week, but I mean for the most part, it's a regular weekly meeting, and he asked me about my connection with the Lord and specifically about my quiet time and what happened that specific week. What did I see God uh tell me in my quiet time, or what is God teaching me in my quiet time right now, or what did I read over in my quiet time? What were my prayers like? So we talk specifics about quiet time, so it's not generalized. Oh, yeah, I had it. Yep, okay. But it's more specific. And he talked to me about, he asked me, make sure, you know, how's your physical and your spiritual and emotional health? How is self-care going? How's your focus and purity, making sure I stay away from pornography and lust, or even things I shouldn't see on the internet or social media or my bad habits? We talk about my marriage, how my connection is with Amy or my my kids and grandkids, but there's a connection there of understanding that I know I'm in a safe space and I can really share. And if there's something going in my life, I have to really open up and talk about that I'm safe, I'm loved, and there's gonna be a time of prayer and healing through that so we can get through that together, that I'm not alone in this, that I don't have to hide it from people, but I can shed that light, I can ask for forgiveness from God and talk to somebody else and confess to somebody else what's going on in my life so that healing can happen in my life. So I challenge you to find somebody in your church community that you can do it. It doesn't have to be the pastor. I hope you're already connected to someone uh in ministry in your church, but it can be somebody in your small group or Bible study or life group, whatever you call your your family that you get together with weekly or bi-weekly, but get connected with somebody and make sure that we are opening up and allowing healing to happen in our life. Lord, I just want to come to you right now and thank you for this sharp turn, this change in this podcast, this at this episode was different. And I just thank you so much that we're able to, you know, stop for a second and breathe and be with you and be silent and still. Make sure we have that quiet time with you, that connection, because that is what's needed more than anything else in this world. That's why we fast, to remind ourselves also that food is not everything, money is not everything. You are everything. You're all we need, God. Yes, you provide us with those things, but you're the one that we need. We come to you right now for that help, for us to be able to make that time for you each and every day. And we know we're not perfect, but that's not what we're going to have an excuse about that, oh, we're human, we're not perfect, we can't do this. We're gonna make an effort to make an intentional, to make it uh a more of a connection with you. And we do, if we do have quiet time, we're gonna push it. We're gonna do more to have a connection with you, uh, with scripture memorization, or having more sermons in our life, or whatever it is for that next step for somebody to grow even more with you, in you, through you, for you. We just thank you so much for what you're doing in our lives, Lord. Thank you, thank you, thank you. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.