Chapter 7. Showing the Necessity of Meditation
Chapter 7.
Showing the Necessity of Meditation It is not enough to carry the book of God's law about with us, but we must meditate on it. The necessity of meditation will appear in three particulars.
1. It makes us fruitful.
The reason why God has given us his word, written and preached, is not only to know it, but that we should meditate on it. The word is the letter of the great God written to us. Now, we must not run over it in haste, but meditate on God's wisdom in authoring it, and his love in sending it to us. Why does the physician give his patient a prescription? Is it that he should only read it over and know the prescription, or that he should apply it? The reason God communicates his gospel prescriptions to us, is that we should apply them by fruitful meditation. Would God, do we think, ever have gone to all the pains of writing his law with his own finger, if it were only that we should have the theory and notion of it? Isn't it that we should meditate on it? Would he ever have paid the cost to send abroad his ministers into the world, to furnish them with gifts, Eph
4.11, 12, and that they must be near to death for the work of Christ, Phi 2.30, if it was only that Christians should have an empty knowledge of the truths that are published? Is it only speculation, or is it meditation that God aims at?
2. It helps us retain God's Word.
The necessity of meditation appears in this: because without it we can never be good Christians. A Christian without meditation is like a soldier without arms, or a workman without tools.
(1) Without meditation, the truths of God will not stay with us. The heart is hard, and the memory slippery. Without meditation, all is lost. Meditation imprints and fastens a truth in the mind, like the selvedge 69 which keeps the cloth from raveling. Serious meditation is like engraving letters in gold or marble, which will endure.
Without this all our preaching to you is like writing in sand; like
pouring water into a sieve; like throwing a bur on a crystal, which glides off and doesn't stay. Reading and hearing without meditation is like weak medicine which will not work. Lack of meditation has made so many sermons in this age miscarry.
(2) Without meditation, the truths which we know, will never affect our hearts: "These words which I command you this day shall be in your heart." Deu 6.6. How can the word be in your heart, unless it is worked in by meditation? As a hammer drives a nail to the head, so meditation drives a truth to the heart. It is not taking in food, but the stomach digesting it, which turns it into blood and energy. So too, it is not taking in a truth at the ear, but meditating on it, which digests it in the mind, and makes it nourish. Without meditation, the word preached may increase our ideas, but not our affections.
There is as much difference between the knowledge of a truth, and the meditation on a truth, as there is between the light of a torch, and the light of the sun. Set up a lamp or torch in the garden, and it has no influence. But the sun has a sweet influence; it makes the plants grow and the herbs flourish. So knowledge is only like a torch lit in the understanding, which has little or no influence; it doesn't make a man any the better. But meditation is like the shining of the sun; it operates on the affections; it warms the heart and makes it more holy. Meditation gives life to a truth. There are many truths that lie dead in the heart, as it were, which when we meditate on them, they begin to have life and heat in them.
Meditation on a truth is like rubbing a man fallen in a swoon; it fetches life for him. It is meditation that makes a Christian.
3. It values God's Word.
Without meditation we make ourselves guilty of slighting God and his word. If a man lays something aside and never minds it, it is a sign that he slights it. God's word is the book of life — not to meditate on it, is to undervalue it. If a king issues an edict or a proclamation, and his subjects never mind it, it is a slighting of the king's authority.
God issues his law as a royal edict. If we do not meditate on it, it is a slighting of his authority, and this amounts to nothing less than contempt for the Divine majesty.