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Meditate: Hearing the Holy Spirit in Our Thoughts

Today, we’re shifting gear and going a little deeper, moving from simply reading the text to actually meditating upon its meaning.

Now, I’m aware that some Christians have serious concerns about this kind of thing. They associate words like meditation, contemplation, and even imagination with Eastern religions and the New Age and worry about people using and abusing the Bible.

But the word meditation literally just means "to ponder or concentrate." So, Christian meditation means pondering, concentrating, focusing our thoughts fully upon Jesus. It has nothing to do with emptying our minds–but rather with filling them with the beauty of Biblical truth.

Again and again, the written Word of God describes itself less as something to be studied objectively than as something to be experienced subjectively: tasted, savored, and absorbed into our very beings.

We see this when the prophet Ezekiel is handed a scroll and told by God to consume it (Ezekiel 3:3), and then again when the prophet Jeremiah says, ‘“When your words came, I ate them”’ (Jeremiah 15:16). Similarly, the psalmist invites Israel to "Taste and see that the LORD is good" (Psalm 34:8). And then, of course, there’s Jesus himself who quotes Moses telling Satan that ‘“Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”’ (Matthew 4:4).

On another occasion, God instructed Joshua to ‘“Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips, meditate on it day and night”’ (Joshua 1:8).

The Hebrew word translated "meditate" here is hagah which literally means: "to moan, ponder, or muse." There’s a sense here of "ruminating"–like a cow chewing the cud.

So how very practically do we do this? How are we to chew upon God’s Word in this kind of way? I want to offer three keys to Biblical meditation: interruption, intuition, and imagination.

First, Biblical meditation means embracing interruption. Don’t rush! Take your time. For a number of years, I read several chapters of the Bible every morning, aiming to complete the whole thing in a single year. But some days, in all honesty, I was so desperate just to get it done that I couldn’t recall anything I’d just read. I began to crave a slower, deeper, more reflective approach.

Second, having been interrupted by the text, we mustn’t be afraid to explore its implications subjectively, beyond its most obvious rational meaning. One of the simplest ways to do this is to pay close attention to any word or phrase that captures my attention, even if I don’t yet know why. As I explore this word or phrase in my mind, wondering why it has attracted me, a train of thoughts may well be triggered that can leave me talking to the Lord or scribbling in my journal. Such apparent bunny trails have often led me into fresh revelation and times of prayer.

Third, having slowed down to embrace interruption, and having exercised my intuition, it’s time to apply my imagination to the text. One particularly effective way of activating my imagination with the Bible is to apply all five of my senses. For example, I might take a story from the Bible and ask: What am I actually seeing here? What am I hearing? Am I tasting or smelling anything? What am I feeling? Gradually, an overly-familiar story can come alive.

These three practical pointers for meditating on Scripture–interruption, intuition, and imagination–can bring the text to life by helping us slow down to read between the lines.