Super Bowl champions like Peyton Manning know how to focus. In fact, any great athlete has learned the art of staying in the zone no matter how intense the pressure is that surrounds them. How do you get in the zone with God? How do you turn off the noisy racket that comes from techno overload or hectic living? Through Biblical meditation. Biblical meditation is not the act of inaction, or escaping all thought.
I’ve tried emptying my mind of everything… I can’t do that… Even worse… what if my brain got stuck on thinking about nothing… it’s kind of like when your computer crashes. Meditation is about divine reflection.
The reason meditation is so effective is that it pulls you out of the mode of trying to cajole God into doing something. The focus of meditation is to increase our awareness of God in the world and in our lives.
The psalmist writes in Psalm 63:6: “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.”
This is reflection. In our culture of the electric light bulb, the “never ending day” we never have time to reflect on the most important things in life. The Hebrew meaning of the word meditation is to rehearse over and over again, to simmer.
When you are cooking and you let something simmer. You are allowing it to soak in. There are a 100 different types of meditation, I want to share with you one method. Another psalm that deals with the exercise of holy quietness is found in Psalm 39:4 and 7: “But when I was silent and still, not even saying anything good, my anguish overwhelmed me.” At that moment, instead of becoming overwhelmed with depression and anxiety, the poet remembered God. You can, too!
Reflect on your life through a passage of scripture. Take a simple passage of scripture. Something from the Psalms or the Gospels and reflect on what it says about God’s presence in your life.
Pick a posture that fits your meditation. Most often we think of mediation as something you must do while sitting and remaining as motionless as possible.
Now, when you first start doing this you will grow bored in about 3 minutes… but, stay at it. I promise, if you begin to do this suddenly you will find that one morning or evening you’ve spent 30 minutes or more and you will feel like the time just flew by. That is a good thing. It means you are slowing down, finding a new rhythm for living…
That is the point when suddenly you will find that you carry a sense of God presence into your whole day.