3 Brooding
3 
Brooding
Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
Oh how I love your law!
It is my meditation all the day.
Carolyn, who grew up in Midwestern farm country, remembers raising chickens. Brooding hens were both difficult and valuable. A brooding hen would sit for days, even weeks, on her eggs, barely moving except for brief respites to eat and drink. If you got a hand too near, she’d give you a sharp peck. If you tried to shoo her off the nest, she’d flap her wings in your face and scramble back onto her eggs. There she would sit, motionless, seeming to accomplish nothing at all. Yet at the appointed time (twenty-one days after fertilization) egg shells that she had kept warm through long days and nights began to jiggle and crack open, and tiny, soggy chicks emerged, soon to become the soft yellow peepers that Carolyn as a child loved to hold gently in her hands. Throughout the hen’s time of brooding, it looked as if nothing was happening; it looked as if she was being lazy or indeed was asleep. But something important was going on beneath her. Her brooding was breeding; she was incubating new life.
Brooding prayer is a little like that. Christian brooding or meditating, as we call it, ripens, stabilizes and strengthens our renewed hearts. It is a vital, energizing element in our communion with God. What is it? In essence, it is directed thinking, which is a basic Christian discipline for all of our living and especially for our praying.
Brooding is a descriptive label for the discipline we have in view because it pictures the sort of activity involved. Meditation, the classic Christian word for it, is not a common term in ordinary speech. Today it most often refers to an exercise in Eastern and New Age religion that is very different from the spiritual discipline portrayed in this chapter. Brooding, on the other hand, is a familiar word for turning over in one’s mind problems, strategies, choices to be made and difficulties to be overcome. All of us brood about everyday issues at some point or other. In one respect, however, this word also fails us: our ordinary brooding is inclined to be random, to lack focus and to leave us as confused as we were when we started, whereas meditation is essentially a matter of corralling random ideas about God in his presence and under his eye in order to form clear, orderly, vivid and nourishing thoughts about him. Again, the self-indulgent broodings into which we regularly fall are forms of moodiness that we could well do without, whereas if we want to be healthy Christians the discipline of celebratory thinking that we call meditation is something that we cannot well do without. It is an art that all praying people need to master.
“But I can’t control my thoughts,” people object, “my thoughts wander.” Dear friends, you are not alone in that! We all moan about the way that our thoughts wander when we are trying to pray, but as a matter of fact they are wandering also a great deal of the time when we are on our own and just letting our minds run free. We think laterally by association rather than logically, to some purpose. We daydream, we fantasize, we reflect on experiences we’ve had which either delight or disgust us. We remember the impact of the emotion that brings these episodes back to our minds, and we dwell on them just because we felt so strongly at the time. This was good, but that was a bad experience, we say to ourselves as we mull over the events. We think of our joys, we think of our sorrows, we think of situations and perplexities that make us anxious. And so our minds run free, dwelling on these things: problems of relationships, puzzles about dead ends in the life we are living, doubts and uncertainties about particular activities in which we are engaged. I’m not getting anywhere, we fret and that thought brings on gloom and distress. Wandering thoughts of this sort constitute precisely the kind of brooding that does no good. J. I. recently read a detective story where a sentence with only five words jumped out at him. The detective was brooding on the crime, but “his thoughts were a blur.” We all know what it is like when our thoughts are a blur. Our mind goes to and fro, restlessly traveling up and down and all around, but we aren’t getting anywhere. The mind’s flow is random, nothing gets sorted out, and we end up feeling deeply frustrated. Such is the constant human experience of wandering thoughts, and we cannot wonder that people assume nothing can be done about it.
But the apostle Paul seems to think that we can indeed exercise control over these blurred, aimless thoughts of ours and even tells us how to do it. “Finally, brothers,” he writes, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil 4:8). That is directed thinking. Paul clearly supposes that by practice and with our Lord’s help we can learn to focus our thoughts and to keep them focused on things that are worth thinking about. As already indicated there is a name for this activity. It is called meditation. It has a history: Christians have been practicing it and writing about it for centuries, almost since Christianity was born. To repeat what was said a few paragraphs back: Meditation is an art that we must learn.
THE MEANING OF MEDITATION
Can we be more precise about the nature of Christian brooding or meditation? We have already described it as thinking in God’s presence, thinking before the Lord, thinking about the Lord and our life in his world, by his grace, under his sway. To take another image from the farm, this kind of meditative brooding is comparable to a cow chewing the cud. A Christian who practices it brings things back to mind just as the cow brings back what she has taken into one of her stomachs. The Christian chews over these matters in the presence of the Lord, drawing from them nourishment, motivation, warnings and wisdom. It is a sort of talking but not in any sense is it a sign that you are losing your marbles; it is a sign, rather, that you are advancing in Christian sanity. Deliberately meditating in God’s presence gets your thoughts into order before the Lord, and it is always progress when you manage to do that.
Among English-speaking evangelicals none thought and taught (and, without doubt, wrought) so much with regard to meditation as the Puritans. Some snippets from these masters of the art will help us forward at this point. Here first is John Owen, the supreme Puritan theologian.
To be spiritually minded is . . . to have our minds really exercised with delight about heavenly things . . . especially Christ himself as at the right hand of God.
Spiritual-mindedness is developed, exercised and reinforced by meditation.
