5 Steps to Help You Practice Meditation

Don’t Neglect Meditation

Given the stress early modern writers laid on meditation as a revealed duty incumbent on all Christians and not an optional add-on, it is worth asking whether contemporary evangelicals have neglected or even forgotten this once-esteemed practice altogether. In his study of Puritan meditation, David Saxton suggests precisely this, arguing that large swaths of the contemporary church are marred by a “shallow spirituality” and that this shallowness has spread in large part because “over the last century believers have lost a regular focus on Christian meditation.”¹ Likewise, Marian Raikes laments that “although evangelicals do have their own godly heritage of meditation (in the Puritans), they have largely lost sight of it” and that “few evangelical pastors seem to be either teaching or modelling meditative skills.”²

Surely these criticisms do not accurately describe every contemporary context, but when I reflect on my own experience of growing up in an evangelical church, they don’t seem too far off the mark. I remember frequent encouragements to read my Bible but few if any mentions of meditation, and certainly no one was insisting on the centrality and necessity of it.

To the extent that contemporary evangelicals do neglect meditation, however, we do so at a significant spiritual cost. In the first instance, if meditation is a biblical duty, as the Puritans believed, then our neglect is actually disobedience. Moreover, if the Puritans were right about the crucial role that meditation plays in our spiritual formation, then our failure to meditate causes us to miss out on its heart-warming, piety-inducing, life-transforming power. But in addition to these significant motivations, it also seems that by recapturing the early modern Reformed emphasis on meditation, we would go a long way toward combatting some of the problems that particularly plague our twenty-first-century cultural moment.

A Heart Aflame for God

Matthew C. Bingham

A Heart Aflame for God explores spiritual formation practices that are consistent with the 5 solas, presenting the riches of the Reformed tradition for 21st-century evangelicals.

Meditation Forces Us to Slow Down in an Age of Speed

Life is getting faster. And while some might be inclined to dismiss this accelerating pace as neutral or even beneficial, there are good reasons to suspect that our habitual exposure to this hyper-paced world has serious consequences for our capacity to slow down and pay attention to things that really matter. Researcher Gloria Mark argues that the internet’s very “design unleashes the floodgates for distraction” and that “the organization of the internet, with its nodes and links and ever-changing content, has shaped not just where we pay attention but also the frequency at which we shift our attention.”³

For Christians, and particularly for those Christians committed to word-centric Protestant piety, these developments are troubling, to say the least. This is because Scripture calls us to think on God and the things of God, and such purposeful pondering does not lend itself to speed, efficiency, and the rapidity demanded by our always-on digital world. For the psalmist, God’s promises and commandments were to be treated like honey, a rare treat surely meant to be savored rather than sped through:

How sweet are your words to my taste,
     sweeter than honey to my mouth! (Ps. 119:103; cf. Ps. 19:10)

Contrast that sense of slowing down to appreciate what really matters with this description of our fast-paced culture from author Johann Hari: “In some ways, we are increasingly speed-reading life, skimming hurriedly from one thing to another, absorbing less and less.”⁴

If reading Scripture was likened to eating, meditation was compared to the digestive process through which food was transformed into the vital stuff of life. “Meditation,” wrote Nathanael Ranew, “is like the assimilating or digesting power, helping to concoct spiritual food, and turn it into spiritual nourishment.”⁵ And while it is possible to eat one’s food quickly, digestion moves at its own rather slower pace. So too with meditation: it is, by definition, something that cannot be accomplished in haste. To practice it is to slow down. It is to block out the rush of the urgent and new so that people can give their mind and heart to what is ancient and eternally significant.

The Practice of Meditation

At this point, if you’re anything like me, you may be feeling a mild to moderate sense of frustration with the way our discussion of meditation has thus far lacked a certain nuts-and-bolts specificity. Perhaps as you’ve read the foregoing exploration of meditation’s meaning and benefits, you’ve been nodding along in agreement, yet you’ve also been feeling a rising tide of impatience as you wonder when, if ever, we will get on with explaining just what exactly the person meditating is expected to actually do. Even once we understand that meditation involves an intentional reflection on divine truth with an eye toward stirring up godly affections, we might still ask what such a project should actually entail.

