THE LOST ART OF MEDITATION

There are two other things to consider before we finish looking at the importance of knowing about God as the first step to knowing him more deeply. The first is the place of meditation and the second the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

Meditation as it was understood by an older generation of Christians is almost a lost art today. Recently I received a copy of a helpful lecture on contemporary Australian spirituality by a Dr. Allan Chappell that emphasised this point. Dr. Chappell looked at the way contemporary evangelicalism has veered either toward mysticism or rationalism, and said that the solution to bringing these deviant paths back together is the practice of meditation. I think he is right. Meditation more than anything else is the means the Spirit uses to turn what we learn about God into experienced relationship with him.

J.I. Packer makes that point in his book Knowing God. “How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God?” he asks. “The rule for doing this is demanding, but simple. It is that we turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God” (Knowing God, p. 18, emphasis added). I’ve found this little statement more helpful than any other in my quest to know God in a vital and experiential way.

But how does it work? In itself, meditation (at least the meditation Packer is talking about) is the activity of reflecting, examining, recalling and applying what we learn to our lives. Above all it involves pausing and taking time to explore and reflect on an object (an idea, a truth). Part of the reason we don’t benefit from much of what we read and hear is that we don’t take time to consider it deeply. We let it flit through the mind – understood and comprehended, perhaps, but not possessed and applied. When that happens, we get next to nothing from it. Meditation halts the process and allows ideas to be thought about. It turns them over and breaks them into parts. And as it does so, it increases the possibility of them being understood and absorbed.

I find it helpful to break important sentences up into their parts and to make sure I understand precisely what words mean. Time and again I’ve cracked the outer shell of an idea simply by forcing myself to think of words with similar (synonyms) or opposite (antonyms) meanings to its key terms. However it’s done, this kind of meditation is not a passive dreamy thing. It’s active, but it’s also unhurried. It gives time for meaning and significance to emerge.

The process has often been likened to that of digestion. The digestive process breaks down the food we eat and releases its essential nutrients for absorption. Meditation does much the same thing. It allows words and ideas to be broken open and their goodness assimilated.

That’s particularly important when it comes to knowing God. It allows what we learn about him to be held in the mind and brought before the heart as something to be received, believed and acted upon. It allows us to turn mere words about God into personal qualities belonging to him. And as we dwell upon these, God becomes real and personal and the object of our admiration and love.

It is my personal belief that failure at this point – to take the time to meditate upon what we read and hear about God – is the greatest cause for our failure to really know God. We’ve simply got to slow down and find time for quiet reflection if we are ever going to know God intimately and personally.

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