By . . . meditation, I intend the thought of some subject spiritual and divine, with the fixing, forcing, and ordering of our thoughts about it, with a design to affect our own hearts and souls with the matter of it. . . . In meditation our principal aim is the affecting of our own hearts and minds with love, delight, and humiliation.
By meditation I intend meditating upon what respect and suitableness there is between the word and our own hearts, to this end, that they may be brought to a more exact conformity. . . . Because persons are generally at a great loss in this duty of meditation . . . I shall . . . give briefly two or three rules for the directing of believers to a right performance of this great duty, and they are these:
Meditate on God with God; that is, when we would undertake thoughts and meditations of God, his excellencies, his properties, his glory, his majesty, his love, his goodness, let it be done in a way of speaking to God, in a deep humiliation and abasement of our souls. . . .
Meditate on the word in the word; that is, in the reading of it, consider the sense in the particular passages, . . . looking to God for help, guidance, and direction, in the discovery of his mind and will therein, and then labour to have our hearts affected with it.
What we come short of in evenness and constancy in our thoughts . . . let it be made up . . . by frequent returns of the mind to the subject proposed to be meditated upon.
Richard Baxter, the supreme Puritan pastor, understood meditation in the same way and urged that the hope of glory should be a regular theme. The task, he writes, is a “set and solemn acting of all the powers of the soul upon this most perfect object, rest, by meditation.” In this, Christians are “to use your understandings for warming of your affections, and to fire your hearts by the help of your heads.” Light must generate heat. “He is the best Christian who hath the readiest passage from the brain to the heart.” The meditative process consists of consideration (discursive thought) followed by soliloquy (talking to oneself in God’s presence). Stage one is to bring the truth about our promised heavenly rest before our minds as clearly and fully as possible and then to awaken the affections—love, desire, hope, courage and joy—in appropriate responses, so that the hope of heaven becomes an object of delight and desire. Stage two is then “pleading the case with our own souls. . . . Soliloquy is a preaching to oneself.” Its aim is to move us to resolute Christian practice. What Baxter has in mind appears from the following:
In thy meditations upon all these incentives . . . preach them over earnestly to thy heart, and expostulate and plead with it by way of soliloquy, till thou feel the fire begin to burn. . . . Dispute it out with thy conscience. . . . There is much more moving force in this earnest talking to ourselves, than in bare cognition, that breaks not out into mental words. Imitate the most powerful preacher that ever thou wast acquainted with. . . . It is a great part of a Christian’s skill and duty, to be a good preacher to himself. . . . Two or three sermons a week from others, is a fair proportion; but two or three sermons a day from thyself, is ordinarily too little.
Finally, one should move “from this speaking to ourselves, to speak with God” directly in prayer. Earnest desire and hearty resolution, poured out in honest petition for help, strength and single-minded zeal in running the race of life will always secure God’s blessing. The Puritans proved that in their own lives and so may we in ours.
Nor is it only Protestant pietists like the Puritans who have practiced this mode of brooding. There is also a noble tradition of directed and concentrated meditation on the other side of the Reformation divide, where it is commonly called contemplation or contemplative prayer. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, signed by Pope John Paul II on October 11, 1992, we read:
Meditation engages thought, imagination, emotion, and desire. This mobilization of faculties is necessary in order to deepen our convictions of faith, prompt the conversion of our heart, and strengthen our will to follow Christ. . . . Contemplative prayer is also the pre-eminently intense time of prayer. In it the Father strengthens our inner being with power through his Spirit “that Christ may dwell in [our] hearts through faith” and we may be “grounded in love.” . . . Contemplation is a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus, “I look at him and he looks at me.” . . . Contemplative prayer is hearing the Word of God. Far from being passive, such attentiveness is the obedience of faith, the unconditional acceptance of a servant, and the loving commitment of a child. It participates in the “Yes” of the Son become servant and the Fiat of God’s lowly handmaid.
The Catholic Church has a great deal of wisdom to share with Protestants about brooding as a way into prayer.
Thinking in God’s presence is, as we have seen, the basic idea of Christian brooding, but what should we be thinking about? John Owen specified Jesus Christ in his glory. Richard Baxter insisted on the hope of heaven; which is right? The answer is that both are right, and there are many other topics to meditate on also. Proper Christian meditation is thinking about God and everything else in relation to God. It should include thinking about our own relationship to God, thinking about God’s purposes and God’s greatness and God’s achievements and God’s blessings, and thinking about what is involved in pleasing God, what it means to fully respond to God. It is thinking about our life under God, the life that chapter two pictured as hiking with the triune God as our resource, and the Lord Jesus as our self-identified Friend: life with its ups and downs, life with its immediate and long-term pressures, yet always life as hiking with the Lord. In meditative prayer we think about these things from all sorts of angles. The Puritans defined meditation as talking to oneself before addressing God, but in fact talking to God discursively will include the thinking process that is meditation’s essence, and there are many examples of precisely this in the Psalms. Where we have seen God solving our problems, we learn from the Psalms to say “Hallelujah!” Where problems still wait to be solved, we review their components and learn from the Psalms what it means to pray to God with the comprehensive word “Help!” In this way meditative thoughts easily and naturally move into prayer. Thinking in the presence of God becomes talking to the Lord directly, and talking to God leads back to further thinking in his presence. This is a natural transition, both ways.
