Learning to Meditate

Hello again. It was a late afternoon. The heat was thick as we approached a Buddhist temple in northeastern Thailand. My colleague and I had been teaching English at a high school in Bangkok, and we had decided to take a week off and travel to that area of the country. We had in our possession a letter of introduction from the director of the school in Bangkok, where we were teaching. We were going to provide this letter of introduction to the head monk at this temple in northeastern Thailand. We were college students on a one-year assignment. All we had was a little stipend for food, and so we were poor. Having a free night to stay in a temple was a great economic advantage. Sometimes we ended up being literally stuck outside, fending for ourselves with mosquitoes. Other times, they would give us a nice place to stay inside, and they would feed us. It depended on the mood they were in, I guess, and how they felt about us. As we approached the temple, we heard the sound of early evening chanting. It wafted across the landscape, and it's really, to some degree, designed to do that. It's designed for the monks there who are chanting, and it's also designed as something for the people around to hear. After spending a year in Thailand, I heard these things so often. After a while, I could almost repeat them myself. In translation, they were chanting an ancient sort of homage to the Buddha in the language of Pali, which was supposedly the language of the Buddha in India at that time. It wasn't in Thai. I understood Thai at least well enough to understand what was going on, but this wasn't in Thai. In translation, this chant is translated, homage to the blessed, the worthy, the perfectly self-enlightened one, which is this homage to the Buddha. I'm not going to do special music for you, okay? I'm not going to chant this, but in Pali, it's Namatasa, Bhagavata Araratosamma Sambuddhasa. You can go onto YouTube, and you can find this chant. In fact, there's literally hundreds of videos with millions of views of this chant, because it's probably one of the most famous Buddhist chants that's out there. Like all of these mantras. That one, I just, you know, again, it's Namatasa, Bhagavata Araratosamma Sambuddhasa. That doesn't take very long to say it, and even if you were to sing it out in a very elegant way, this would go on for five, seven, eight, ten minutes. This phrase chanted over and over and over again, and when I was preparing this message, I went on to YouTube and I found one video, and it was 28 minutes of nothing but this one phrase repeated in a very beautiful way. I mean, it was a professional singer, and it sounds beautiful, but it's 28 solid minutes, right? Now, why would they do that? Well, because this is about meditation, right? This isn't just a prayer. This is about, this is about putting yourself into a mental state when you do this. It's literally designed to be hypnotic, and if you're sort of stuck in a temple compound and you're listening to it after a while, it does kind of, it kind of almost puts you to sleep because it's this sort of very gentle, rolling sound of this chant. And so teaching English to Buddhist monks was, we certainly kind of felt this time to time like we were kind of like Daniel, you know, kind of, you know, sort of all this stuff around us. Of course, we told them about our beliefs, and they told them about their beliefs, and so, you know, it was an equal exchange of ideas. And so it was during my time in Thailand that I learned about Eastern meditation. I learned about mantras and chants and how they were designed and what they were designed to do. And I learned just how diametrically opposed they are from biblical meditation, just how dramatically different this Eastern meditation is.

Biblically based meditation is about filling our mind with God, right? His works, right? His law, his presence, who he is, what his plan is for us. Whereas this meditation I'm describing, this Buddhist meditation or Hindu meditation, is about emptying the mind, right? You want to empty and clear the mind. Biblical-based meditation is about deeply pondering God's laws and impacts on the here and now, right? What does this mean for us? But Buddhist and Eastern meditation is about taking our minds inward and looking for truth within us individually. And of course, there's derivations of this meditation that have reached our shores, of course, you can go get yourself involved in classical Eastern meditation, as I'm describing, where you would do these mantras.

But there's also now the influence of yoga. There's the influence, you know, you go into a health club and you can go to a yoga class and you'll hear about reaching inward and all these kinds of things that people do when they meditate today. And there's something called mindful meditation, which a lot of studies have been done on, apparently has some health benefits.

But that's not what I want to talk to you about today. I'm not going to talk to you about Eastern meditation or mindful meditation. What I want to talk to you about today is what the Bible says about meditation. What does the Bible say about meditation and the spiritual benefits that come from taking the time to meditate? It's really one of those great tools of spiritual connectedness to God that we talk about. But often what we do is we sort of toss it out, right? Like, well, you know, we need to pray, we need to meditate, and we need to study our Bibles, and we kind of, you know, kind of go down the list.