I speak here from personal experience, and if your mind also gravitates toward such practically oriented queries, you may be disappointed with much of what early modern Protestant devotional literature has to offer, at least on this particular point. Puritan reflections on the topic of meditation are often long on general exhortations and rather short on concrete specifics. For example, after waxing eloquent on the spiritual blessings of meditation and urging that all Christians do it, Wilhelmus à Brakel concluded his discussion with what might seem to be a surprising indifference toward precisely how his readers should put this vital duty into practice: “I do not wish to prescribe rules to you. Begin with it and you will experience yourself which way is best for you.”⁶ Thomas Manton struck a similar note when he warned his readers to “not bridle up the free spirit by the rules of method.” Rather than worrying overly much about “rules and prescriptions,” Manton recommended “voluntary and free meditations” and described any specific guidance given as “arbitrary directions” meant to be helpful but never binding: “We do not prescribe, but advise.”⁷

So if you are looking for a detailed, step-by-step how-to guide that ensures you are meditating “correctly,” then our early modern Reformation guides may disappoint you.

So what is one to do? Can’t we at least say something about the specifics of meditation? Well, yes. So long as we remember that the Puritans understood themselves to be “offering flexible guidelines and not rigid rules to be followed,”⁸ we can indeed note some of those practical pieces of advice that recur regularly in Puritan writings on meditation. Here are five to help us get going.

[Meditation] is a thinking about God and the things of God with an eye toward personal application.

1. Hold Meditation and Scripture Closely Together

Meditation must be held in a close relationship with both Scripture intake and prayer. We must underscore the degree to which Reformation meditation was always meditation on what God has revealed in his word. Most often, this means meditating directly on a passage of Scripture: we hear God’s words to us in Scripture, and then we naturally turn to think about them, reflect on them, and apply them to our own hearts. “Reading and meditation,” wrote Thomas Watson, “must appear together.” Indeed, the two activities so complement and complete one another that each can be said to derive its real benefit from its proximity to the other: “Meditation without reading is erroneous; reading without meditation is barren.”⁹

Meditation largely takes the form of spending deliberate moments reflecting on what one is reading that day. There are, however, other prompts for meditation encouraged by Reformed authors. In addition to directly meditating on a passage of Scripture, Reformed Protestant devotional manuals regularly encouraged Christians both to meditate on one’s own life—thankfulness for one’s blessings, sorrow for one’s sins, wonder at God’s providential leading, and so forth—and to meditate on God’s glory as seen in creation.

2. Distinguish Between “Settled” and “Occasional” Meditation

Although it is true that Puritan authors did not insist on a one-size-fits-all approach to the practice of meditation, almost all of them found it useful to divide the practice into two basic types: there was a “deliberate,” “solemn,” or “settled” meditation and also a “sudden,” “occasional,” or “extemporal” meditation. As Nathanael Ranew explained it, “Meditation is either that which is more set and solemn, or that which is more sudden and short.”¹⁰

“Sudden” meditations could be linked to almost anything. Lewis Bayly, for example, suggested that getting dressed in the morning could be an occasion for remembering “that as thine apparel serves to cover thy shame, and to fence thy body from cold, so thou shouldst be as careful to cover thy soul with that wedding garment which is the righteousness of Christ.”¹¹

Bayly’s extemporaneous meditations nicely illustrate three hallmarks of “occasional meditation” more generally: the meditations were (1) brief, (2) prompted by some mundane occurrence, and (3) shaped, constrained, and inspired by Scripture, even though not necessarily arising in direct response to it.

3. Grab Hold of a Thought, and Don’t Let It Go

At its core, meditation is about intentionally lingering over particular scriptural truths, promises, stories, and insights so that God’s word by his Spirit might work in us, not as a dead letter but as that which “is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). Meditation is meant to encourage readers to grab hold of specific God-honoring thoughts and then refuse to let them go, turning them over and over in the mind until eventually they work their way into the heart.

