Meditation: It's Better Than You Think

"Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth, meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful." Joshua 1:8

Recently, I had the opportunity to write a 68 day E-Devotional for our church on the subject of love -- love both inside and outside the body of Christ. During this extended time of writing, I found myself constantly meditating on just one or two verses at a time. Sometimes, though not always, the Lord gave me verses a couple of weeks in advance. But whether He gave those verses to me the day before the devotion was to be emailed or weeks in advance, I found myself thinking upon those verses for lengthy periods of time.

The experience was really terrific! Hopefully, the readers of these E-Devotions were blessed. But even if they were not, you be can be sure that I was personally blessed. I have been a pastor for most of the last 18 years or so, and I have taught my share of bible studies. But this adventure in writing devotions probably allowed me the greatest opportunity to really "meditate" on God's word. Oh, sure I had meditated on verses in the past. But in preparing sermons and doing bible studies, I often was looking at either many passages of scriptures or a certain text of 8-10 verses perhaps. Sometimes I would zero in on 1-2 verses and think about them a great deal during the week prior to teaching a lesson or preaching a message. Usually, most of my prepartion time was spent in picking apart the passage, checking context, digging into the Greek or Hebrew, etc. But this time of devotional preparation allowed for maximum meditation on a very few verses. There was a great deal of mulling over a verse or two and tossing it over and over in my mind for lengthy stretches of time. It turned into a valuable time of just letting the Lord speak to me, as I "chewed" on those verses.

What I found was that as I meditated, I would spend quite a bit of time in prayer about those few verses to be focused upon each day for the devotion. The result: the Lord really opened my eyes to spiritual truths and seemed to give me greater depth of insight. In addition, since love was the subject, He showed me many of my shortcomings in the area of love. I was often humbled in the process, as I saw how selfish I really am. And true love -- agape love that is -- is far from selfish. I really began to see how far short I fall in the area of agape love, and it gave me a greater desire to love like Jesus. After all, Jesus said: "As I have loved you, so you must love one another." (John 13:34) And that is quite a challenge!

I had heard people in the past speak of meditation on God's word. In each instance, they said to focus on just one or two verses to meditate upon. Those were wise words they gave, but in my life they were not put into practice as much as I'd like to say. So as I close, I would exhort you to begin meditating of just a few verses on a regular basis. It may just be better than you think. In fact, it just may change your life.