But we don't really go into any sort of depth on what it means to actually meditate. And in many cases, our views of meditation have been colored and influenced by this sort of Eastern meditation and some of these techniques. I mean, probably most of us have not been to a Buddhist temple, so we wouldn't go. But nonetheless, there's been sort of this influence either through culture, music, literally, you know, my neighborhood. We have a lot of Hindus and Buddhists down in the South Bay.

So it has sometimes we may not realize it, but our views on meditation can be influenced that way. How should a Christian meditate? How often? And, you know, how do we connect meditation with Bible study and with prayer? Today, I'd like to look at what I call the what, why, how, where, and when of meditation. And that's kind of my outline for today. We'll, you know, you will go through those things and and we'll hopefully be able to understand a little bit better how we need to incorporate this vital skill and tool into our daily routine.

The title of today's message is Learning to Meditate. Learning to Meditate. So let's start with the what. What is meditation from a biblical perspective? Let's turn over to Psalm, the Book of Psalms, chapter 4. The Book of Psalms makes reference to meditation in a lot of places.

We won't have the time to look at all those references today, but there's one here that I want to just start with because it gives us a chance to look into the Word, and it also gives us sort of an example of how meditation is discussed. Psalm 4, verse 4, easy enough to remember, Psalm 4, verse 4, says, be angry and do not sin. Okay, well we often kind of hear that, but we kind of stop there, but the rest of the verse is meditate within your heart on your bed and be still, selah.

So that's sort of the thought in a verse. In my Bible, they've got a paragraph break after chapter 5, but there's sort of a thought that's being conveyed. Now, if you have a King James version of the Bible, I have a New King James I just read it from, if you have a King James version, the King James version says, stand in awe and sin not, commune with your own heart upon your bed and be still, selah. So it's interesting that in sort of an older English way of thinking about meditation, they use this term commune. Commune with your own heart.

If we look at the complete Jewish Bible, it translates this verse as, you can be angry, but do not sin. Think about this as you lie in bed and calm down.

Right? Time out. Maybe you're upset, but don't sin. Think about this a little bit and just calm down. So it's interesting that there's a lot just in this one scripture about a lesson for us, where especially for guys, we can get a little worked up, right? Just, hey, think about this. Don't sin. You might be upset, but don't sin. Think about this a little bit. Just calm down.

The good news translation says, think deeply for the word meditate. The contemporary English version says, silently search your heart. Now, I could keep going. I mean, the way that this word meditate has been translated in various English versions is really quite varied. Now, why is that?

Well, because this word meditate is actually a little interesting to look at in the Hebrew, because the actual word for meditate in Hebrew is the word imru, I-M-R-U, and it literally means to say. It's kind of strange to say, or to utter, as in, God said, let there be light. That's what that word means, to say. Other words in Hebrew that are translated from meditate are similar, like haga.

In my Bible, I just look over in Psalm 1, verse 2. You can see another use of the word meditate.

It says here in verse 2, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night. That word is the word haga, and it means to moan, to growl, to utter, to speak, or muse. Now, we often think about musing, we think about, you know, like that, or musing. But, you know, to muse, sorry, I'm making a... I'm going like that.

