The Puritans were not content with a mere head knowledge of God and Christ. Their chief desire in their meditation was to fan the flames of their desire for Christ and to look more like him in their thoughts, words, and deeds. Consequently the Puritans have given us a wonderful example of how faithful biblical meditation can lead to a life lived fully for Christ.

We conclude our series on biblical meditation with the meditative practices of the Puritans who not only give us an encouraging example that biblical meditation can be lived out, but also a much needed exhortation of the necessity to prioritize meditation in their daily lives.

John Owen (1616-1683) is emblematic of the Puritan’s devotion to meditation when he writes,

How can we call ourselves Christians if we spend our days hardly ever thinking of Christ? But when you think of Christ, be careful that you are guided by the word of God. It is easy to invent a false Christ.1

This is what Puritan meditation can be boiled down to: A deep love for Christ and His Word that causes the believer to think about all of life in relation to Christ and his Word. Beeke and Jones aptly state the Puritans view on meditation:

For the Puritans, meditation exercised both the mind and the heart; he who meditates approaches a subject with his intellect as well as his affections.2

The Puritans were so devoted to thinking about Christ as much as possible that they proposed two categories of meditation: occasional meditation and deliberate or disciplined meditation.

Occasional meditation is meditation that can occur at any moment of the day where the believer is inspired to fix their gaze upon heaven and consider God’s greatness, glory, and truth.3 For the Puritans, meditation could and should be practiced anywhere and everywhere. As Saxton remarks, though occasional meditation was a spontaneous occurrence without any set study of the Scripture, it was still kept in check the objective Word of God.

The Puritans fought against allowing occasional meditation to degenerate into mysticism. They taught that the written Word of God should always guard one’s thoughts and reasoning. Far from trying to undermine the sufficiency of God’s Word, occasional meditation seeks to better understand God’s written Word by seeing how the entirety of God’s works illustrate biblical truth.4

Likewise, Beeke and Jones write of the Puritan’s meditation being always bound by Scripture,

By anchoring meditation in the living Word, Jesus Christ, and God’s written Word, the Bible, the Puritans distanced themselves from the kind of bogus spirituality or mysticism that stresses contemplation at the expense of action and flights of the imagination at the expense of biblical content.5

This is well reflected in Owen’s exhortation, which stands in stark contrast to the bankrupt meditative practices explored in the previous article.

Many thoughts in the minds of men are vain, useless, and thoroughly unprofitable. These are often looked on as silly rather than sinful. But wherever there are ‘vain thought,’ there is sin (Jer. 4:14). The word implies hoping for good out of something that is nothing. The Israelites sought for happiness from idols which were nothing and could do nothing, much less bring them happiness. So many seek to find happiness from vain thoughts about themselves. Such vain thoughts are indulged in when men fancy themselves to be what they are not; to do what they do not do; and to enjoy what they do not enjoy.6

He goes on to teach about meditating on the realities of heaven, saying, “A false heaven, created by the imaginations of men, will soon evaporate when serious thought is given to them.”7 A person meditating on heaven according to their subjective thoughts about heaven does them no good. They are not truly meditating on heaven at all; they are merely meditating on their own imaginations. Owen goes on to detail what must be central, not just in the discipline of meditation, but in all actions of life:

“And so the whole of our wisdom is said to lie in the ‘fear of the Lord.’ Without this fear, all our duties to God are useless, for they neither glorify God nor do they bring any spiritual strength and growth to our souls.”8

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