Listening to God - Meditation

Pastor Burcham’s Sermon

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Be still and know that He is God. It’s a bigger challenge than what it originally sounds like and yet, I still feel that today, more than any other time, we need to hear from God. Whether we need a word of encouragement or we need a word of hope or we need help in a decision, we need to hear from God and have Him speak into our lives. And yet, it seems that our lives are so complicated and they’re filled with so much activity and there’s so much noise going around, how can we be still and just be in the presence of God and hear Him and let Him speak into our lives?

That’s why for the next few weeks, we keep going back to some historical spiritual disciplines, some practices of days gone by that people before have used to be quiet in front of God, to get themselves to a position where they can listen to God, where God can really speak into their lives.

This week, we’re going back to something that dates into the Old Testament, that is, meditation, taking a portion of God’s Word, a verse or even a portion of a verse and just focusing on it and living with it and soaking it up for all that it’s worth.

Meditation goes back all the way to the time of when the people were going into the Promise Land. The book of Joshua, the first chapter, they’re getting ready finally now to go into the Promise Land and this is what God has to say to them, “Do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth. Meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.” Why? “Then you will be prosperous and successful.” What He means by that is if you’re going to make it in the Promise Land, if this is going to be a new day for the people of Israel, you have to stay connected to God’s Word. You have to be in a position where you can listen so God can speak to you.

Just a moment ago, David starts out the book of Psalms when he says, “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of wicked but his delight is in the law of the Lord.” That isn’t the Ten Commandments. That’s the scriptures. It says “his delight is in the Word of the Lord” and, on it, he meditates day and night. It is this meditation on God’s Word, the pondering of God’s Word, the rehearsing of it over and over again in your mind, this deep thinking about what God has to say to us.

Rick Warren in his book, A Purpose Driven Life, says that meditation is hard work. He says it’s focused thinking. It’s taking a portion of scripture and just rehearsing it again and again, going over it and reflecting on it over and over again in your mind. And he goes on to say, “If you know how to worry, you know how to meditate.” Think about that. What happens when you worry? You don’t consciously think about the thing you’re worrying about. It’s just always there, right? It’s in the back of your mind and when you least expect it, it sort of creeps up and you think about it again and you rehearse it again in your mind. He says if you know how to worry, you know how to meditate. I’m an expert at meditation and I didn’t even know it. If you know how to worry, if you know how to bring something up again and again, that’s what meditation is.

It’s not the meditation that we hear going on in the world today, transcendental meditation, new age stuff. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite of that. New age meditation, transcendental meditation, it’s all focusing in on you, the whole idea is that you’re supposed to get centered. You’re supposed to look inside of yourself. The focus is not on the words that you say but how you say them, the intonation and the rhythm in which you say it so that you push out everything else so that you can just focus on yourself.

Christian meditation is a 180 of that because Christian meditation is not a focus on self. It’s a focus on God. It’s not on how you say the words but it is on the words themselves because it is the Word of God. It dates back to Old Testament times, over 20 times in the scriptures it mentions meditating on God’s Word.

By the time we got to the 4th or 5th Century, there was a practice that came up which was fourfold for meditation. The first step was a deliberate reading of the text, maybe two or three times over, just slowly reading it, letting each word sort of jump out at you and soak it in. The second was to ponder it for a time. “So what is God trying to say there?” Then you would pray about it and maybe you would pray the passage itself. And then you would contemplate it and think about it. History went on and, all of a sudden, it became something that was part of the monasteries and what the monks would do. So they take a vow of silence and they’d spend their entire day reading and pondering and then praying and then contemplating all day long excluded from everyone else. Give me five minutes in that, I’ll either be bored or asleep. We have to breathe new life into this. We have to breathe new life and have a fresh look at this ancient practice of meditation so we can be more in tune to listening to what God has to say.

I’ve taken the four steps that they developed in the 4th Century and really whittled it down to three key things. There are three key times when I think that God speaks to us, that meditation would help us listen better to God. God speaks to us through His written Word. The bible, the scriptures, that is God’s Word to us. It’s His revelation to us. It’s His inspired, inherent word that we can come back to time and time again. Everything we need to know about God is in the scriptures. Everything that we need to know about ourselves, it’s in the scriptures. So God speaks to us through the scriptures so we should come back to them again and again and again.

Take note of this: Jesus, when He is in the desert, 40 days, He’s gone without food, the devil is tempting Him. This is what Jesus does, “It is written man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” So here we have the Son of God going back to Scripture. He’s quoting from Deuteronomy. He goes back to the Old Testament scriptures to fend off the devil and his temptation.

How about Paul when he talks to Timothy. He says, “All scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, training and righteousness so that you may be thoroughly equipped.” It is God’s Word in which He speaks to us and in which He reveals Himself to us. So we know for sure that God speaks to us through Scripture. Meditation helps us focus on that scripture so we can listen better to what God has to say.