But to muse, in this sense, is to literally speak aloud some sort of insight that you have. You know, I've often wondered about that painting and what it means, right? You're kind of admiring something, you're musing on some work of art, right? Or something that you're seeing. When we talk about meditation and what it is, then, it's... there's a component of speech in meditation. And often, that can be speaking to ourselves, or it can be speaking sort of within ourselves, right? It can be speaking out loud, certainly. As in, for example, saying to our heart or, you know, praying to... praying within our heart about something. We know Mary, as she heard the news of this child that she was going to have, she kept these things in her heart, right? She had these things in her mind. There is an active connection between our thoughts, our feelings, via speech, either out loud or silently. So, I don't know if you remember doing this in grade school, but when we were in grade school, many of us were told by the teacher, now, I want you to read, right? We'd all have our books out, right? And maybe you'd go around the room, right? And somebody would read aloud, and other people would read silently. And then, sometimes, they would say, now, everybody, I want you to just read silently this thing. And the reason that teachers do that is because the student is not yet figured out actually how to read, or they know how to read, but now they're having to connect meaning, and they're having to enunciate, and maybe there's words they don't know in the text. And so, there's sort of this mouthing, almost, that goes on with, you know, kids who are maybe seven, eight, nine, ten, you know, for me, I was a little older, right? To kind of figure out what these words mean. And there's sort of this mouthing that goes on as they, as the words are connected into the brain, and there's a focus on every single sentence, and what it means, because the brain is processing that. And that's kind of what this, this meditation is like. It's a very purposeful, very focused way of thinking, and uttering, and speaking, may be allowed, but often not, inside. And so, you know, if you go back to Psalm 4, verse 4, in the case with the complete Jewish Bible, where it says, you know, be angry and sin not, right? Calm down. Think about this. It's really saying, speak it to yourself on your bed, right? Speak this to yourself on your bed, let it roll around, test it out in different scenarios, right? You know, just take some time. This kind of meditation, then, is not chanting, right? It's not clearing your mind or going deep inside. It's about taking some subject and really taking the time to sort of speak it out loud, as I said, really sort of imagine, you know, sort of, sort of what it, what it means. And so, you know, to some degree, you can almost put a template to it, right? And you might consider that, you know, you have a passage, and, okay, you know, what does this mean? And how does it apply to me? And how have I experienced this before, right? And you kind of follow these things through. So that's a little bit about what. And we're going to get to that. We're going to sort of touch on this what as we go through some of the others here in a little while. But that's kind of the base of what biblical meditation is about. It's an utterance. It's a moan. It's a growl, right? It's some sort of something, a muse, that comes out. Now, why do we meditate? Why do we meditate? Why would God want us to do this? Look over in Romans 12 verse 2. Romans 12 in verse 2.

God, this is a very powerful verse, often sometimes maybe overread or used in different contexts, but there's something in Romans 12 verse 2 that's very interesting. It says, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. See, meditation renews our mind. It clears away patterns of thinking about a particular subject or set of subjects. It gives us a chance to become something different than what we have been. It gives us a chance to synthesize what we've read, what we've heard, what we've seen, what we've experienced in some sort of a lens of the Bible. Now, again, you know, there's mindful meditation that is used in all sorts of different ways. I'm talking about biblical meditation, meditation here right now, where we are praying through a subject. We're thinking about a subject. We're meditating on a subject. So you take, for example, someone who has been victimized.

All right, somebody who's been victimized. Somebody who's been victimized might have been in an abusive relationship. Literally, they might have been physically abused, or they might have been verbally abused. They might have been told their whole life, you are nothing. You're worth nothing. You're never going to mount to nothing. You're just pitiful. And after you hear that, year after year, you become victimized. You become this view that I'm worthless. I'll never amount to anything, and everything is going to go wrong in my life, and it's hopeless. And that's what victimization does. It creates a sense of hopelessness within the person. If somebody is a racial minority, right, grow up in certain areas, you know, like, well, yeah, you know, people like you are this way, right, or people who are poor, people who grow up in extreme poverty. They're used to just having to scrap it all together, and there's this sense that they're never going to get out of it. Even if somebody comes along and hopes, right, they're like, yeah, right, yeah, here today, gone tomorrow. I know what it's like, right? I know how the game is played. That's a victimized mentality. That's a mentality that says, there's just no hope for me. Well, see, meditation takes that, and it says, well, wait a minute, the mind has to be renewed. This victimized mentality is going to change. It's going to be renewed. It's going to be different. And we ponder, and we think deeply about what God says in Philippians when he says, you know, I who have begun a good work in you will complete it. We realize that God gave his son that we might have life. Our life has so much value that God died that we might live, right? We have value as a person. We have value as a son of God. And we think about what God says to us and the value that we have, and we meditate on those scriptures. And we think about the lies that we've been told about how we're worthless, or we don't have any, you know, we'll never amount to anything. And we think about those things.

And then we begin to realize that something is different. Something can change. And it's unfortunately, it's a cliche right now, going from victimization to victory, right? But that's what we're talking about. God in us, in our mind, says, udders, growls, moans, no! I'm not a victim.

