Start the Day Happy in God – The Lost Art of Bible Meditation

Article by David Mathis Executive Editor, desiringGod.org (Severely edited by me!)

“I’m just not feeling it today.” How often have you reached for that excuse? Many of us can be quick to cast ourselves as the victim of a sluggish heart.

Making peace with a pokey heart is a very strange phenomenon, even as it now is a widespread assumption and typically goes unquestioned. It may be no big deal if we’re talking about whether you want peanut butter on your breakfast toast. But far more is at stake when this becomes an excuse for neglecting God, whether in his word, prayer, or Christian fellowship.

Specifically, this excuse has served to undermine habits of spiritual health related to beginning each day with the voice of God in Scripture. Some of us are gaunt, frail Christians because we’ve learned, like our world, to cater to the whims of our own fickle hearts rather than direct them and determine to reshape them.

Your Pliable Affections

In what may be his most insightful and deeply spiritual book, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God(2014), the late Tim Keller introduces us to a side of the great English theologian John Owen (1616–1683) that is especially out of step with modern assumptions. Owen, according to Keller, would not be so quick to grant the excuse, “I’m just not feeling it today.” In fact, he likely would respond forcefully— and many of us might be better for it.

Keller summarizes, “Meditate to the point of delight.” Don’t give in to your heart’s first inclinations. Rather, take hold of them, and direct them. Open the Bible, and turn your attention to the one who is supremely worthy, and keep your nose in the Book, and your mind on Jesus, until your sluggish heart begins to respond like it should. That’s striking counsel for a generation conditioned to “follow your heart.”

Recondition Your Heart

In chapter 10 of Prayer, Keller adds we are to wed God’s word with our prayers through meditation. It’s a perspective on forming and reforming our pliant hearts that is the challenge today.

In general, we are far too easy on our minds and hearts. We grant we can train the body.In fact, you’re always training the body, whether for the better or the worse. Most will agree that you can train the mind— “the mind is a muscle,” so to speak. You can set it on a particular object and learn to keep it there. It will take practice. You can learn, as Keller summarizes Owen, to “meditate to the point of delight.”

Three Stages of Meditation

Some well-meaning Christians set out to read their Bibles, don’t feel much (if anything), then move on swiftly to pray a few quick, shallow petitions, and then embark on their day. Owen would say, with C.S. Lewis, you are far too easily pleased.Owen would have us wrestle like Jacob, with your own sluggish soul, until light dawns. Wrestle. Direct it. Turn it. Grapple with it until it does what it’s supposed to do, feelingmore like it’s supposed to feel, about the wonders and horrors of the Word of God. Say, in effect, to the God of the word, “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” and discipline your heart to receive the joy for which God made it.

Now, a few clarifications are in order to recover this lost art of meditation. Owen distinguished between study, meditation, and prayer. Meditation is the bridge between receiving God’s word (in reading and study) and responding back to him (in prayer). Meditation then, says Owen, is something you can learn. It is distinct from study and prayer, though overlapping with them . It may be parsed into three sequential stages.

1) Fix Your Mind

Begin with Bible intake, through reading, and rereading — the slower the better. Beginners will have more questions and need to navigate how frequently to stop and study or just keep reading and pick up clues as they go. But the main point is that meditation begins with immersion in the words of God.

Unlike Eastern “meditation,” which seeks to empty the mind, biblical meditation requires the filling of the mind with the truth of God’s self-revelation in his Son and Scripture. We don’t just up and meditate. We begin with Bible, fixing our thoughts on God and his Son through the content of His Word.

2) Incline Your Heart

Fixing our thoughts can be difficult enough, but inclining the heartis imponderable for many. Not because it can’t be done, but because we have been socialized to assume it can’t. But Owen counsels us, having fixed our minds on God’s word, to meditate until you begin to feel the word. Preach to yourself untilyou begin to feel more like you ought. Does the word declare God’s majesty? Feel awe. Does it warn sinners? Feel fear. Does it announce good news? Feel joy.

The goal is not to meditate for a particular duration of time, but to meditate until the point of delight, to persist “unto your refreshment.” The apostle Peter speaks of the present, not merely the future when he says, “Though you do not now see [Jesus with your physical eyes], you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8). Inexpressible, glorified joy is offered when we fix our minds on the Word of God himself and meditate untilHe smiles on us, and warms our souls.

3) Enjoy Your God

In the final stage, we give vent or space, to the enjoyment (or crying out) begun in the second. We fan the flame of affection for the truth in view. This is the high point of meditation — enjoying God in Christ — which fills our souls with “an answering response.” As Keller comments, we “listen, study, think, reflect, and ponder the Scriptures until there is an answering responsein our hearts and minds” – which leads us to prayer.

So, we want our prayers to be prompted by and tethered to the intake of God’s word. ‘Enjoying God’ can only be produced if we are responding in prayer according to who God is, as revealed in the Scripture”

Not Just Truth but Jesus

Keller ends with Jesus Himself as the chief focus of our meditation. Not only did the God-man delight in the Word of God like the happy man of Psalm 1, but He Himself is “the One to whom all the Scripture points.” As Christians, we learn to meditate both with Him and on Him.

In our reading, rereading and study over Scripture, we persist to know and enjoy, not just truth, but The Truth Himself. For Christians, the final focus of our meditation is personal, discovered in the living person of Jesus Christ.

To read article in its entirety, go to: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/start-the-day-happy-in-god