This is the final week of our Beholding series, looking at the spiritual disciplines as God's gift to us that we might become who we were always intended and made to be — God's imagers. That is who we are. That is at the core of God's design. We were made to receive His glory and reflect it. We were made for intimacy and communion with God. And the disciplines are God's gift to us to experience that reality.
So over the last eight weeks, we have looked at disciplines of community, confession, fasting, and generosity — disciplines that help us come to God with open hands, to release the things we have been holding on to, and to allow God to cover up for us what we far too often try to cover up ourselves. The last two weeks we looked at the disciplines of stillness — silence and solitude — and last week the discipline of prayer, which is the integration of our life into the life of God. This morning I want to finish this series with the discipline of meditation.
Growing up in the church, meditation was never really on my radar. When I was younger, it was kind of an outlier thing — something mystical, something Eastern, something that maybe weird people did. That is not the day we live in today. My phone and my Facebook page are constantly being filled with breathing techniques. You cannot throw a rock without hitting a yoga studio. Meditation is everywhere, and honestly, that makes a lot of sense. The world is confusing. There is a lot of scary stuff going on. People are burnt out, frazzled, anxious. And so there is this sense of needing something to settle us, something to still us. It makes complete sense that people are looking for peace, and so many are turning to meditation.
But there is a significant difference between the meditation our culture is engaging in and promoting and the biblical discipline of meditation. It might be an oversimplification, but most meditation in our cultural reality is about emptying ourselves — slowing down, being still, clearing the mind. I am not saying that critically or judgmentally; I am simply observing the reality. The idea is: I need to be still and silent, I need to empty myself, and that is what will help me.
Biblical meditation, Christian meditation, is actually the exact opposite. It is about filling ourselves. Emptiness is actually the problem. The emptiness that sin brings into our reality — the emptiness of the absence of the God we were made for — that is at the heart of the problem. It is what drives the idolatry of our lives, this attempt to fill that emptiness with something else. Our culture says: slow down, still yourself, silence yourself, empty yourself, and you will be good. And the slowing down is good. The stilling is good. The silencing is good. But the emptying is where it breaks down, because emptiness is the problem. What we need is the fullness of God.
So meditation is the slow, attentive, deliberate engagement of our mind, our heart, and even our bodies, concentrating on and experiencing the presence of God. This is possible because of who God is. God is a relational God. God is a speaking God — a God who reveals Himself — and that is such good news. If God were not that, we might draw by inference from creation that there is a Creator. That is what Paul says in Romans 1 — we look at what exists and go, this came from somewhere. But if God were not a communicating God, a self-revealing God, we would not know much else about Him.
I have been trying to root all these disciplines in creation because I see them as fundamentally acts of participation in the new creation offered by Jesus. Jesus is fixing and setting right what was lost and broken in the fall — by sin and the fruit of sin, which is death. That is what Jesus is doing. And the disciplines are God's invitation to us to enter into that.
So we go back to Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. We went deep — excuse the pun — into this a couple of weeks ago, how before God speaks, the Spirit prepares, He hovers. But then we get to verse three, and it is so simple and so beautiful.
1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
What a monumental description of God's power. God does not roll up His sleeves — figuratively or really. When God creates, what does He do? He speaks it. And because He is God, what He speaks happens. God speaks and light exists. God speaks and land exists. God speaks and existence exists. The God of the Bible is not a silent God. He is a God who speaks. And this is what I need you to hear this morning: the Bible is not God's authorized book to tell us about Him. The Bible is not primarily an informational textbook about God. The Bible is an introduction of God to us. The very God whose words create reality — "Let there be light," and there is light; "Let there be land," and there is land; "Let there be creepy crawling things," and they are — that very God speaks to us in the Word. Which is why the Word is living and active. Engaging with the Word is engaging the creative power of the God who speaks and it is.
It is not surprising then that John, in his Gospel, as he is introducing Jesus, goes back to this act of creation. He frames the introduction of Jesus as new creation.
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
The One who speaks and it exists is the One that John is now going to introduce us to. The same Word that spoke creation into existence becomes flesh. The One who said, "Let there be light," comes as the true light into the darkness. He shows up in a body — born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, walking the dusty roads of Galilee. The Word becomes flesh.