I'm not going to be victimized anymore, right? I mean, you know, we often think about meditation as sort of this quiet thing, right? We're sitting cross-legged, kind of like this, you know. But no, meditation goes well beyond that. Biblical meditation says, no! No, I'm not going to be victimized. I have value the Son of God died for me. And these people around here get it, too. And I'm part of God's family. That's what meditation does. You know, you just don't read this. Oh, yeah, you know, that's right. Transformed. Okay, done! Check! Next, verse 3, you know, it doesn't work that way. It comes through meditation. That's where this all comes together. The brain begins to connect all the dots. And this is where free will begins to come to play, because we realize that, no, we have free will. We can make choices about our lives. We can move. We can move out of that neighborhood, because that neighborhood is no good for us anymore. We can change our friends, because those friends aren't actually our friends. We think they're our friends, but they're just putting us down. We can change our circumstances. We can go back to school. We can go talk to somebody who's encouraging. That's what free will kicks in. We can choose right thoughts from wrong thoughts and light over darkness, etc.

Go over to Psalm 49, verse 3, please. 49, verse 3.

And, you know, sometimes when we start talking about these things, it's like, well, this kind of sounds like a self-help book, you know? But the fact is, you know, the Bible is kind of the ultimate help book, isn't it? Right? It gives us wisdom of how to live and how to overcome some of the things that we've been through. And it gets taken in different ways, but we're just going to look at the Scriptures. Psalm 49, my mouth shall speak wisdom, and the meditation of my heart shall bring understanding. We meditate to bring understanding, to connect the dots on things. And when done properly, meditation gives us a derivation of wisdom. It gives us understanding. Now, if we're moving through our life from sort of phone screen to computer screen to TV screen to, you know, work to sleep to Netflix to, you know, whatever it is, and we never have a moment to think this is never going to happen.

And what happens a lot of times is people start medicating in other ways, right? They'll self-medicate through alcohol or they'll self-medicate through some kind of drug abuse because that's how they're going to cope. That's the coping mechanism. Instead of having a moment to think about something that's that's positive. And so what ends up happening is if we don't have time to think, then what we do is we just reflect the mood of what we're going through, right? Wife's upset. I'm upset, right? Netflix is happy. I'm happy. Boss is angry. I'm angry, right? And we just get kind of kind of tossed around through this, just kind of going from one emotional experience to another, just sort of mirroring that emotional experience. But meditation stops that process. Meditation says, you know, God created me for a purpose and He has a plan for me and the circumstances around my life don't have to dictate my mood, right? Just because you're upset doesn't mean I have to be upset, right? Just because my boss is upset doesn't mean I have to be upset. I, you know, maybe He's got to kind of get it under control, right? Meditation stops that process because our relationship is with our Creator. Our Creator has a plan for us. We know we've got some problems. We're going to work on those problems. We're not perfect. We're asking God to guide us through that.

And sometimes we get, you know, we'll fall into old habits. It leads us to intentionally do things, like count it all joy when you fall into various trials. That's illogical. You know that, right? There's nothing joy. It's about falling into a trial, right? I banged my thumb with a hammer.

Hooray! There's no sense! It's completely illogical. But meditation takes that Scripture and it gives us a chance to contemplate it and go, you know what? There's something that I'm learning from this experience. There's something that I probably didn't know I needed to learn from this experience. Or you might say, I don't know what I'm supposed to learn from this experience. God helped me to learn what I'm supposed to learn from this experience. Not letting the sun go down on our wrath. The Bible says don't let the sun go down on your wrath. And meditation says, hmm, I'm probably doing that. And that's probably causing me high blood pressure. That's probably causing me all sorts of problems. Forgiving others because God said to forgive them. Again, that doesn't make sense. Somebody hurts you, right? I'm going to stay away from you. Okay, that's fine. But you can forgive them because actually it's better for you, right? It's better for me. I'm the one that's hurt when I don't forgive. That's why we meditate. Because it gives us a chance to process this information. If we just read it, it's just words on a page. But thinking about it, right? Saying it aloud, saying it to ourselves, asking questions about how it affects us. So we've talked about the one and the why. Let's discuss the how. The how of meditation. Now often when we think about the how, we tend to think about kind of our position. Like, should I be sitting down? Should I be cross-legged? Should I be walking through the forest? Right, we tend to think about our bodies when we think about how. But I want to shift that a little bit because really what we're talking about when we talk about how is really the mental how. Not the physical how. There's a mental how that we're talking about. The spiritual aspect. How do we spiritually meditate? Go over to Joshua 1 verse 8. Joshua 1. There's so much in this verse. We could spend a lot of time in this verse. I propose you spend some time in this verse meditating on it here tonight and tomorrow and later on. Joshua 1 verse 8 says, this book of the law shall not depart from your mouth. Joshua 1 verse 8. But you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe 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. Now there's a why in here for sure. There's another why in here. Why do we meditate? Because it's going to make us prosperous and it's going to give us good success. Now this again is meditate on God's law it says here. There's also a when in here. Day and night. You see a when in here? Day and night is when we meditate. So it really kind of goes along with our prayer routine. And again there's kind of an equation, right? Meditation on God's law plus time equals prosperity. That's kind of, you know, success. Meditation plus time, or meditation on God's law plus time equals success. Now under the Old Covenant, this time we're dealing with an Old Covenant, the promises were physical. They were national, right? So what's described here is a physical, a national success, which is great. Who wouldn't want that, right? I'll take that. But under the New Covenant we have better promises, right? We have better promises on the New Covenant. So we not only get to have the physical success, but Jesus says a hundredfold I will give you in this life with persecutions and eternal life in the kingdom of God. So when we think about being Christians under the New Covenant, when we think about meditating on God's law, it's not just about physical things, as was Joshua would be describing here, but it's spiritual things. It's eternal life as well.

