Let’s fill our minds with God’s works and words, and let’s think deeply about them. May God help us to do the hard work of meditation, and may God give us understanding in all our meditation. Let’s meditate before we google.

There is an often neglected discipline in the Christian life: Meditation. Meditation should be the duty of every serious Christian man and woman. “…but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2). “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Psalm 119:97). I mean Christian meditation, not the weird eastern mysticism of the empty-minded meditation. Christian meditation is exactly the opposite. The goal of Christian meditation is to fill the mind, not empty it, and to think deeply on God and His truth. When we meditate, we walk more carefully (Josh 1:8), we gain understanding (Psalm 49:3), and our soul prospers and is established (Psalm 1:3). I want to focus on some reasons we don’t meditate.

Laziness

Why don’t we meditate when the Bible clearly promotes this practice? Partially, we don’t meditate because we are lazy. Meditation can be hard. In order to meditate, you have to push pause on all of the distractions. You have to step away from your phone, your calendar, your friends. Meditation takes concentration, and sometimes we can be unwilling to do the hard work of actually putting our minds to the task. We wonder why our souls are dry, but when we really think about it, we have not been diligent to put in the effort to really fill our minds with God’s word. We should take this proverb to heart: “The sluggard buries his hand in the dish and will not even bring it back to his mouth” (Prov 19:24). Don’t expect to get filled if you’re unwilling to bring the Scriptures to your mind.

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