“Meditation is a cross between Bible study and prayer.  Meditation is both, a blending of prayer with Bible study.  Most of us first study our Bible and then move to prayer, but the prayer is detached from the Bible you just studied.  Meditation is praying the truth deeply into your soul until it catches fire.  By fire I mean, until it makes all sorts of personal connections so it shapes your thinking, it moves your feelings and changes your actions. Meditation is working out the truth personally.

The closest analogy to meditating is the way a person eagerly reads a love letter. You tear it open and you weigh every word.  You never simply say, ‘I know that,’ but ‘What does it mean?’  You aren't reading it quickly just for information; you are looking for feelings, for what lies beneath what is said.  Most important, you want the letter to sink in and form you.”

Does this practice sound foreign to you?  You already meditate in many harmful ways!  Compulsive worry or anger are forms of meditation.  You keep rehearsing a past offense, or plotting (Ps. 2:1) revenge, or you keep imagining fears concerning the future (Matt.6:25 – merimnao; “brood”).   You keep going over and over these things in your thoughts and imagination, and they destructively affect your emotional state and choices.  God calls on us to replace these “natural,” spontaneous meditations with the deliberate, habitual (“day and night”) choice to meditate on his Word!

Paul Thompson