So understanding that nuance then, we understand that if we meditate on God's law, we will have success, even though we might be persecuted, even though we might have afflictions, because we're New Covenant Christians and that's part of the deal. We have persecutions and that helps us, again, be prepared for servicing God's kingdom and eternal life. So we meditate on God's law. How do we meditate? We meditate on God's law. That's what we do. There's lots of things we can meditate on, but it says here that we meditate on the book of the law and it shall not depart from our mouth. Interesting how that connection, right? We sort of speak it, whether to ourselves or out loud, and we meditate on it day and night. We meditate on God's Word. We read it, we study it, we consider the connections to the various parts of our lives. This is why we come to church, right? So we can read the Word, so we can sort of consider how it's spoken and what's described.

Stopping, pausing, taking the time to think about an aspect of God's Word and how we're going to implement it. This is where growth occurs. This is where change happens. Change does not happen when we're watching Netflix, right? That's entertainment. Now, we might be emotionally impacted by something, right? But again, that's just gonna go fleeting unless we actually take the time to think about what we've seen and what we've done. Our meditation, our pondering some scripture or aspect of the law, invites self-examination.

It invites a evaluation of the way we live and the decisions that we're making.

Now, we are commanded to be here. It's a holy convocation, right? Read it in Leviticus 23. That's why we're here. It's a holy convocation. Jesus said, don't forsake the laws, the small law, the lesser things like tithing, right? Don't forsake those while you do the weightier matters of the law. So we attend the festivals and we keep the Sabbath. But these things are just shadows, right? These are just shadows of a greater thing that is to come in God's kingdom and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for our lives. And so we meditate on these greater truths, right? And what they mean for us and how they're going to change our lives and what God's plan is and the sacrifice of His Son and our elder brother and being reconciled with the Father and what our life is today and how it's going to be different tomorrow. Literally different tomorrow and how it's going to be different in the world tomorrow. Now we take the time and we think about these things. You can just write some of these notes down. Psalm 119 verse 15 says, meditate on my precepts. David meditate, meditate on God's precepts. That's a very legal sounding word, but it's basically a way of describing His law, His way of thinking. Psalm 119.48 says, I meditate on your statutes.

Verse 97 and 98 says, I meditate on your law all day long. Verse 148 says, I meditate on your word.

So this is not the only time we're told to meditate on God's law. Jesus taught that the intent of the law when He came was more than just sort of the written word, right? You don't need to turn there, but I'll give you this example from Matthew 5, a very famous example of the Sermon on the Mount. He says, you've heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not murder, one of the Ten Commandments. But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. Now, what does that mean? Well, if you read the rest of the verse, it talks about, you know, agreeing with your adversary quickly, leaving your gift at the altar, and being reconciled with your brother. Jesus really took that apart, right? And said, I'm going to tell you more about the intent of the law. And so we need to understand what is that spiritual intent behind it. How does it apply to us? Which brings up another how aspect, which is the intersection between Bible study and Bible meditation. Because Bible study is Bible study. You're studying your Bible, right? And we need to study our Bibles. We need, there's a certain academic study that goes on, right? We chain reference, right? We go to concordances. We look at that sort of themes, and we might color those themes into our Bible. We have the Bible correspondence course, and there's those commentaries, and there's a certain academic understanding of truth that we need to have. But then there's a time to let our hearts speak to us about what the Scripture is saying, right? And that's a very different exercise. Let our hearts sort of show us what the Scripture is saying. Let God's Spirit speak to us about what it means for us personally. Now if we're all brain about God's Word, right, we can become disconnected from the Spirit. We can become disconnected from the Spirit and intent of the passage because it's all about some academic knowledge. And we've met people like that, right? They want to tell about all about the academic knowledge of the Bible, which is great, right? And we've also met people who want to just talk about all the lovely emotion and just kind of speaks to me. And you can see there has to be a balance here, right? Because if you're all into the emotion, you're going to be tossed about to and fro with every wind of doctrine. That's what James says, right? You got to be grounded in the truth.

