Biblical meditation involves becoming detached from the controlling and hindering influences of the world and attached to the living God through Christ that we might, through faith and study of his word, experience the sufficiency of the Savior and reach out to a hurting world in need of the living Christ. The goal of Christian meditation is to internalize and personalize the Scripture so that its truth can affect how we think, our attitudes, and how we live. Here are ten thoughts/ideas on how we can use biblical meditation to reduce our daily stressors and improve our trust in God:
2. Our nature requires proximity to God; The nature of man and the nature of the world and Satan constitutes a great need for personalizing the Word: Gen 1:26; Rom 3:23; Ps 51:4; etc. Because man is a holistic being, his spiritual, psychological, and physical faculties are intertwined.
3. Meditation is inherent power; It reforms the mind and life. Using the words “meditate” reminds us of the reason we should have close contact with our heavenly father. (Acts 10:38; Luke 4:41; Luke 1:35; Zech 4:6; 1 Thess1:5; Micah 3:8; 2 Tim 1:17; Rom 8:26).
4. Be reverent and mindful that you are reading/studying the Word of God; The Bible is a powerful medium through which God communicates to us and each word and sentence has a purpose and function. This means reading deliberately, slowly, and alertly, not mechanically or thoughtlessly.
5. Read Repeatedly; Going over and over the passage to observe more and more knowing that you do not exhaust the meaning of any verse even when it becomes familiar and you think you know it. There are always new observations to be seen or mined as a miner searches for silver or gold (Prov. 2:4; 2 Tim 3:15-).
6. Read Creatively; Visualizing yourself in the time, history, and situation of the passage as much as possible to experience a feel for what the author and the people of his day were experiencing. “Precisely because God chose to speak in the context of real human history, we may take courage that these same words will speak again and again in our own ‘real’ history, as they have throughout the history of God’s people.
7. Have pray-full Reflections; Trusting the Spirit of God to open your eyes and heart to see, understand, and respond to the Word. Again, read as the Psalmist who prayed: “Open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things from Thy law” (Ps. 119:18). This is also the position of humility and respect. God’s Word is a spiritual book requiring spiritual perception.
8. Be Patient and wait on the lord; Time and patience are important elements to effective meditation and examination of the Word. Again, remember that the great enemies of meditating on the Word are noise, hurry, and crowds. Thus, the Psalmist, looking for insight to God’s Word and direction in his life prayed, “Lead me in Thy truth and teach me, For Thou art the God of my salvation; For Thee I wait all the day” (Ps. 25:5).
9. Use your Imagination; Visualize the setting and put yourself there. Try to feel the burden, the concern, the fear, the love, etc. Seek to taste and feel every word you read.
10. Reflect Purposely; To fulfill the biblical objectives of meditation—worship, instruction, motivation, transformation. As the Psalmist who prayed: “I will meditate on thy precepts, and regard thy ways” (Psa. 119:15), and again, “Make me to understand the way of thy precepts, So I will meditate on Thy wonders” (vs. 27).