There’s an important distinction here. Meditation is different than studying. Studying God’s Word is great. Studying God’s Word is important but meditation is different than the study of God’s Word. Case in point, probably from the video that started out the message: Last week, all of a sudden, I had stuck in my brain, “Be still and know that I am God.” I don’t know why. It just kept coming up again and again and again. In fact, I even posted it on my Facebook because I was doing my journaling thing, you know, and I said, “This verse just keeps coming up again and again.” Just be still and know that I am God. My first inclination, what’s the context of that? When was that written? What’s the historical setting? And me being me, I said, “You know, let’s dig into that one word. What does it mean to know? What’s the root of that? What’s the original language? What are the nuances of that word?” That’s the study of God’s Word and that’s good and that’s important but that’s not meditation. Meditation is just taking that verse and just letting it be and letting it soak into you and listening for what God is saying.

It’s interesting that in my journaling exercise, I put on Facebook on Monday, “So I’m going to be preaching on meditation and I’m trying to figure out, ‘How can I convey this whole idea of just soaking in God’s Word?’” I got a bunch of suggestions on that. It was cool. One suggestion said that I should pass out sponges to everyone so you get the idea you’re just supposed to soak in God’s Word. You’re not getting a sponge this morning.

Another idea was how about a Jacuzzi? You just sit and soak in God’s Word. You are definitely not getting a Jacuzzi this morning. The third one I like, it’s like marinating meat. It’s grilling season. Do you ever do that sometimes? You take a piece of steak or a pork chop or chicken or whatever and you just marinate, sometimes the day before, right? You really want it to soak in, so you get your herbs and your spices or the glaze and you put it on your meat and you put it back in the refrigerator and you just let it sit and let it soak and, all of a sudden, it’s absorbed by the meat. In fact, if you cut it in half, you’d see that it is gone, it had permeated the entire piece of meat from top to bottom. That’s what meditation is, to just soak in God’s Word, maybe just a passage, maybe just part of a passage and just let it creep into every aspect of your life and every moment of your day.

There’s another aspect of the analogy I like. You can tell the difference between marinated meat and un-marinated, right? You put two steaks down, one’s been marinated and one hasn’t. They look different. There is a different aroma about them. There’s a different taste about that. You know there’s something special about this piece of meat. If you live in the Word of God, if you just sort of marinate in the Word of God, there’s a difference about you. You have something that people want because you have something at your disposal that others don’t have. So meditation is just sort of soaking in God’s Word. And this is important because God’s Word is dynamic. God’s Word doesn’t change but the application of that Word, the significance of it sort of changes. The original meaning doesn’t change.

Case in point: Let’s go to Jesus again. Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy, “Man does not live by bread alone but in every word that comes from the mouth of God.” It was originally written to the people as they were about to go into the Promise Land. “Get ready, folks, do you remember when you were in the desert? You had manna in the morning, you had quail at night so you didn’t have a great cuisine and so you had to depend upon God and a total trust and a total dependence upon God.” That was the original meaning of it. How does Jesus use it? Jesus takes that text, He doesn’t change the meaning of it but now He applies it because the devil comes to Him, He hasn’t eaten for 40 days, right? And he says, “Change these rocks into bread.” Jesus uses it to fend off the devil and say, “Uh-uh. I have my priorities straight. It isn’t so much about my stomach. It’s about my soul. Man does not live by bread alone.”

How about you, right here, right now, this morning? What could that scripture be saying to you? Could it be calling you to reevaluate your priorities, what’s really important in your life? Could God be teaching you to be content with what you have? Could God be saying, “Be thankful and praiseful for all the blessings I’ve given you.” Do you see what I’m saying? The meaning of the passage hasn’t changed but how it applies to your life does. Meditation is saying, “I’m going to live with the Word of God with God speaking to me and I’m going to say, ‘Now how does it apply to this moment on this day? What’s God saying? What is it that He wants me to hear?’” God speaks through His Word.

God speaks through prayer. Now we normally think prayer, that’s us talking to God. And yet when we look at scriptures, prayer is really a conversation with God. There are two things that are going on here. We come before God. We know that God is listening to us but, in the context of scripture, it always talks about it as being a conversation with your Father or a conversation with your friend. Well, how does that work?

Well, tell me if this hasn’t happened to you some time. I’ll have a friend call me up and say, “Man, Ron, I am just dealing with a bunch of stuff. I need to talk to someone.” Yeah, great. So maybe sit on my deck, sit someplace else and then they come over and, all of a sudden, they just unload, right? Just, wow, they have a lot going on in their life and they’re just unloading and they’re unloading and unloading. Two hours later, I haven’t said anything. I’ve nodded my head a couple of times. I’ve said, “Hum-uh. Uh-huh. Oh, I see.” Tried to ask a question but really couldn’t get it in. Two hours are up,  they stand up and they go, “Boy, thanks for talking to me.” I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to because what I communicated was that I care about you and I’m interested in what’s happening and that spoke volumes.

When we come to God in prayer, we may not hear an audible of God talking to us but certainly, we can picture God nodding His head, coaxing us on, “Go ahead, tell me more,” and in the end, saying, “Boy, thanks for talking to me, God.” Because we know that He cares and that He’s interested. God speaks through prayer. Meditation is focused prayer so we can listen a little bit more to what God has to say. What I mean by that is usually when I come to God in prayer, I have this whole laundry list of things that I want to go through. I want to thank Him for a few things. I want to ask Him about a couple of things. I need some help with a decision here and it’s usually all over the board. And those are okay. But meditation prayer says, “I’m going to take this piece of scripture and now I’m going to use that as the basis for how I come to God and how I’m going to talk to God.”