And here is why that matters. When we read the Word, when we consider the Word made flesh, when we engage the Scriptures and God's revelation, we are not simply reading about Him. We are learning to hear from Him. Which means the goal of studying the Scriptures is not information acquisition. You were not made to extract data from a text. Sometimes I think that is exactly how we treat the Bible — like we are studying for a final exam, cramming at the last minute, trying to figure it all out. That is not what we are made for. The goal — the thing we were actually made for — is communion with the God who made us for Himself.
I have often ironically joked that much of evangelicalism has a twisted trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Book. I think much of American evangelicalism is guilty of bibliolatry — we worship the Bible. Now, I am not anti-Bible. I love the Word of God. I love it. But it is not an end unto itself. We do not study Scripture simply to study Scripture. It is not designed for that. It is a means to an end. God has given us the Word so that we can enter into His presence, hear His voice, know His will, and become what we were made to be. The Bible is the means to communion with God.
That means we do not study the Bible just to be right. Anybody else guilty of that? I love to be right. I usually am — at least in my own mind. We love to be right. This is actually part of the problem we talked about last week. We are all building our own little kingdoms, and we want everyone to think like we think, and we would really love it if God would make that happen. But that is not how God designed it. The prayer is, "Lord, not my will but Yours be done." So we do not study the Bible just to win the argument. And this is going to seem like a strange thing to say: we do not even study the Bible just to know the truth. What does Jesus say? "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free." We do not study the Bible to be right — we study it to be righteous. We do not study to know about God — we study to know God. Those are radically different realities. And like all the other disciplines, meditation, contemplation, biblical study, engaging with the Word is not a performance. It is a pathway. It is not, "God, look how much I studied today. Look how much I know about Your Word." As if God is going to be impressed by that. As if God gives us the Word so we can memorize it and pass a test. It is a pathway. The image I want to give you this morning is that the Word is a door — a door we are designed to open and walk through.
So Paul has a word for the church in Corinth, and I have said many times I love Corinthians because it was a jacked-up church. It just makes me feel better. Paul has this word for the church in Corinth that I think the American church — and Estrella Mountain Church — needs to hear this morning.
1b …"knowledge" puffs up, but love builds up.
There is a way of knowing — a type of knowledge that looks good on the surface. Think about puffing up in the animal kingdom, how animals try to impress one another. Or you go to the gym and you see guys walking around like this. There is a way of knowing about God that looks good but that only puffs up and does not produce what it is supposed to produce. Paul is not contrasting knowledge against love or being anti-knowledge. He is saying there is a way of knowing that does not bring transformation, and there is a way of knowing that does. That is the kind of knowing I want. I do not want to be puffed up. I want to be built up.
We looked at this a few weeks ago:
2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
Listen to what he is saying. If you win the knowledge game — you win, you got it all, you figured it out, you are like some kind of genius — if you win the knowledge game but you do not love, you lose. You fail. Because knowledge has a purpose beyond itself. We looked at 1 John 4 a lot last year:
16b …God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
Paul is not anti-intellectual. He just knows that knowledge has a purpose. Knowing God and being transformed by that knowing — that is the purpose. We become what we behold. God is love. So if we behold God, yes, knowledge happens — but that knowledge happens for the purpose of transforming us into the images we were made to be. If knowledge does not result in the fruit of love, it is being misapplied.
Let me drive this home with one more rather ominous passage from James:
19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!
You believe there is one God over all, one God who created the heavens and the earth. You have got that down. Awesome. Guess what? The demons believe that and shudder. The enemy, and all of the spiritual entities in his kingdom — let this sink in — have better theology than you do, than I do, than anyone. They are older. They are smarter. They have been around a lot longer. They are very familiar with biblical revelation. And yet that knowledge has not served them well.
So hear me. The Bible is like a door that must be entered. The demons — and far too often, we — study the door. Faithfully, sincerely, we study the door. "Oh, what kind of wood is that? Look at the grain on that. How many layers of stain do you think there are? Look at that door handle. Look at the framing. Look at the architecture of the threshold. This is an awesome door. Can I tell you about the door? Let me tell you about this door." And you can study the door and you can win at biblical trivial pursuit, but that is not the goal. That is not the purpose of a door.
