Should Christians Meditate?
As transcribed from the video above, Joe Thorn discusses whether Christians should meditiate:
I think we know a lot of other religions talk about meditation. It is either a mental or a spiritual discipline that functions in a completely different way than what we see in Scripture. And I can't speak to all of those forms of meditation, but Biblical meditation is essentially sustained deep thought on the word of God. It is prayerful, and it is intense, and it is personal. It is taking the Scripture that you have read or perhaps have studied and rolling it over in your mind, grounding it in your heart as you seek to understand the God who is revealed there, the laws of the God that have been communicated or commanded, and it should always include a sense of introspection, not morbid introspection, and our point shouldn't be to focus on ourselves, but to see, "Lord, is there any hurtful way in me?" As the Psalmist says. So when we meditate on the word of God, we are taking God's revealed truth, seeking to know him and ourselves better, and we respond to that by faith. There should be conviction. There should also be encouragement.
Meditation is, I believe, the most important form of intaking the word of God out of all of the options. You have Bible study, Bible reading, and all of this. But the reason meditation is so important is because if it's done right, it includes prayer. It obviously is the word of God, and you're not bound to a particular time or place. You can meditate on the word of God as you go about your day. So especially, like I talk to my wife, she's a stay at home mom, she home schools, we've got four kids and a dog, and she sometimes feels like, "I don't have time in my day to just get away and have half an hour or an hour and just read the word." But what she can do and what other busy moms, as an example, can do is they can, throughout the day, stay focused on one passage of Scripture that they are preaching to themselves, applying to themselves and listening to the voice of God as they give their heart and their attention to it.
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