Spiritual Dicipline: Meditation

Intro

I don’t know how many of you know this, but when I was in college, I was a double major. I majored both in Music Theory/Performance, and Religious Studies. The latter meaning I studies the world’s major religions.

As part of my Religious Studies major, I took at a class called Buddhism and Islam. There was a point in the class, during the Buddhism section…where we walked into the classroom and the lights were off, and there was a…let’s say different…smell in the room.

Our professor promptly told us that that morning we would be practicing the art of meditation. And I’ll tell you, it was sorta weird…but sorta cool…and sorta awkward.

What we ended up doing was lying on the classroom floor, listening to a 20 minute audio clip of something guiding us through meditation. We closed our eyes, created a focus point, and put our body in a position to receive and accept. Actually, that was an important part of the meditation…the posture of our body.

You might be familiar with these types of postures…like this.

Someone meditating

So…when I tell you that tonight we are focusing on the Christian Spiritual Discipline of meditating…how many of you had some kind of image like this pop into your mind?

Right. I would imagine that’s common to most christians that hear this…because meditation is a lost art…a lost discipline in the Christian life.

There are so many reasons for this that it could be a whole message or series on it’s own. Everything from the globalization of world religions, instant gratification culture, cell phones…and so much more.

But blame and reasons are not something we are here to talk about tonight. We are here tonight to talk about how to recover this art of meditation, and to better understand it…AND to help you value and practice it yourself.

I want to start with this statement to help you understand the difference between the meditation you may be thinking…and what meditation actually is.

Christian meditation is about the posture of the heart.

Plug for Habits of Grace Book

A good definition of Christian Meditation comes from Donald S. Whitney and says it is:

“deep thinking on the truths and spiritual realities revealed in Scripture for the purposes of understanding, application, and prayer.”

That’s what Christian mediation…the process or deep thinking...

Cow’s Cud Illustration

So…to recap so far, we’ve talked about:

What Christian meditation is…given the definition, shown an example.

Let’s talk for a minute about why it’s important.

Why meditation is important.

Scripture models it.

Genesis 24:63 ESV

63 And Isaac went out to meditate in the field toward evening. And he lifted up his eyes and saw, and behold, there were camels coming.

Psalm 1:1–2 ESV

1 Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; 2 but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.

Psalm 119:99 ESV

99 I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.

The church practiced it.

William Bridge, William Bates, Thomas Manton, Thomas Watts

Our soul benefits from it.

It’s the missing link, the thing God’s people have always done and we have lost.

Think of how God’s word use to be received before the printing press.

With the introduction of printed scripture, we gained the discipline of reading God’s word but lost the discipline of meditation. The more accessible God’s word has become, the more commonplace we have begun to treat it. As if it needs to be read like any other book. Just because it looks like every other book, doesn’t mean we approach it like that.

It’s the gap between God’s word and God’s ear.

It’s the fire that warms the soul to God’s word.

But we haven’t really talked about how to go about doing that. That’s what we will spend the next few minutes doing.