…the cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings. In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one’s social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education. These are, of course important in measuring one’s successs in material matters and it is perfectly understandable if many people exert themselves mainly to achieve all these. But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one’s development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others – qualities which are within easy reach of every soul – are the foundation of one’s spiritual life. Development in matters of nature is inconceivable without serious introspection, without knowing yourself, your weaknesses and mistakes.


Nelson Mandela - From a letter to Winne Mandela in Kroonstad Prison, February 1975 - in Conversations with Myself

The only way in which we can gather and keep collected our distracted minds and our roaming thoughts is to center them about Jesus Christ. By that I mean that we should let Christ lay hold of, attract, captivate and gather about Himself all our interests. Then our sessions of prayer will become real meetings with God. Just as the radii of a circle run to the center, so all our thoughts should run toward God.

Hallesby, Prayer, location 896

“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