So let’s just use mine from this past week. “Be still and know that I am God.” So my prayers have been, “Okay, God, I’m not good at being still. You already know that. I’m packed from sun up to sun down. I’m not real good at being still.” Or maybe it’s a time of confession. “Yes, I know that you’re God but I’d like to be, at least in concern of my own life.” Because I’ve tried to be God of my own life. I’ve tried to make things work the way that I want them to happen. I tried to impose my will instead of listening to your will, God. “Be still and know that I am God.” “Yes, you are. And I look at the magnitude of your universe and all that you have made.” “Be still and know that I am God.” “You are God and I’m thankful because I’m dealing with some things that I can’t handle and only you as God can handle them.” Do you see what I’m saying here? You have taken your prayer life but you have focused it in on a piece of scripture, on a passage and you’ve tried to open yourself up to hearing what God is saying. God speaks through prayer. Focused prayer, meditation can help us listen to what God has to say.

And God speaks through life. I am more and more convinced that God speaks to us every day, every moment of every day. Jesus said He would never leave us. Scripture tells us that God says that He’ll never forsake us, that He’s always with us. If God is by our side, then God must be communicating with us and speaking to us. I cannot believe that He confines His communication to certain moments and certain places.

So think about all of the different situations you’ve been in this past week. I’ll just give you a minute and think about all the different places you’ve been. Maybe it’s in work, in school, in church, at home, with family, friends, by yourself. Think of all the decisions and choices that you’ve had to make, small and large. Now think that God was right by your side, that He was right there, that He could have been a part of every situation. He could have been a part of every choice and decision.

Meditation is a way of infusing God into our whole lives. What I mean by that is this: Meditation is not a scheduled event. It’s a way of life. That has been my big revelation for this week. It’s not where I started out on Monday. On Monday, I was like, “Alright, how am I going to communicate this?” My challenge to you was going to be take an hour. You can spare an hour out of your next week and just focus in on a piece of scripture. You know what? I don’t have an hour. You don’t have an hour and I’m not sure what good that would do. Meditation isn’t a scheduled event. It’s a way of life and isn’t that what the scriptures say? What did it say in Joshua? “Meditate on the law day and night.” Psalm 1, “Meditate on God’s Word day and night.” It’s not a scheduled event. It’s a part of who we are. In other words, we take it with us into every situation and to everything that we’re doing.

I didn’t get that and I really can’t explain it but all I know is that this passage has been in my head all week long and it’s usually not like that for me. But I’m sitting with the staff on Tuesday in our meeting and I’m thinking, “Be still and know that I am God.” I’m having a conversation with my family and I’m saying, “Be still and know that I am God.” I’m wrestling through some decisions and choices I have to make and it comes to my mind, “Be still and know that I am God.” It wasn’t until about Thursday that it hit me. In fact, if you follow me, I even posted it on my Facebook, doing my journaling thing, you know. I said, “Meditation isn’t a scheduled event. It’s just part of who we are.”

When you take a piece of scripture and you take just a nugget of it and you just live with it all week long and you think of it constantly, just like worrying, it just keeps coming up again and again and again and, all of a sudden, you’re just immersed in God’s Word. And that passage is deeply imbedded in you. This is one historical practice I think I’m going to stick with because I like it. It’s pretty cool because I have God with me all week long and consider this. Let’s say that 50 out of the next 52 weeks, I’m going to give myself 2 weeks off, 50 out of the next 52 weeks, I pick a piece of scripture or a nugget and I just live with it. I just keep coming back to it every day.

At the end of the year, look at the arsenal that I have of passages of God’s Word that are deeply imbedded in me. The different situations come up in my life or different situations come up in a friend’s life that I can pull upon, I can draw upon and apply to their life. That’s the power of listening to God through meditation when it’s not a scheduled event but it’s just a way of life. It’s just part of who you are.

That’s why I’m going to give you another challenge this week. I’m not going to ask you to take an hour out of your day or your week and just focus in. But I am going to say, “Can you live with a passage for one week?” I don’t care what it is. You’re probably going to spend a little bit of time choosing that passage. Take “Be still and know that I am God.” That’s great. How about Jesus when He quotes Deuteronomy, “Man does not live by bread alone but every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Romans 8:28, “All things happen for the good of those who love Him.” Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.” There’s a whole book of them, right? Just choose one. Study it a few times. You’re probably going to have to write it someplace so that you don’t forget it. There’s one family I know they take a dry erase marker and they write it on the bathroom mirror. So considering how vain you are, you may really have it deeply imbedded, I don’t know. Do something so that you remember it and you just keep coming back to it. And maybe in your prayers, you refer to it and just throughout your day, just like worrying, it just keeps coming up again and again.

And then a week from now, then you can decide, “Did that make a difference? Did this historical practice make an impact so that you could listen to God maybe a little bit better?” Amen.

Copyright 2010 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church