I love having quiet times with God. There is nothing like experiencing God’s love, touch, and blessing in stillness with him. His job is to be our lover; ours is to be his beloved. I love letting God touch me. He draws me into himself, erasing all the striving, pressure, frustration, and frantic pace of life.
Meditation is about finding our rhythm in God. When we couldn’t have cared less about him, God couldn’t have cared more. Before we knew him, he took the initiative and reached out to us. We love him because he first loved us- 1 John 4: 19. We responded to what he did, and he answered our response. Like a dance, we went back and forth-and we still do. God moves, we move. The father works, we work. the Holy Spirit engages, we engage. Everything we do flows out of our relationship with God. Meditation provides us with the inward anointing which reveals the presence of God.
All of life in the Spirit flows from the inside out. Coming from the inner man of the spirit, through the soul as a vehicle of expression which uses our body to demonstrate to the outside world who we really are in the Spirit.
Meditation is a fabulous spiritual discipline which enables us to see in the spirit. It is the eyes of our heart being enlightened so that we can know, understand and experience who God is for us-Ephesians 1:18.
Prayer is the process of finding out what God wants to do and then asking him to do it. Meditation is an important precursor to that effect. Before we pray, we ought to meditate, read, think, listen, and be still. Reading the Bible does reveal the will of God to us because confidence and prayer go together. By meditating on the word of God, the way I pray is formed.
Romans 8: 35-who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written:
For your sake we are being put to death all day long; we were considered as sheep to the slaughter.
But in all these things we are overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, or depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The difficulty is that our emotions can become our focus rather than the gospel if we let them.
Emotions can be strong and as hard to capture as a runaway horse. We can place more power and emphasis on them than the revealed word of God in scripture.
I feel really disconnected from God, we say. However, we fail to see that it is against what the Lord says in scripture. I will never leave you nor forsake you. I am always with you. Nothing can separate you from my love!
Reading a passage like that can infuse Christians with confidence. What a great thing to pray! Nothing can separate us from the love of God: by meditating on it, this truth embeds itself deep within our spirits. Our minds become renewed through the power of God’s love. We give our inner being the opportunity to access the Holy Spirit and be changed.
God has given us an important instruction in Psalm 46: 10-be still, and know that I am God. Stillness releases a capacity in us to receive truth at a deeper level.
1 Thessalonians 5: 23-now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, he who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.
Learning how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in the midst of problems and difficulties is vital. Without that help, we miss the wealth of our spiritual journey.
It is perfectly possible to bring ourselves to a place of peace. It is a simple discipline. Having practiced this for years, I can now bring myself to peace in any situation within a few seconds. I have learned how to retreat back into my spirit and find the peace of stillness that meditation births in me. It has become simple for me, like using a computer or driving a car. Without stillness, our experience of God is limited. Stillness is a precursor to rest in the Lord, drawing us into a continual experience of his presence.
Put simply, we have to hear God’s silence before we can listen to his voice. A silence exists in God that is so knowing, so healing, so releasing, and so embracing, that all kinds of things can be communicated to your heart. The silence is about deafening. Psalm 42: 7-Deep calls unto deep at the noise of your waterfalls; all your waves and billows have gone over me. That capacity to enter stillness can release an unbroken communion with God and bring us into a place of being God conscious.
The Lord does not cause the difficulties in our lives but he does know how to take advantage of opportunities!
God uses problems and issues to teach us how to be still. God uses every issue in several different ways because he is constantly at work in our lives. All too often we pray, Lord, set me free from this, when he wants to work on five or six attitudes, conditions, and character issues in our life. I’ll set you free eventually, God says, but I’d like to cover half a dozen of these things first. If you cooperate with me, the benefits of this problem are going to be significant.
In the Spirit, every problem comes complete with its own provision attached. God is so kind that he will not let you experience an issue without his provision coming with it. Every problem is designed to bring us into something new in our experience of God. He allows in his wisdom what he could easily prevent by his power.
Meditation helps us discover that provision, by reminding ourselves of how reliant we are on God. In recent times, meditation has become a dirty word in some Christian circles because of its connection to the new age and eastern religions. However, meditation has been a part of humanities relationship with God for thousands of years. The Psalms, for example, are a series of meditations, and are full of humans expressing their need to meditate.
When we consider deeply the things of God; We are meditating. When we reflect on his work in our lives, we have begun to meditate. It doesn’t hurt to sit down and think about Jesus and meditate on the type of person he is. For me, I’m constantly drawn back to how kind God has been to me. He is the kindest, happiest, and sunniest person I’ve ever met. I believe that when we get into contact with heaven, we will hear laughter. When we really come into the presence of God, tremendous joy, well-being, and peace floods our lives.
Joy is who God is; where he lives from; And what he does. He lives in perpetual, everlasting, and eternal joy. In his presence there is fullness of joy. The father does not give us joy. He gives us himself. He is absolute joy personified. The atmosphere surrounding God is always joyful. We need to anchor our souls in the person of God and embrace his Uninhibited delight in all things.
When we rejoice it is because we have entered the place of his joy and delight. We center ourselves in His joy. We breathe it in. We smile because we live under his smile. We rejoice because he is delight and delightful.
Whenever we encounter the Kingdom, we are lovingly confronted with the God who loves to celebrate! We come under the influence of his innate joyfulness. When life is tough then we have permission to count it all joy! -James 1: 2, 3.
Joy is meant to overwhelm every negative emotion. Sorrow may last for a night but joy comes in the morning-Psalm 30: 5. When joy is present no negative emotion can flourish. Jesus was acquainted with grief Isaiah 53: 3 it was not a close traveling companion. We need to be restored to the joy of our salvation-the delight and pleasure of our first major contact with the Lord. Joy keeps all experiences in God fresh. New every morning is God’s goodness and compassion-Lamentations 3: 21-23. Life in the Spirit is daily renewable and joy is always a part of God’s day for us. It is his plan for us to be joyful on a constant basis. These things I’ve spoken to you that your joy may be full-John 15: 11.
Meditation can be a long process. Sometimes, I’ve spent several weeks on one particular passage of scripture. When God is speaking to me clearly about something, there is not much point in reading something else. We have to become disciplined in exploring the truth God is entrusting us with.
It is amazing how God uses meditation to share his heart with us.
Malachi 3: 16-then those who feared the Lord spoke to one another, and the Lord listened and heard them; So a book of remembrance was written before him for those who fear the Lord and who meditate on his name.