The whole of a Christian’s thought life should be bathed, or perhaps we should say housed, in prayer. When our hearts are changed at new birth, the thought life becomes permeated by thankful, joyful, trustful awareness of God. This awareness flows from a heart already given to Christ and inhabited by his Spirit. Thus the apostle Paul’s command to the Christians at Thessalonica to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17) becomes increasingly a habit of our minds. When this discipline has built into our inner being a habit of consciously turning our thoughts Godward, we will occasionally be overridden by floods of joy, also from the heart, and find ourselves moved to intense praise of God for all the wisdom that he has shown, all the things that he has made, all that he has taught us, and all the opportunities that he has given us. We thank God for the way he has enabled us to use our minds, and we thank him also for the link between heart and mind whereby gushes and gales of spiritual joy whirl us into spontaneous outbursts of worship. This is what happens when God, who inhabits both our hearts and our minds in the sense of our reasoning powers, enables his people to think and feel and move, in short to live, in a sustained attitude of prayer.
GOD’S VOICE
The autobiography of the late Lewis Smedes is full of wry touches. One chapter is titled “God and I, Almost Friends.” There he writes, “[God] never, well, almost never, talks to me. I gather that he talks to other people,” Smedes quotes a Latvian hymn: “My God and I go in the fields together. / We walk and talk as good friends should and do.” Smedes might also have quoted the chorus: “He lives, He lives, Christ Jesus lives today! / He walks with me, and talks with me, along life’s narrow way.” The idea of prayer as “the great conversation” belongs to Christianity everywhere. But Smedes, ever the honest realist, goes on to say, “When I am with God I do all the talking most of the time.” He feels puzzled when people blithely say, “God talks with me,” for this kind of two-way exchange had not been common in his own experience, and that is a condition that many of us share.
We are sure that there are some Christians to whom God speaks in ways that he doesn’t speak to us, but we think hearing an audible voice from God is rather rare. Yet it remains a basic truth that God is a communicator, and he is going to speak his mind to his children one way or another. How will he do it? Meditation on biblical teachings and realities is one regular way. Meditation is a humble-hearted activity that again and again leaves us aware that God has guided our thinking and made some things clear to us thereby, and that in effect God is “speaking to me,” telling me what I need to know. This is the united testimony of those who learn to meditate. God makes things clear through meditation, showing us things, telling us things, straightening out our thoughts on things. Many Christians have not acquired the habit of meditating, and so they miss this. We wouldn’t want that to be the story of our lives or of yours.
MEDITATE ON GOD’S WORD
Scripture itself gives us many examples of meditative prayer, particularly the discipline of meditating on portions of God’s Word. Here, at the start, is an example of God himself directing this practice. Joshua, the new leader of the migratory Hebrews, is still shaking in his shoes trying to get over the fact that Moses is dead and that all the responsibility of leading Israel into the Promised Land now rests on his own shoulders. God comes to him and says:
This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Have not I commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go. (Josh 1:8-9)
God had already said, in a similar vein, through Moses that each future Israelite king should “write for himself in a book a copy of this law. . . . And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law, . . . and that he may not turn aside from the commandment” (Deut 17:18-20). Those who lead (and we all lead others, one way or another) must be led by the Word of God, which we must absorb into head and heart as a lifetime project.
In Scripture we read of an experience recurring for the prophets whereby verbalized messages came into their minds and they knew that this was from God. But this is not the usual thing. The usual thing is that matters become clear after prayerful meditation, informed by praying over what we read in Scripture. Evidently this was how God meant it to be for Joshua, both as a man and as the manager of Israel’s invasion of Canaan. “This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth.” For Joshua that meant the five books of Moses, in whatever form he had them. In our day (as for the past 1,700 years), the acknowledged canon of Scripture includes sixty-one additional books, which together with the Pentateuch make the complete Bible. That is the book that is not to depart from our mouths but on which we are to meditate day and night. The English Bible, in almost any version, fills more than one thousand pages of fairly small print, and none of us will have exhausted the wisdom of those Scriptures by the time our life ends.
Within the Bible the Psalter highlights meditating on Scripture. The first psalm is in a sense the keynote of the whole book, and this is how it opens:
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night. (Ps 1:1-2)
This is an echo of God’s word to Joshua. It also reflects a spiritual reality that remains for today’s Christians. When we come to a living faith in Christ and are born again, our inner being is changed in a number of ways, as we have already begun to see, and among them is the opening of our inner eyes to discern the self-evidencing divine origin of Scripture along with the divinity of the Christ who is set forth in its pages. John Calvin illustrated this from the immediacy of sight and tastes in the mouth, “Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.” As colors and tastes evidence themselves to be what they are, so does God’s written Word. According to Calvin, the Scriptures, being fully human as they are, immediately impress the true believer as being divine in source and character. A believer who is reading meditatively knows, intuitively and undeniably, that these words are not merely human writing; they are from God. Calvin illustrates this by the way sweet and sour affect the taste buds. If you have lemon juice in your mouth, you immediately know it is sour. If you have sugar in your mouth, you immediately know it is sweet. Similarly, the Word of God evidences itself as the Word of God. And so the spiritually hungry heart goes back to it again and again as the needle of a compass goes back to the magnetic north.
