Picture your group of friends and people you encounter throughout your week. Odds are at least half of them either practice or talk about practicing some sort of meditation. Maybe they call it “mindfulness” or “getting clarity” or “creating headspace”, but the root of it is Eastern meditation.
But when Psalm 1:2 talks about meditating on God’s Word, the Psalmist is talking about something completely different than what most of the world thinks of as meditation. And the difference may be what is keeping you from experiencing God through meditation.
How is Christian Meditation Different from Other Forms of Meditation
Christian meditation is detaching yourself from whatever sin or distraction is happening in your life in order to attach yourself to God. Every other type of meditation is simply to detach your mind from the world. So if you’ve simply jumped on the bandwagon of “emptying your mind”, you are simply practicing Eastern meditation which is associated with a false religion. Christian meditation is solely to help you fill your mind with Christ. If you haven’t used meditation for this end yet, you probably haven’t yet discovered the peace God wants to fill your mind with.
What Does Christian Meditation Look Like?
There are many different ways to incorporate meditation into your life. Meditation can be simply listening to God’s Word slowly or spending time reflecting on what He has been up to in your life. It can be as simple as talking through what He is teaching you or memorizing specific passages of scripture. If you want some specific suggestions, this post will help.
Steps to Begin
Christian meditation takes practice, but one of the best ways to start is by engaging your imagination.
Put that worship music on and imagine the scene you are singing about. Sometimes if the song isn’t really descriptive, I imagine myself at the throne of Jesus joining in with the angels and singing praise to Him like Revelation 4 describes. It may sound dumb, but I promise it’s a whole other worship experience when you start to use your imagination.
Or, after studying a passage of scripture, go back and read it slowly and imagine yourself in that scene. For example, read Matthew 14:13-21 and picture yourself as part of the crowd listening to Jesus and getting hungry. What are you feeling? Thinking? Smelling? How does that fish and bread taste? Use your 5 senses and really put yourself in that scene NOT to change the meaning of the passage, but simply to experience these true stories in a deeper way.
There are a million different ways to meditate in order to fill your mind with Christ. The point is, mediation is the way you can take your thoughts and begin to replace them with truth. It’s the way you can “renew your mind”, “think about the things above”, and “pray continually”. If those things have felt out of your reach in the past, try meditation. It’s an avenue God may want to use to allow you to walk with him and talk with him on a continual basis.
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