Christian Meditation

[EpicScore]

MEDITATION AS A CHRISTIAN DUTY

What is Christian Meditation?
The Bible describes meditation as a deep contemplation - i.e. something you dwell on seriously, for long periods of time. For Christians, the goal of meditation is just not to empty ourselves of worldliness, but to be filled with God's word and Spirit, so that we can live a Christ-like life. Because of this, Christian meditation always involve Bible reading, but not every time we read the Bible will lead to meditation.

Preparing for meditation

• Appoint a time: Surrender your best or prime time to God. Set up a schedule if you need to. Be deliberate in seeking after God, and don't treat Him as an afterthought after you're too tired to do anything.
• Set-up a place: Keep away from distractions.
• Determine the duration for meditation: We cannot build intimacy with short, infrequent conversations. There's no specified minimum period of time, but ask yourself if you can build close, meaningful relationships with people you won't spend more than 5 minutes talking to. Consider your priorities and see if we are putting lesser things above our desire to communicate with God.
• Be respectful: Remember that we are in the presence of God. Intimacy does not negate the need for respect. While it is not necessary to be too formal, we should be accountable for our dress and/or our posture as we come before God. Don't behave in a way that we wouldn't when coversing with another person.
• Be disciplined: While relationships should grow organically, we cannot hope to build a strong spiritual foundation to have a genuine fellowship with God through sporadic and infrequent unions. As A.W. Tozer says, "The unattended garden will soon be overrun with weeds; the heart that fails to cultivate truth and root out error will shortly be a theological wilderness."

Meditation guidelines

• Start with prayer: Come before God with a spirit of humility and dependence upon His grace, for "Neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow." (1 Corinthians 3:7)
• Ask questions: We build understanding by questioning rather than ignoring or glossing over difficult facts. Examples: what does this verse mean? what is its significance/implications? is it supported by other parts of the scriptures?
• Observe: Make the effort to find the answers to the questions. Carefully study the words and phrasings used in the text, and check see how it fits the context of the narrative.
• Reflect: Ask yourself, "what have I done?" - have I truly believed the verse? have I acted consistently with what I claim to believe?
• Commit: Decide on a specific actions to pursue in response to the verse you've read.
• End with thanksgiving.

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Taken from the Bible Study topic series my church is currently having. It had helped enrich my bible reading/meditation, and I hope it can do the same for the Christians here.

 

[Jesus is my Superhero]

I meditate to force my mind to think on God Almighty and His written word. I've never tried pursuing answers to my questions or problems, but I can see there may be value doing so.
While I force my mind on things of God, self isn't having a very good time. Self is being diminished and forced to sit quietly in a corner.

 

[EpicScore]

Yes, I remember listening to a sermon, where the preacher remarks that Christians are often less joyful than secular people because they tend to try to empty themselves of worldliness but forget to be filled with His spirit, and then we end up deprived instead of overflowing, as we should be.

Before finding this guideline, my own meditation experience had been very parched. I've been following various Bible-reading plans and even using various translations to try and get new angles from the passages to no avail. Reading was just a slog and nothing that was written seems really relevant to my life. I suppose this is because of a lack of focus, and whatever questions and concerns I might have from one part of my reading gets forgotten/buried by the time I got to the next part, and I never get back to exploring those questions because I'm so ready to end the session.

It's completely different now. Reading has been refreshing rather than draining, satisfying rather than burdensome. The result gleaned a few insights that can actually be shared with others, which can hopefully edify them as well.

I'm still using a Bible-reading plan to get a pericope, but then I focus on just one or two verse to digest. Writing down the questions, observations and reflections helps a lot, as it's easy to get side-tracked otherwise and you end up losing your pace and not getting anything.