Carolyn tells of an unusual young man who at the age of twenty had already spent nearly a third of his life on a spiritual search. Raised in an Islamic country, in a nominally Muslim home, he first explored various Eastern religions and a variety of philosophies, sticking to each for a time, then leaving it to continue his search. Finally, as a college student in the United States he encountered a group of Christians and marveled at the loving ways they treated each other. Their religious explanations about a person named Jesus made little sense to him; still, he continued to admire the way these young Christians lived. Eventually one of them handed him a Bible and said, “Read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; you will get to know this Jesus.” This young man spent a weekend doing exactly that, reading and meditating on the person of Jesus as the four Gospels presented him. By the end of his reading the Spirit of God had done his work through the Scriptures. The young man’s long spiritual search had reached its conclusion; his new spiritual journey as a Christian, trusting the Bible and worshiping its Christ, had begun. Reverend Mateen Elass has since served as a Christian minister of the gospel for more than two decades.
The heart is drawn into loving trust in the God-given Scriptures in the same way that the heart is drawn into adoring fellowship with the Father and the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. This is a basic fact about the born again. So the idea of meditating on the Scriptures day and night, the thought of the Bible or something from the Bible being in your mind as you rise in the morning and as you finish the day and close your eyes at night, isn’t empty rhetoric (sermon talk!); it is neither hyperbole nor fantasy; it is not unreal; it is the natural way for things to be in the daily experience of the believer. Trustful thinking about God and his Word in tandem should be a constant each day of our lives.
But where does one begin? You can start by focusing on brief passages that have already meant a great deal to you and bring you joy every time you think back on them.
In recent years, I (Carolyn) have chosen a different sequence of Scripture for each new year, and then focused on a few lines each day of the week. It shapes a brooding sort of praying—beginning with God’s words to me. A current sequence from Isaiah reads, Monday: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; / I have called you by name, you are mine” (Is 43:1). Tuesday: “I am the LORD; I have called you in righteousness; / I will take you by the hand and keep you” (Is 42:6). Wednesday: “Sing to the LORD a new song, / his praise from the ends of the earth” (Is 42:10). Thursday: “A bruised reed he will not break, / and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; / he will faithfully bring forth justice” (Is 42:3). Friday: “ ‘I, I am the LORD, / and besides me there is no savior. . . . / [Y]ou are my witnesses,’ / declares the LORD, ‘and I am God’” (Is 43:11-12).
The Scripture itself invites prayerful meditation on all its length and breadth and envisages this as a work of true love. “Oh how I love your law! / It is my meditation all the day,” says the psalmist (Ps 119:97). This love of the Word of God is evidently the overflow of love for the God of the Word; the two loves are one, and for us, as for all who went before us, it is either both or neither. Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Psalter, celebrates the Word of God as an object of attention, trust, love, deep thought, obedience, desire and delight in all but one of its 176 verses. A person who focuses on Scripture as an object of study might lose sight of this, and also of the fact that much of Scripture is itself prayer—in written form, designed to give us models not only for petition but also for meditation. At a glance we can see that Psalm 119 is addressed to God throughout; it is all a prayer to God, recognizing the value of his Word.
But I’m just not a disciplined kind of person, and it is beyond me to pray and brood like that, we moderns might mutter. Yet look at Psalm 119:15-16:
I will meditate on your precepts
and fix my eyes on your ways.
I will delight in your statutes;
I will not forget your Word.
Here is an everyday constancy based on firm resolve; is such firm resolve really beyond you? Surely not.
But my life is full of anxiety, we might complain. It is hard to give myself to meditation, even on Scripture, when I am constantly worried, which I am. But turn to verses 23-24:
Even though princes sit plotting against me,
your servant will meditate on your statutes.
Your testimonies are my delight;
they are my counselors.
Come along, now! This is the way for you to go! Let the Scripture itself speak to you about your worries.
But meditation is hard, we might object; I don’t like sitting still and being passive. You don’t? Then look at verses 47-48:
I find my delight in your commandments,
which I love.
I will lift up my hands toward your commandments which I love,
and I will meditate on your statutes.
The psalmist pictures himself coming to meditative prayer with the same delight we express when a friend whom we love and weren’t expecting to see suddenly comes toward us. Raising our hands is almost a reflex, an expression of exuberant joy. Are you making your restless body an excuse for evading serious meetings with God?
Why should I exert the effort necessary for meditation? we ask. Verses 97-99 declare:
Oh, how I love your law!
It is my meditation all the day.
Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies,
for it is ever with me.
I have more understanding than all my teachers,
for your testimonies are my meditation.
Doesn’t the prospect of gaining wisdom make meditation worth the effort? Sadly, there are couch-potato Christians just as there are couch-potato TV watchers, who look on at others’ efforts but make no effort at anything themselves and so get nowhere. And yet energetic meditation on the content of God’s written Word is no more than natural, just as it is no less than fulfilling at heart level, for the born again child of God.
MEDITATE ON GOD’S WORKS
The psalms encourage Christians to meditate not only on the Word of God but also on the works of God, the marvelous, mighty, merciful things that he has done and is doing even now. Such meditation is presented as a steadying, hope-creating activity for believers in distress. In Psalm 77 a man in trouble begins his prayer with that trouble:
I cry aloud to God,
aloud to God, and he will hear me.
In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord;
in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying;
my soul refuses to be comforted.
When I remember God, I moan;
when I meditate, my spirit faints. (Ps 77:1-3)
What is this psalmist meditating about? God in general, one supposes, but at first he cannot get his mind off his own terrible condition, so much so that he has to say “my spirit faints.” But these sad thoughts do not remain the focus of his brooding. He forces his mind (John Owen’s phrase) to “consider the days of old” (v. 5) and to recall when he sang “my song in the night” (v. 6), exulting in what God had done for him, and by verse 11 he is able to say:
I will remember the deeds of the LORD;
yes, I will remember your wonders of old.