The enemy is subtle and far too cunning. He is more than content to have you study the Bible if it is only puffing you up. He has no problem with that. He might even encourage it — to keep you busy and informed and never once walking through. The enemy does not need to make you a skeptic. He just needs to keep you on this side of the door.
That is what the discipline of meditation is for. I want to show you a little of what that looks like. Let us start with a well-known text from the Old Testament. Joshua is taking over from Moses, leading God's people into the land of promise after forty years in the wilderness. And this is what he receives from the Lord:
8a This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it.
The Hebrew word here for meditate is הגה — hāgâ. It is a fascinating word. It does mean to think and to meditate, but it is an auditory, audible word. It means to moan, to mutter, to read in a low voice. It is used in some fascinating ways in the Old Testament, especially in Isaiah. In Isaiah 31:4, this is the word used to describe a lion growling over its prey. And in Isaiah 38 and 59, it is the word used to describe the cooing of doves. So let that sink in. It is the sound the body makes when it is absorbed in something it has given its full attention to. That is what it means to meditate — which is a little different from how we tend to think about it culturally.
I have already talked about the discipline of silence. There is a time to still ourselves, to silence ourselves in the presence of God. And there is also a time to mutter. There is a time to chew the Word of God. Listen to Joshua 1:8 again with that idea in your ears: "It shall not depart from your mouth” - not your mind, your mouth. To meditate on the Word is to mutter it, to turn it over on the tongue. It is embodied. It is physical. It is the sound of someone absorbed in something they cannot stop attending to.
Origen, one of the early church fathers, writing in the third century, described meditation on Scripture as being like a cow chewing its cud. I love that. You take the passage in, and you chew it. You work it. You swallow it. But you are not done, because you are a cow. So you bring it back up, and you chew it, and you work it, and you swallow it again. And you are still not done. And it comes back up. There is this persistent, slow, sustained thinking and reflection. Aren't you glad God didn't make us to eat like cows? Although there are some meals I wouldn't mind having a second time! But I think this is a brilliant metaphor and description of what meditation actually is.
Because actually — He did make us to eat the Word of God like a cow chewing its cud.
We are such a consumeristic society. By nature, we have been trained to think that more is better, so we just keep consuming, consuming, consuming — take something in, move on to the next, take something in, move on. Meditation breaks that cycle. It focuses us and allows us to sit with the text until we draw the nutrients out of it. That is what the cow is doing. That is what God is encouraging Joshua to do. Stay in the Word. Let the Word stay in you. Let it not depart from your mouth.
And do you see how this is not the silent, interior, detached meditation of our cultural moment? This is the body and mind working in harmony — the physical and the spiritual — the dust that our bodies are made of and the breath of God that our spirit is made of, coming together, focused on the God who made us for Himself.
It is a process with a purpose. Not merely to know it, but to do it. Once again, James nails this:
22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.
That is the whole puffing-up problem. "Oh, I read the Scriptures. I meditated. I went to the sermon. I did that." Great. Now what do you do with it? What are you looking for in it?
So let us look at a New Testament example of meditation. The word meditation is never actually used in this text, but I think you will see exactly why I chose it. In Acts 17, Paul is on one of his missionary journeys and he comes to a city called Berea. And when he gets there, he does what he always does — he goes first to the local synagogue, to his fellow countrymen, and he brings the gospel. And something begins to happen.
11 Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.
There are two really important verbs in this verse. The first is "received." The Greek is δέχομαι — dechomai — meaning to receive with open and ready acceptance. Open hands. Eagerness. The Bereans are not standing back with their arms crossed going, "What have you got for me?" They are actually hungry for the truth. They do not assume they have everything figured out. They do not assume they know all there is to know about God. They have an openness. Paul comes with this message and they receive it with eagerness.
But they do not just say, "Well, Paul said it, therefore it is true." It is not a one-and-done sort of thing. They receive it with eagerness, and then they examine the Scriptures daily. The Greek there is ἀνακρίνω — anakrinō — a word that means to examine carefully, to sift, to investigate. I think of Sherlock Holmes when I think of this word. And it is in the present tense, the tense of ongoing action. This is not a casual inspection. This is not a one-time fact check. Daily they were sifting. Daily they were investigating. Daily they were contemplating. They were chewing on the Scriptures daily to discover the truth — to see if these things were so.
