Let’s start off by going back in time and I mean back into the times when your were in high school and perhaps college and your teacher ended the week by saying, “Now, Monday we are going to have an exam over all that we have been studying this past week, so be sure and study your notes and books concerning these chapters so you will be ready to take your test early Monday morning.” Talk about ruining your weekend! “Geeze,Teacher! Give us a little bit of a break, won’t you?” Oh the horror of it all, and it’s not just over one day’s study, but an entire week! Yikes!
How many of you remember those days? What did you have to do to get ready for those exams? You had to study, didn’t you? Even if it did take all your weekend time as you watched all your plans fly out the window. They sure did know how to ruin free time, didn’t they? But on the other hand, you didn’t want to fail, you didn’t want to fail the exam or the course, so you had to put in the time to get ready for the “blessed event”! So what did it cause you to do? It caused you to read back over and study your notes and your textbooks over that particular subject so you could do your best on the exam. You read, you studied, you memorized, and maybe, just maybe, you learned something about that particular subject that you can still remember at least a little bit of it today. In essence, you were “meditating” over the subject at hand.
“Meditating” is not a bad word. It’s a Biblical word. It means “to think upon, to ponder the meaning of, to cogitate, to think upon what that verse or passage is saying to me, and what it means for my life.” Why, you’ve been meditating all your life, especially as you prepared for those exams, or while you’ve thought about a problem in your life that needed to be solved. It’s a natural process. The Psalmist said in the first Psalm of the person whose delight is in the law of God’s word, “and in His law he meditates day and night”. Moses wrote in Deuteronomy 6:69, “The words of God are to be in your heart. Write them upon your doorposts and upon your gates so that you see them when you leave and when you come back. Talk about them with your children. Discuss them when you sit at your table, when you lie down, and when you get up, and when you walk down the road. Let them be as a sign upon your forehead.” Moses didn’t want the Israelite people to forget the words of God and all that He had done for them, so he had them meditate on God’s words so they would not forget them.
Meditating on God’s word means to memorize them. It means to read them, to think about them, to whisper them to yourself as you walk along the road or in your house, speaking them outloud so that you can not only think about them but you can hear them. Educators tell us that what we speak out loud, we hear with our ears, and we better remember what we’ve heard. What you put in your heart, what you put in your mind, what you speak out loud, is what comes from your heart and soul. You’ve memorized it, thought about it, spoken it, absorbed it so that you can share it with those around you, and many times remember it for yourself! That’s meditation, and it works for all areas in your life, for your exams, for the problems you are trying to solve, for sharing with others, for life experiences. The result is that God’s words get into your hearts and into your thoughts so that you are influenced by their teachings. That’s all it is folks, and it’s not hard to do. It just takes repetition.
A little boy was to remember the first verse of the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” for a Sunday School play. Well, he got the first part right as he stood before a sympathetic crowd, “The Lord is my shepherd,” but then he bogged down in his memory and couldn’t remember the rest of it. So, he started again, “The Lord is my shepherd,” but still he forgot the next words. But all of a sudden they came to him and he stood up straight and almost shouted out, “The Lord is my shepherd, what should I worry!” Well, he didn’t quite get the correct translation, but he sure got the right meaning! That’s exactly what meditating on the words of God does, it gets down deep into our hearts and encourages us to put His words into our thoughts and actions. How about you? Take a simple passage like John 3:16 and start meditating upon the words of God.