I will ponder all your work,
and meditate on your mighty deeds. (Ps 77:11-12)
By controlling his thoughts, sending them into a channel toward God, focusing on the great things God has done—in creation, in providence and in grace—and thus thinking in a directed, disciplined way, so that God fills his whole horizon, this psalmist, though embattled by life’s circumstances, is able to stabilize himself. He started in trouble and admits that trouble in prayer, but he then meditates with stubborn persistence on the mighty works of God and so gets steady and strong again. The wonders of the exodus and the passage through the Red Sea (corresponding for Christians to the wonders of their redemption through Christ, their regeneration in Christ and their subsequent experiences of God’s goodness) are the mighty works that, as he reviews them, raise his mind above his present pain and renew his hope for the future. That kind of God-centered meditative prayer is an art that we need to learn from him.
There is nothing magical about the way meditation can change a mood. What happens is that the process of thought renews, at the conscious level, knowledge that Christians already have in their heart—knowledge that the God they trust is changeless and consistent, a faithful promise keeper who has undertaken to see his people through their life in this world, no matter how hard it may be, to the glory that is in store for them beyond. So reviewing what God has done in the past, both in the public history of world redemption and church renewal and in our own personal experience, naturally brings encouragement, refreshment, patience, stability and hope; for nothing in God’s character or commitment has changed, and he can be trusted to keep his promises. Paul understood this, and so we find him writing of “God who raises the dead. He delivered us, . . . and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. . . . For all the promises of God find their Yes in [Christ]” (2 Cor 1:9-10, 20). It is conscious certainty about God’s faithful consistency that explains how, by the time he ends his poem, the writer of Psalm 77 finds that joyful peace and confident expectation are becoming his again as he dwells on God’s leading of his people in past days. And the same conscious certainty, breaking surface as we meditate, will enable us who, it may be, are traveling a troubled road as did the psalmist, to end up saying with Paul: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame [disappoint, NLT], because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been give to us” (Rom 5:3-5).
The directed thinking modeled in Psalm 77 is self-directed, and the discipline of practicing it is self-discipline. As natural and joyful as thinking of God is to the born again, we often have to prime the pump of our hearts to focus on God’s Word and works by wrenching our minds away from our immediate troubles, otherwise they will remain center stage indefinitely. Implicit in Psalm 77, this wrenching is implicit in Psalm 143 as well:
My spirit faints within me;
my heart within me is appalled.
I remember the days of old;
I meditate on all that you have done. (Ps 143:4-5)
And it becomes explicit in Psalm 42:6: “My soul is cast down within me; / therefore”—that is the wrench point—“I remember you.” In all these passages the frazzled psalmist is renewing his confidence in God by focusing on God’s Word and works in resolute meditation and thus he strengthens himself to go on crying “Help!” until help comes.
METHODS OF MEDITATION
What has been said so far boils down to this: meditating on what the Bible sets before us is a vital means both to a vivid grasp of God’s revealed truth and to the energizing of faith during times of trial. From both standpoints meditation is equally a preliminary to prayer and an element of it. (So far we have spoken only of prayer as petition in times of need, but we will extend the definition before we are through.) So how are we to go about meditating?
The first point to make is that meditation is something that you can do well in more than one way. Different ways of meditating are right for different people at different times. As long ago as the fourteenth century, Walter Hilton, one of the great devotional teachers of the Middle Ages, said:
You should recognize that in the matter of meditation there is no universal rule which can be established for everyone to keep in every situation. These things are by nature a gift of our Lord and are directed to the various dispositions of his chosen souls according to their particular state and condition. And according to each person’s growth in virtue and spiritual estate, he increases opportunities of meditation, both for their spiritual knowledge and for their love of Himself.
According to Hilton’s wise perceptions, we must therefore take personal responsibility to find what form of Christian meditation is appropriate for us.
As tastes, skills, temperaments and powers of mind and body vary from individual to individual, so will styles of meditation vary. This is not a case of one size fits all. How you meditate most fruitfully depends on who you are and is something that you will discover by trying out the various ways of doing it, just as we find our preferred meal on a restaurant menu by trying out a range of dishes on successive visits. What is merely good should never stand in the way of what is better, and what is best for us in this matter of meditating is something that we will discover, under God, through the experience of various experiments.
What then are our options in this matter? The Eastern way of meditation, which unhappily sometimes finds its way into Christian circles, is to concentrate on objects (for instance, stones) or abstract patterns or notions such as one hand clapping. But the Christian way, or ways rather (there are several), concentrate mind and heart, spiritual eyes and ears, we might say, on God as he has shown himself to us in holy Scripture. Here are some of the possibilities. The first two are preparatory to those that come after.