I love this as a New Testament picture of meditation because it is so simple, so normal. No mystical strategies. No magical incantations. You do not need to cold plunge and do breath work. You do not need to pray in a circle or walk a labyrinth. You do not need — and I say this as kindly as I can — to wade into most Christian living sections, which are just full of extra stuff. The Bereans did not have any of that. They just had open hearts, open minds, and a willingness to chew, to think, to do the work. Just careful, thoughtful, consistent, daily consideration of the Word. That is something we can do, church.
Next week we begin our third summer of studying the Psalms. For eight weeks we are going to immerse ourselves in the prayers and worship of ancient Israel, and I am praying that this series on the disciplines will equip and empower us to engage with those Psalms differently than we have before. I have chosen Psalms that are deeply connected to many of the disciplines we have already looked at together.
So I want to take a minute and meditate with you — or at least in front of you — on a fragment of a Psalm. I know it is not polite to chew with your mouth open, but that is exactly what I want to do right now. I want to show you a glimpse of what slow, thoughtful reflection on Scripture can look like. I have chosen the opening phrase of Psalm 23 because it is so well known:
1a The Lord is my shepherd;
How often do we come to a text and just move on? "The Lord is my shepherd — what does it say next?" But meditation is thoughtful and slow. We keep coming back to it over and over, allowing it to impact us.
One of my favorite ways to do that is simply to sit with each word. "The Lord." Not a lord. Not many lords. The Lord — God's covenant name. The God who has revealed Himself not just in creation, but who has created a people for Himself and entered into covenant with them to bring about the restoration of mankind. The Lord who spoke everything into existence. That is who we are talking about. I get far too casual with God sometimes. I love the imminence of God — I love that Jesus came in flesh and was one of us. But I do not want imminence without transcendence — the otherness of God, the vastness of God, the "I am clearly not that" of God. So we enter this Psalm thinking about the God who rescued His people from Egypt, who showed up as a cloud of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, who parted the seas, who established His people, and who has promised an end to sin and death. And I am two words in and I could spend hours allowing my heart and mind to reflect on who God is.
Then, who is this covenant God to me? And I start thinking about how God called me — kicking and screaming. I think about the times over and over again when God has graciously disciplined me and when He has graciously supplied what I did not deserve.
"The Lord is." Not might be. Not could be. Certainly not should be. Those of you who grew up in guilt-based, legalistic systems — that is how we tend to read this. But this is not a conditional statement. It is a declaration. The God who speaks existence into reality — is. Present tense. Right now.
"My." Not just some holy person's God. Not the God of some perfect person — and I have been looking for one of those all my life; only found one, and His name is Jesus. The Lord is mine. Think of Psalm 8: "What is man that You even pay attention to us?" But the God — not the small, weak, mean, pathetic God our culture imagines, but the biblically robust, powerful, sovereign, all-knowing, all-present, all-loving Creator of everything that exists — is my shepherd.
He is my shepherd. Now I can spend a long time thinking about shepherds. I do not always like to, because shepherds watch sheep, and sheep are dumb — and I am dumb, and I need one. But that is honestly where my heart and mind go. Lord, how do I need to be shepherded?
Here is this incredible declaration: the God who exists and creates all existence is my shepherd. And I need a shepherd. You need a shepherd. We need a shepherd. It is too easy to sit here thinking about your husband or your wife or your kids and how they need a shepherd — but that is their meditation. This is yours. You need a shepherd. You need one who sees you as you are, who knows you and still loves you. You need one who guides you with a staff to good water and pasture. You need one who disciplines you with a crook. You need a shepherd who creates safety and fights enemies for you, because you are just a sheep and the enemy is a lion. So you need a shepherd.
And somewhere in that process — maybe some of you got a little glimpse of it just now — you go from thinking about God as a shepherd to starting to experience Him as one. Because we do not study to know the words. We meditate to know the God who spoke them, who stands behind them, who makes them reality. We meditate to get to Him. He is the goal.
So let me close this morning with one more important text from Paul in Ephesians chapter 3:
14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16 that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Oh, church — this passage is so rich. You have no idea how badly I want to spend four or five hours unpacking it with you this morning. Unfortunately, that does not get to happen today, but I want to point out a couple of really important things.