Many specific Protestant instructions for meditation often amount to simply uncovering different angles and questions through which one might approach a text of Scripture. The precise shape of such an inquiry, in practice, takes many forms. Often it involves sitting with a truth and allowing the mind to explore its different aspects and implications.

Many of the specific forms that godly meditation takes involve comparing one Scripture passage with another. As Vermigli put it, “Nothing is more helpful for explaining the Scriptures than the sacred letters themselves,” and thus searching through the Bible for “passages that are related to the ones you have in hand” becomes “a useful and a joyous hunt, not for deer and boars, but for heavenly treasures, which we can take with us as food for our journey all the way to heaven.”¹²

To do this well—indeed, to do it at all—we need to slow down our Bible reading. For some of us, this may mean reading fewer chapters each day than we have attempted in the past.

4. Apply God’s Truth to Yourself

Given this Puritan emphasis on meditating until “thy heart grow warm,” it should not surprise us to discover that much of the practical mechanics of meditation revolves around figuring out how to apply biblical insights to our lives. Such a commitment to applying God’s word was perhaps put most succinctly by John Ball when he declared that “application is the life of meditation.”¹³

This aspect of meditation requires both scriptural knowledge and a Scripture-framed self-knowledge, and thus it blends quite naturally into the idea of self-examination. Most often the way that meditation “works” to stir up godly affections is by applying scriptural truth to one’s life in a fashion not unlike what faithful preachers attempt to do each week from the pulpit. So this might involve taking hold of a biblical promise, thinking about ways that God has kept it for you in the past, and then actively turning with fresh trust to the God who will surely keep on keeping his promises in the future.

In all this, whatever convoluted associations we might have with the word meditation, when we encounter early modern Reformed writers describing their understanding of the practice, we find Christian men and women who really are not doing anything more complicated than slowing down and reflecting honestly on the ways that biblical ideas intersect with their own hearts and lives. Reckoning with that baseline simplicity that sits at the heart of meditation brings us nicely to our final practical point.

5. Don’t Overthink It

We would perhaps do well to conclude our “practical advice” by returning to the opening point of this section: many Reformed authors were reluctant to be overly prescriptive when talking about meditation. If early modern Reformed Protestants were somewhat evasive when it came to the mechanics of how to meditate, we would be wise to recognize that this was ultimately a feature and not a bug. For in addition to the basic Reformation desire to avoid insisting on rules not found in the Bible, the lack of detailed instructions found in Protestant devotional manuals also simply reflects the nature of meditation itself. As we have already noted, meditation is, in large part, nothing more than an intentional sort of thinking. It’s a thinking about God and the things of God with an eye toward personal application. There is nothing magical, mystical, or even especially complicated about it. When we meditate, we are using the same faculties that helped us understand the text in the first place, but we are then simply building on that understanding by deliberately considering more deeply how those biblical realities intersect with our reality.

To distinguish between reading and meditation is to recognize that a bare intellectual comprehension of biblical texts is not enough. It is to guard against the temptation to imagine that letting “the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col. 3:16) can be accomplished merely through a mechanical approach to Bible reading in which more always equals better. Puritan writers were constantly trying to underscore this point, stretching the limits of their imagination to better convey this sense that Bible reading was not really complete until it was joined up with godly meditation: “Reading brings me meat, meditation brings forth the sweetness. Reading brings the coals to the wood, meditation makes the flame. Reading brings me the sword of the word, meditation whets it.”¹⁴

So don’t get caught up in the trap of overthinking the mechanics of meditation, but rather see it as the appropriate Spirit-wrought response to reading or hearing God’s word: you hear from God in Scripture, and then you think about what he has said through meditation, applying it prayerfully to your own life.

This article is adapted from A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation by Matthew C. Bingham.

Matthew C. Bingham (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast) is campus dean and associate professor of theology at Talbot Seminary Phoenix, Biola University. He is the author of Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution and A Heart Aflame for God. He has served as a pastor in the United States and Northern Ireland. Matthew is married to Shelley, and they have four children.

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