First, we should soak ourselves in the Bible, so that our minds are awash with it—or, as C. H. Spurgeon put it, till our blood is “bibline.” J. I. has elsewhere urged that we should all become “Bible-moth” Christians; he has in mind the fact that the members of John Wesley’s Holy Club in eighteenth-century Oxford were called “Bible-moths,” as those who chewed through the Bible from cover to cover. John Owen said that every Christian should regularly read the Bible right through. Luther did this twice a year; the sixteenth-century Anglican Prayer Book set out a lectionary for daily use that took one through the Psalter monthly, the New Testament twice a year and the Old Testament once; Murray McCheyne, a nineteenth-century Scotsman, produced a plan for reading all Scripture once a year; T. C. Hammond, a twentieth-century Irish stalwart, read the whole Bible quarterly. Do not bite off more than you can chew, but make plans to read the Scriptures in their entirety on a regular basis. Second (and this goes with the first) traverse the Bible in terms of overall images of its nature as God’s communication to us, and of our due response as recipients of his messages. Images affect our imagination, and imagination is the midwife, if not the mother, of insight. We now suggest seven such images; you may be able to add to the list. (These seven start with the letter l. Yours may not, but they will be none the worse for that.)
See the Bible as a library of sixty-six books, of very different kinds, written over a period of something like a millennium and a half, yet meshing with each other to tell a single story about the words and deeds of the Creator-become-Redeemer as he formed a people for himself. Savor the flavor of the different books, and note how they fit together, with the history books as the backbone of the Bible and with the books of theology, wisdom, sermons and songs attached to the backbone in their proper place, like so many ribs. Get the hang of the Bible as a whole.
Explore the Bible as a landscape of human life in all its many modes and relationships, both with and without God. Bible characters are fascinating and will grow on you as models of how to and how not to order your existence. Make a point of appreciating each person you meet in the text, and try to see what makes each of them tick. They exemplify so much (which is, of course, why in the wisdom of God they are there). Learn more of God by watching him deal with them.
Read the Bible as a letter from its divine Author to every reader. When the biblical books were written, God had you and us in mind, and what has been written for all comes as a personal communication to each. The thought is mind-blowing, but it is true. As the nature of Scripture is essentially God bearing witness to himself in the form of and so by means of faithful human witness to him, so the message of Scripture to you and us is God elucidating to our minds and hearts, in an applicatory way, things that his servants wrote for people in their own day. Each of us, then, should read the Bible as God’s love letter to us and labor to squeeze out of it every bit of meaning that is there, as we always do with love letters in this world because we know we are meant to. We should read the Bible as if the letters RSVP were written at the head of every page. A memorable misprint on the contents page of one of J. I.’s books long ago said: “RSVP means Revised Standard Version.” But RSVP actually means, in French, Répondez s’il vous plaît—in English, “Reply, please!” It is as if God says to you and me, “Your Bible is my love letter to you—read carefully what I say there, and get back to me about it.” All love letters call for answers, and the Bible is no exception.
Value the Bible as your listening post in enemy-occupied territory, which is what this world is, and tune in constantly for instructions, as spies do, setting up places for maintaining communication by radio with headquarters. This is an excellent picture of the discipline of reading the Bible with due attention, listening hard to all its teaching so as to live right in our constantly hostile world.
Rate all that Scripture says about living in faith and obedience as law, in the sense of the Hebrew word torah—not, that is, public legislation, at least in the first instance, but the kind of instruction, authoritative yet affectionate, that children in a good family receive from a parent: instruction that is meant to shape character and outlook, and to give understanding of what the family stands for and expects of its members. That is what law meant to the writer of Psalm 119 and what God’s directives in Holy Scripture mean for us.
Reckon the Bible to be your light in a world of darkness surrounding you. “Your word is a lamp to my feet / and a light to my path” (Ps 119:105). The picture here is of a traveler—a hiker, we may say, recalling our imaging of the Christian life in these terms, or a camper, or a messenger—having to walk by night across open country, full of places where one could easily slip and fall and do oneself a major mischief. But there is a path, if only we can see to keep to it. Today, we would carry a flashlight to illuminate the terrain in front of us and show us the next bit of the path. In Bible times, people carried an oil lamp at night for the same purpose. In every age Scripture enables its readers to pick out the path of life, despite the intensity of the moral and spiritual darkness through which they often have to go.
Last, cling to your Bible as a lifeline, hold on like grim death to its promises and its assurances that almighty God always knows what he is doing on all those occasions (and for most of us there are any number of them) when you feel that grim death itself, in some shape or form, is precisely what you are up against. Lifeguards and the sometime devotees of Baywatch (remember?) know well that people who think they are drowning grab and hang on to their rescuers like limpets, and they grip lifebelts and lifelines in the same almost convulsive way. That illustrates how intently we should take note of God’s assurances to his people as we make our way through the holy Scriptures, and how we should further tighten our grip on those assurances in the toughest of times.
QUICK MARCH, SLOW MARCH
When military personnel are on parade, they perform a quick march and a slow march. So far, we have been assuming a discipline of Bible reading that corresponds to the quick march: namely, the following of a one-year or two-year plan, or a three- or four- or five-year program, as the case may be, that takes you by one route or another from Genesis to Revelation, after which you go back to the beginning and do it again—and again—and again, for as long as life lasts. We all need to do this, and we may well lose out badly if we do not do it, just as we may well lose out in health terms if we do not have a balanced diet of regular meals. Meditative reading of the whole Bible, whether in terms of our seven images or within a different frame of thought, is basic to everything that our life of praying should involve.
Francis Martin, a Roman Catholic, speaks of his early days in the Cistercian monastery where he learned the regular rhythm of soaking himself in the words of Scripture. There the brothers followed the Scripture in line with the church calendar so that nearly all of Scripture was read aloud during worship in the period of a year. In addition his order followed a typical monastic pattern of praying eight times a day beginning at 2:00 a.m. and ending at 7:00 p.m. During these daily periods of prayer they sang or prayed all 150 psalms in sequence each week so that they covered the entire Psalter fifty-two times in a year.
