18 The Wrong Kind of Meditation

perspective on the person, Word, and works of God than you do.

Tell this person something like this: I was praying and meditating the other day and I feel like God told me this. Perhaps this person can validate what you think you’ve learned—or let you know when you’re on shaky ground. This is an important function of the body of Christ.

Next, talking about what you’ve learned will further clarify or crystallize it in your mind. The more you talk about it and share it under God’s leading, the more you understand it and the more real it becomes.

Lastly, it will become a means of edification for somebody else. Many times, I’ve had God reveal something to me that was a tremendous truth, but I didn’t know the reason for it. However, not long thereafter, I might be having a conversation with someone and need to share the truth that God had given me earlier. God edifies us in order that we might become a means of edification for somebody else.

It’s this application phase that separates Christian meditation from other forms of meditation. These others are an inward journey, a self-oriented experience. The meditating is for them, and not focused on anybody else. Christian meditation is the opposite. It forces us to live in reality, not escape from it. After you have finished Christian meditation, it forces an outward experience of obedience to the truth God has given.

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The last area to consider is the peril of negative meditation. As we continue to tie all of this together, you will remember that we briefly touched on fantasy in the first section. Imaginations, musings, mutterings, fantasies, and daydreaming are terms that need further clarification. Merriam-Webster states that to meditate means to muse. It means to become absorbed in thought, wonder, or marvel; to think or speak reflectively.

Musing and muttering means talking to ourselves. We’re always doing this. It’s happening on a conscious level during the daytime and on a subconscious level at night. The question is, Do we invite God into our musings and mutterings? Is this a monologue, or is it a dialogue between us and God?

Under God’s direction, this can become a dynamic area of productivity by turning random musing into creative brooding. Personally, this is where I get a lot of my teaching ideas and biblical insight. I begin to turn my musings and mutterings into what I call creative brooding and meditation.

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If you put an a before muse, you get “amuse,” which means to not think and to divert the attention. Too much amusement dulls our spiritual sensitivity if it’s worldly amusing. Most amusement in this world is designed to keep us from doing deep thinking about the things of God. We just go and watch a movie or TV program or listen to music. Next thing we know, we’re being amused. Our mind is not really in play regarding the things of God. Before we know it, we’ve been subtly sidetracked.

Fantasy or daydreaming is a process whereby we willfully recall certain events, conjure up some situation in our minds, or create some kind of images or drama. It’s something that we willfully create, a form of perverted meditation. Therefore, it is a satanic counterfeit to keep people’s minds from deep, life-changing meditation on the things of God.

We often don’t recall what our mind is doing while we’re asleep. Fantasy is what I would call directed daydreaming. We begin to pursue some pleasurable thought in our minds while we are awake. They reveal who we really are more than anything else.

Fantasy and daydreaming are forms of wish fulfillment. This means that we escape to our fantasy to be or to do what we cannot be or do in reality. If I really want to pull something off and I can’t do it in real life, I retreat to my fantasy to do it. So, it’s a form of wish fulfilment. It’s normal in children, but progressively un-

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healthy into adulthood. The older we get, the more we should be moving from fantasy to reality.

Who are you really in your daydreams? What kinds of things do you do there that only you and God know about and that you wish He didn’t know about? What kinds of things do you do there when nothing or no one is forcing you to think or meditate on something particular? What does your mind naturally start thinking about? Would you be comfortable to have your fantasies and daydreams broadcast? Christian meditation is a way of controlling and directing these fantasies and daydreams in a godward direction.

Biblical Examples

The Bible talks a great deal about the imaginations of the heart. This is a biblical way of describing what today we would call fantasy, daydreaming, and so forth. Here are some examples of what the Bible says about the imaginations of our heart:

• Genesis 6:5 soberly states, “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” Our minds are perverted. • Later in Genesis 8:21 it says, “Every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.”

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• Proverbs 6:16–19 declares, “There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.” • Romans 1:20–21 (nasb) says, “They are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless hearts were darkened.” The King James translation renders “futile in their reasonings” as “vain in their imaginations.” • Ephesians 4:17 instructs us: “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking” (see also 2:3). • Finally, 2 Corinthians 10:5 declares: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to

Christ.” The King James translation starts with

“Casting down imaginations . . .” In other words, we are to get rid of these vain imaginations and instead take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

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Rather than think on God’s person, words, and work, most of us dwell on ourselves, the imaginations of our hearts, and our own happiness and pleasure.

I was talking with a rather eccentric professor about musing, meditating, and fantasies in the mind. He summed up his view in the form of a question: Do your thoughts dwell on the tinseled artifacts of a dying age? In other words, are we meditating on the fading pleasures that this life has to offer? Meditating on these things is Satan’s subtle way of pulling down the shades on the light of the world. When you begin to become preoccupied with these things, it’s like Satan dimming God’s illumination coming into your life.

There are three selves in us. There’s the person we really are, the person we like to think we are, and the person we project to the world. Each of us has a problem with the person we really are in our mind.

However, Galatians 2:20 reminds us: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” The fantasized version of ourselves has to die so the real person can come alive.

Meditation Recap

Now, let’s conclude by reviewing the benefits of practicing right thinking through Christian meditation. First, it deep-

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ens our understanding of the person of God and therefore deepens our relationship with God. Second, it deepens our faith. As our meditation is, so is our faith. It also strengthens and conforms the inner man or woman to the image of Christ and is therefore a means of sanctification.

Christian meditation makes our very fiber biblical. We as Christians need to live in God’s Word to the degree that we continually think the things of God. It also brings peace, tranquility, confidence, and strength to a soul in turmoil due to depression, fear, and anxiety.

Meditation helps us have God’s perspective on sin and evil in the world. And lastly, it is a practical way of controlling our fantasies and daydreaming, thus giving meaning to our musings and mutterings.

Meditation is a rich way of developing our Christian life and deepening our relationship with the Lord. Tragically, it’s been severely neglected in the lives of so many believers.

Humanity is crying out to find and practice real meditation and right thinking, and as Christians, we’ve got to present the answer. We can understand God because Jesus has revealed Him to us. We can understand God because we can have the mind of Christ. We don’t have to be double-minded.

Going forward, may Psalm 19:14 be true for each of us: “May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”

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