First, Paul prays for an interior work of the Spirit for the Ephesians. "According to the riches of His glory, He may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being." He is praying for God's transformation to take place inside out. In other words, the transformation we are looking for and longing for is not something we can accomplish or pull off on our own. God has to do it. So, Paul is constantly praying for the Ephesians that God would do in them what only God can do in them.
Second, he prays for Christ to move in — to dwell, to stay within them. Remember, we were not made to visit God. We were not made to see God for a little bit and then go off and do something else on our own. We were made for constant communion with the God who made us for Himself. You are not made to visit God. You are made to dwell with God. So Paul prays that the Ephesians would experience the dwelling of Christ in their hearts through faith.
Now, the word here for dwell in the Greek is κατοικέω — katoikeō — the word for a permanent residence, to live in a place as a permanent resident, to settle, to inhabit (BDAG). It is not the word for a temporary stay but for permanent residence. And what is so cool about this in the context of Ephesians is that if you go back to chapter 2, Paul is talking to these Ephesians who are Gentiles who have come to faith, and he describes them before the gospel — before Christ dwelt in their hearts. He calls them aliens and strangers, outsiders who did not belong. But now, because of the work of the gospel, they are insiders — and even more, Christ has come to permanently dwell within them. Paul is not praying that this will happen. He is praying that they will experience the power of that having already happened.
Third — and this is so freeing — he prays that they would be rooted and grounded in love. The word for rooted is ῥιζόω — rhizoō — to cause to take root, to establish, to ground firmly (BDAG). The form here is the perfect passive participle — ἐρριζωμένοι — errizōmenoi — and it is passive, meaning this is being done to you, not by you. Paul is not saying, "I need you to root yourself in the love of God." He is saying, "I am praying that you open your eyes to the reality that Christ now dwells permanently within you." The dwelling of Christ in our hearts roots us in His love. The Spirit does the rooting.
So like all the other disciplines in this series, meditation does not produce the transformation — it connects us to the life of God that transforms us. The discipline prepares the soil. You show up day after day with open hands. You chew the cud of the Word, and the Spirit does, underneath the surface, the slow growing-down of roots that you cannot see and sometimes cannot feel and certainly cannot manufacture.
And that is the honest word for everyone who has ever done this faithfully and felt like nothing was happening. The tree does not feel its roots growing. There is no morning you look down and watch them spread. The growth is underground — hidden, slow. You never hear a fruit tree grunt to produce fruit. It is simply the result of a natural process. The tree is rooted, it is slowly drawing its nutrients, the sun is shining, it has the water it needs, and over time, gradually, the fruit begins to manifest — not because the tree tried really hard to make it happen, but because that is the natural process God has designed. And church, that is what God has for us. We have got to stay in the soil. We have to keep returning to the same ground, season after season, while the Spirit does what only the Spirit can do.
And finally, look at how Paul ends this thought in verse 19:
19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
"Filled” once again is in the passive. You do not fill yourselves. The Spirit does the filling. Our role, our participation, is to encounter the Word in the text, in the natural revelation of creation, and in the Word made flesh.
So back to the door analogy. We do not study the door to describe it. Doors are meant to be entered, meant to be walked through. The Scriptures are the door that opens to us the glory and beauty of the God who is with us and for us.
I started this series with a quote from Irenaeus, one of the early church fathers:
The glory of God is a man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God.
We become what we behold. We are shaped by what we serve. We resemble what we revere.
Meditation roots that transformation in our lives — the nature and character of God, focused by the mirrors of our lives on the vision of God. It is what allows the life of God to flow to and through us, making us more and more the images and imagers of God we were made to be.
So church, may this series on the disciplines not be a puffing up — a useful but ultimately useless collection of information about spiritual practices. May it be for each of us an invitation into the life we were created for. The vision of God is the life of man. May we behold Him that we may become like Him.
We have been given a priceless and precious gift in the Word — not because of what it is in itself, but because of who it reveals, and because when God speaks, life happens. So get in the Word. And do not do it the way your flesh and culture want you to — more, more, more, got to get it right, got to do more. Get into the Word to discover the God who speaks. That is what it is for. Let it reveal to you the God who made you for communion with Himself — the God who is love, the God who is still speaking today.
8 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9 What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
Amen and amen.
Scripture in this sermon
Read aloud in the sermon