Yet this is not the whole story with regard to meditation. Two long-practiced procedures that correspond to the slow march must now be explored. First comes lectio divina, literally “divine reading,” a technique of meditation that goes back at least to Benedict of Nursia (480-547), a monastic pioneer and composer of the Benedictine Rule for monastery life. Kathleen Norris, a Presbyterian laywoman who over a period of twelve months spent a great deal of time in a monastery, writes of this procedure as follows:
I’ve been a devoted reader since childhood, and I have been surprised to discover that what Benedict termed lectio divina, and what many contemporary Benedictines call “spiritual reading,” has given me a new appreciation for the contemplative potential of the reading process. Lectio is an attempt to read more with the heart than with the head. One doesn’t try to “cover” a certain amount of material so much as surrender to whatever word or phrase catches the attention. A slow meditative reading . . . of the Scriptures, lectio respects the power of words to resonate with the full range of human experience.
In the Benedictine tradition, lectio divina has to do first and foremost with one’s inner attitude in all reading of Scripture; among today’s Roman Catholics and those evangelicals who have adopted this practice, the usual first move is to select a brief passage and stay with it.
A typical lectio meditation today might involve the following four steps. First, lectio: reading aloud a sentence or two of biblical text. It will be read slowly, savored, perhaps read several times aloud with changing emphasis on each word. Second, meditatio: prayerfully pondering the words, asking yourself such questions as, How is my life touched by this passage? What does it show God doing? What is it inviting me to do? How do I react to it in full honesty, deep within? Third, oratio: responding verbally to God, praying the passage or praying what the text inspires us to pray. Finally, contemplatio: a time of peacefully resting in God, waiting in silence in the divine presence with alert, hopeful expectancy. A new sharpness of focus on something may not be given, but then again it may. Practicing lectio divina takes time, perhaps thirty minutes to an hour for a single verse. But this slow prayerful reading of God’s Word engages the mind and the heart with a refreshing force that the brisk march would easily miss.
Surely there is wisdom in both ways of traveling through the Bible: the steady march—two, three or four chapters a day, showing you the great contours of God’s grand design—and also the slow march, where you read only one or two verses but some biblical picture settles into the core of your being and you consciously nestle into your own place in the palm of God’s hand. This slow meditative reading of a small text again and again may lead to an experience like being in a dark room when suddenly someone releases the blinds. The blinds fly up, the light rushes in, and you see all sorts of things that you didn’t see before. Carolyn has found, though, that often lectio divina isn’t spectacular in the way that this illustration might suggest, but quiet. That image, that picture, that single thought in the passage read becomes fruitful for today, thrills the heart today, gives a needed orientation for living today. And one is left breathing with heartfelt gratitude, Thank you, Lord.
Another technique of slow-march meditation was first worked out for use with Gospel narratives, episode by episode, but in fact it fits all biblical stories of specific events. You could call it the “fly on the wall” procedure. You use your imagination to put yourself into the scene as an observer, watching and listening, focusing your attention on the words and acts of God (in the case of Gospel stories, on the words and acts of Jesus, God incarnate). You overhear, for instance, what Jesus said to the woman at the well in John 4, and what God said to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3, and to Elijah on Mount Horeb in 1 Kings 19. Then you ask yourself, If that was what God said to that person then, what has he to say to me now? And then, What truth, or insight, or promise (what some call a “best thought”) should I take with me from the passage to keep ruminating on for the rest of this day, if not indeed longer? How naturally all this will lead into prayer of various kinds is easy to see.
The knowledge—indeed, the experience—of God by his Spirit applying biblical truths to our own consciences as we meditate on them will, if we are not careful, tempt us to an attitude of self-importance that is utterly ungodly. We must remember that God (not self) is the true center of our universe. Certainly God does make Scripture speak as from his own mouth to all who seek his face, but that does not mean that we are at the center of his universe or that we, rather than he, constitute the center of our own little world. God is great, and we are small; we exist for him, not he for us, although he has freely loved us, saved us and pledged himself to us; and one sign of our maturing spiritually is a more and more vivid sense of the contrast between us and him. A version of the meditative technique just described that helps to ward off self-importance is always to ask of every passage two prior questions—what does it say and show regarding the triune God, and what does it say and show about life in this world in general—before we turn to the question, what has this passage to say to me in particular about myself, my living, my sins, my tasks, my heart, my preparation for things to come? J. I. testifies to the value of this three-question routine, which he has followed for many years.
Another variant of this heart-healthy brooding on Scripture sets you on an exhaustive interrogation of the biblical text. You ask questions of every paragraph that you read. This process is sometimes called inductive Bible study, the discipline out of which grows its first cousin, expository preaching. A reader following this form of meditation would ask three sets of questions. First, what information does this passage convey? (For example, note or mark characters, places, actions, events, lines of argument and how all of these relate to each other.) Second, what is the meaning of these related bits of information and how does that meaning connect with the larger teachings of canonical Scripture? (For example, in John 4:24 you might ask: What does Jesus mean by saying, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth?”) Third, ask, what are the implications of this passage for me? (For example, how might I better worship God in spirit? in truth?) Thousands of Bible study guides (some written by Carolyn) and millions of biblical sermons (some preached by J. I.) have grown from this inductive method that begins with thoughtful, prayerful meditation on a particular section of Scripture.