Knock that off. But if we're again, we're, you know, we're all about the truth. Well, you know, we see our brother hurting over here and we say be warmed and filled and we go on, right? Because we missed the point. We missed the point. So there's a balance between that Bible study and the Bible meditation. And we need to be doing both. And that's where meditation comes in because it gives us that time. God says in John 4.24, I think we know, that He is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth. Right? So it's not good enough to just say, I just love Jesus and then go off, as it says, and not do His truth, right? I mean, Jesus said that. They say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, and I'll say, I never knew you. Right? So we know we can't do that.

And I think we've often neglected the meditative aspects of God's Word because we often focus on truth over and above the spiritual application. Balance is the key. God says to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. He didn't say, pass a written examination by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Some of us might be able to actually pass a written exam very well, but we may not be able to actually live it. Living God's way is messy. It's complicated, right? Because we're having to actually make decisions and discern. Wouldn't it be great if somebody would just come in and say, this is what you do? Step one, step two, step three, done. Right? Well, we're not in a cult, are we? Nobody's coming along and saying, this is, you know, no, it's messy. We have to discern. We have to meditate. We have to think on these things.

Now, let me briefly mention, of course, that we meditate on God's work.

We won't take the time to turn there, but Psalm 119 verse 27 and Psalm 77, 12 says that we meditate on His works. Psalm 145 verse 5 says, I will meditate on the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wondrous works. So we meditate on what God has done for us. Psalm 143 verse 5 says, on all your works, I muse on the works of your hand. So if we step back and think about where our mental focus is and the how we meditate, it's all about God. It's about His works. It's about His promises. It's about His law. It's about who He is. It's all about Him and what He's doing and how that applies to our life and what that means for us. So let's now talk about the where.

Let's talk about the where of meditation. We've already read that you can meditate on your bed.

So a lot of you are like, I'm ready to meditate on my bed. That's nice and comfortable. I'm laying down. And in fact, if anybody's gone camping and camped underneath the stars and been in a nice, warm sleeping bag and looked up on the stars, that's pretty amazing. That's a pretty amazing way to meditate. Some people will fall asleep, though, if they're going to meditate on their bed.

Let's go over here to Genesis 24 verse 63. And again, we can only kind of get hints on this, but we do see some examples here of how our spiritual ancestors meditated. Genesis 24 verse 63.

This is Isaac, Abraham's son. He goes out, says here in verse 63, he says, And Isaac went out to meditate in the field in the evening. And of course, then it says, he lifts up his eyes and there's this beautiful woman, right?

Camels are coming and there's Rebecca and she sees him and, you know, the rest is history.

Isaac went into his field. He left his encampment. He left his tent. He left sort of the man-made areas around and he went into his field to meditate, probably looking up at the sky, looking out over the field, looking out over the landscape. Maybe, you know, it says evening. Maybe it was, you know, there's this beautiful time of day where the sun has set and there's the different colors in the sky, right? We know that Jesus often went into the mountains to pray.

We know that he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane. He chose a garden, right? That's where he chose to pray and certainly he was meditating as well. I'm going to read you an extract from an article on NBC News.com dated September 29, 2017 by Christina Heiser.

She says, aside from boosting your activity level, hanging out at a park, garden, or amongst many trees is great for your mental well-being, too. Nature can be beneficial for mental health, says Irena Wynn, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and clinical director of the Stephen A. Military Family Clinic at New York University Longan Medical Center.

It reduces cognitive fatigue and stress and can be helpful with depression and anxiety.

Research has shown that forest bathing, the practice of spending time in a forested area in an effort to reap wellness rewards, is pretty good for you, and that may explain why this Japanese trend is catching on stateside. A 2010 study published in the Environmental Health and Preventative Medicine, for example, found that participants who walked in a forest had lower blood pressure and levels of cortisol, which is a stress hormone, afterwards than those who strolled through a city environment. And so there's actually research that is showing that when you're in a natural environment versus a city environment, there's actually a difference in how our body reacts. I thought this was a helpful quotation to show that. Now, it doesn't mean you need to be outside to meditate. You can meditate on your bed. You can meditate inside. But we do see that Isaac went out into the field to meditate. We see that Jesus went into the mountains. He went to a garden to meditate. And so, you know, if you can do it, go for a walk in a local park or take advantage. I mean, we live here in one of the most beautiful areas in the country with the mountains and the ocean. Take a Sunday morning and drive to a park, a state park or national park with your Bible, and read God's Word. Meditate on it. Bring a journal and write a few thoughts down. That's also a technique. A little bit on the how. Some of us are better at that than others, but that helps kind of focus the mind. I find that when I write out my thoughts, I tend to sort of get them in a little better order. They kind of tend to come out in very random forms. And I say this, but I don't really mean that. And I say this, but actually I wanted to say that first. And so, by writing that down, it kind of gets your thoughts out a little bit more clearly. We're really walking in the footsteps of giants, aren't we? Isaac, Jesus, David, looks at the heavens and he contemplates, what is man that you are mindful of him? I mean, that's a meditation, isn't it?

He's speaking these words. He's contemplating the awesomeness of God and says, God, who am I? What is man that you're mindful of who we are?

Now, as I said before, the question of where and how raises issues of body position. And oftentimes, we tend to think about yoga and those types of things. But you don't have to sit cross-legged to do this. My wife, she finds that very uncomfortable. Sometimes she's sitting that way. My foot goes to sleep very easily if I'm sitting in some sort of strange position.

So the point is to be comfortable, you know, laying on your bed, looking up, sitting in a chair, walking on a beach, walking in the forest. But make sure you take some time to just sit down and pause and meditate. One family story that we have is one Thanksgiving we went up to Mendocino and it was the Sabbath day and we went over and we found this lookout over the ocean. And we watched these enormous waves and they just came in and they would just crash up against the the rocks. And we just saw that wave just going in and out. And we just sat there and we just contemplated things. And it was just so amazing to just consider God's power and what He's created because we're so disconnected from it in our regular life. As I said, some people journal, some people do different things to try to keep track of things. Now, I didn't specifically sort of go into a lot of depth on the when. The when of meditation. I quoted Joshua 1 verse 8.

That, you know, it's day and night and this doesn't mean that we quit our jobs, right? I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to meditate, right? I mean, that's not that's not responsible.

It says to pray without ceasing. Again, we understand that means that there's a there's a there's a mental alignment with our prayer, just as there is with meditation. What it means is that we should be practicing disciplining our thoughts. Right? We should be disciplining our thoughts, bringing them into captivity to Jesus Christ, right? What we're what God is looking for is that we would grow into the image of Jesus Christ. That's really what he's desiring, right? When we drive, when we work, when we shop, we should be mindful of what our thoughts are.

Are we edifying? Are they edifying? Are they positive? Or are they angry thoughts? Are they frustrated thoughts? Are they victimized thoughts? Are they hopeless thoughts? Are they thoughts about our boss and all the things that he or she is doing or people that are doing to us and the unfairness of life and so forth? Meditating day and night simply means that we want to keep that awareness of what we are thinking and feeling and make sure that we're making adjustments as needed as we go through that. And a more formal and intentional time spent when you actually stop doing something to ponder. That's what we can do in the morning and the evening and at lunch if we have a break. In conclusion, let's turn over to Philippians 4 verse 8. Philippians 4, kind of bringing it all together as we think about the what, when, where, how, why of meditation.

It says here, finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, Philippians 4 verse 8, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy, meditate on these things. Meditate on these things. What we allow into our mind is going to have an effect on us. It's going to have an effect on us. It's going to come out. It's going to come out in our words or it's going to come out in our actions, right? Somewhere it's going to come out. We are what we eat, right? We are what we think. And so Paul says that if we're going to meditate, let's meditate on those things. Let's meditate on good things. Let's meditate on the right things. Let's meditate on God's Word, God's works, God's laws, and his broader intentions for us so that we might be conformed to his image. We are his children and we need to think and be like him.