There is yet one more way of meditating on Scripture that we would like to mention. It is topical meditation such as Owen and Baxter recommended. You select one theme and allow your mind to dwell on it, exploring its various ramifications, reflecting on various passages of Scripture that build up an account of it. For example, you may meditate on the wisdom of God, the glory of Christ (Owen’s choice), the scope of salvation or the hope of heaven (Baxter’s choice). You must, of course, know Bible truths about these things before you can meditate on them. Here a concordance or a topical or thematic Bible will come in handy for discovering appropriate biblical passages. At the end you must ask yourself, How then should I respond to this reality? What should I pray for, give thanks for, and resolve to do and not do? All of our meditating, whatever our method, should lead us to this point.
One final path of meditative and postmeditation praying is so obvious as to be easily overlooked. Simply pray the prayers of the Bible! There are hundreds of them, some of the greatest prayers ever written, almost all of them starting with a meditative celebration of some truth about God’s being and action that lays a foundation for the petition that follows. What better way to pray than to pray God’s own words back to him? You can personalize the prayer by inserting personal pronouns or names. For example, from Psalm 9:9-10, we might pray, “LORD, you are a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in time of trouble. All those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O LORD, have not forsaken those who seek you. This is the situation of. Please be a refuge to him/her in this time of trouble.”
Many great prayers of the Bible invite us to this sort of praying very directly. Leaving the psalms aside, samples include Hannah’s prayer of thanksgiving in 1 Samuel 2:1-10, David’s prayer for his people and his son Solomon in 1 Chronicles 29:10-19, Solomon’s prayer of dedication in 2 Chronicles 6:14-42, Daniel’s prayer of corporate confession in Daniel 9:4-19, Habakkuk’s prayer of commitment during suffering in Habakkuk 3:17-19, Mary’s prayer of praise in Luke 1:46-55, Paul’s prayer of blessing in Ephesians 3:14-21, his prayer of thanksgiving for Christian friends in Philippians 1:3-11, and his prayer for the spiritual advance of Christians he had never met in Colossians 1:9-12, Jude’s prayer of benediction in Jude 24-25, and, of course, our Lord’s model prayer in Matthew 6:9-13. With the Bible as our prayer book, we will never be short of broodings and beacons to shape our praying.
MEDITATION AS MENTORING
Meditation mentors us. Meditation operates as a kind of spiritual work-out because in it God applies his Word to us through prompting us to apply it to ourselves. Meditation matures us by sharpening our vision of God, and it leaves us having to face maturing questions like: In light of what I’ve read, what should I do, and what should I stop doing? What attitudes on my part are right, and what attitudes on my part are wrong? How have I slipped into the wrong ones, and how am I to develop the right ones? What does Christlike godliness involve for me, and how am I to pursue that goal? What renewing of hope and strength do I need from my God right now? What help do I need to be more Christlike than I have been? Meditative questions like these move us into prayer, and so they should.
Meditation operates as food and exercise for the soul, a food and exercise that are necessary for growth. Some Christians are spiritually anorexic, because they fail to “eat” enough, through not having learned to meditate. Stunted Christians are as they are because they don’t meditate. Some Christians suffer from arrested development and remain infantile, because they have not been meditating as Christians should. Out of meditation comes increased knowledge of God, the world, ourselves, Jesus Christ and the promises of God given for our encouragement and steadier reliance on God’s guidance. Out of meditation comes ripe wisdom for facing the world’s value systems and behavior patterns that are contrary to the way of Christ. We must not be seduced by them, so we need to clearly see what is wrong with them. Meditation will give us that clear vision. And meditation will give us at every point a deeper understanding of petitioning God when we say “Help,” of praising God when we say “Hallelujah,” and of pleasing God when we say “Hallowed be thy name.”
Mary, sister of Martha, is found in Luke 10:38-42 sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening to him and learning from him. Martha thought Mary was being lazy and complained to Jesus that she was not being helpful. “Martha, Martha,” Jesus replied, “you are anxious and troubled about many things”—all quite right in their place, be it said. Hungry travelers needed to eat, and someone had to prepare the food. Hostess Martha was right to be tackling this as her immediate task. But food preparation was not at that moment Mary’s priority. We guess that she knew Martha could manage without her; certainly, she now heard Jesus say to her exasperated sister, “Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken from her.” Mary models the prioritizing of learning from the Lord, which we do by meditation, and Jesus justifies her for so doing.
The lesson for us is not that domestic work is not important but that we must each be Martha and Mary by turn. Martha did indeed get her turn at Jesus’ feet when he met her at Lazarus’s tomb and told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” And then, no doubt after a long and weighted pause to let his words sink in, Jesus asked Martha eye to eye, “Do you believe this?” She had heard and thought, and her mind had become clear in that extended moment, and her answer is the best that anyone could ever give, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God who is coming into the world” (Jn 11:25-27). Dealing with all the practicalities of Christian life is a high priority, but listening to the Lord by meditating on his Word is an even higher priority for us. First things first, yet the ideal is both things together! It should be a case of both-and, being Martha and Mary by turns, for all of us. May God help us then not only to behave but also to brood to his glory, so that we learn to pray better, more heartily, more wisely, more humbly, more thankfully and in greater faithfulness to the holy Three, who in their divine unity are so wonderfully faithful to us. This is the way we must go.