This will be the last post on Spiritual disciplines, as my purpose was to discuss Christian meditation and, although Whitney provided 17 examples of meditation, I am posting what I believe the most useful.
I highly recommend adding the book to your Christian library, see post 5 for the table of contents. There is much more useful information in this book; that is, Whitney provided information about the various aspects of the process of sanctification that all growing Christians need to understand.
You can either fumble along, struggling to identify each thing that you need to incorporate into your Christian life, or you can read Whitney and benefit by his having identified these necessary things, shortening the process of your struggle.
For example, one form of meditation I am going to present from his book in this post, is something that the Holy Spirit obviously worked into my Christian mindset while I was studying the beatitudes.
Without realizing I was practicing a form of meditation, I was deepening my understanding of the text and examining my life as it was made apparent to me during my Christian struggle: that is, in terms of the first beatitude, poverty of spirit; I kept observing my struggle and assessing it in terms of whether I was being made poor in spirit. And whether I was mourning my sin….
This type of meditation, which kind of naturally unfolded as I sought to understand the text and made self-observations, enabled me to view my walk in terms of scripture.
All of a sudden one day, I realized the benefit of it as I observed my status, having just fallen into sin, I began to have critical thoughts about myself and my progress; but as I thought more deeply about my situation, I realized that I had a long way to go to be made poor in spirit. Yet, this very instance of falling into sin was an instance of the very thing that could lead me towards that biblical state of poverty of spirit.
Being there felt emotionally painful. As I thought about the pain, I realized that it was emotional pain that derived from my pride being beaten down. And thinking further on the matter (as these instances provided me opportunity – daily), I realized that it is God the Holy Spirit that applies the benefits of Christ; Christ was meek and lowly. To get to meekness, one must know poverty of spirit and mourning for sin, the first two beatitudes. The third is meekness.
That is, one cannot jump straight to meekness or mercy. The process is a gradual one that is orderly. It seems to me that the first two beatitudes are the root of all the rest.
All of the above came to me as I meditated on the beatitudes and observed my life, and abided in God’s appointed means of grace (reading the word, praying, hearing the gospel preached, the Lord’s Supper, and fellowship around the word).
Thinking on the beatitudes, observing my daily life, assessing it in terms of God’s word (the beatitudes in this case), and making adjustments based on what I was learning, became kind of habitual. That is a vast improvement over self-condemnation only.
I judge myself in that I rightly identify sin as much as possible; I look for the motives that keep me sinning. I ask God to help me love Him more than my sin, and so on.
If I merely criticized myself, ignored the sin, re-defined the sin…then no progress would be made. I could never gain self-understanding by doing those things that Christians typically do.
Self-understanding is essential if one is ever to see himself as God’s word describes him; abiding in God’s means of grace is also essential….
To summarize, by abiding in God’s appointed means of grace, I was apparently given a desire to deeply understand the beatitudes and to examine my life in terms of them. And as a result, I grew in self-understanding (which increased my poverty of spirit, mourning for sin…).
One last, extremely important observation I have frequently come to as I go through the above meditation process, especially at times of sinning; is that none of the above would be possible if I denied my sin.
An honest acknowledging of sin, owning it as your own, confessing, repenting of it; asking for God’s enablement to do those things…such things are the gains of dealing with sin.
Furthermore, the sin problem is foundational. God continually states that in scripture and if you play off your sin, you haven’t started the Christian race / walk.
A related point, one which everyone I mentioned this point to has been perplexed or rejected the idea, is that as a Christian matures, he will see his sins much more clearly, and therefore, increasingly know poverty of spirit better. I have posted several wonderful, biblical pastors stating that very thing; yet it is unknown today in Christianity. I have learned it from the Holy Spirit as He has been humbling me.
(At the end of this post, I recommend a few other posts that further explain the points I just made.)
From Whitney’s Book, what I described above and began doing naturally; and Whitney’s #5 and his #16 exhibit many parallels to my process:
Meditation Method #5: Look for Applications of the Text
The outcome of meditation should be application. Like chewing without swallowing, so meditation is incomplete without some type of application. This is so important that the entire next section of this chapter is devoted to applying God’s Word. So ask yourself, “How am I to respond to this text? What would God have me to do as a result of my encounter with this part of His Word? The Bible tells us to ‘be doers of the word’ (James 1:22); how then should I do this portion of it? Is there something to start, to stop, to confess, to pray about, to believe, to say to someone?” If you’ll say to yourself, “I will not close my Bible until I know at least one thing the Lord wants me to do with this verse,” you’ll meditate.
Meditation Method #16: Ask How the Text Speaks to Your Current Issue or Question
Suppose the current issue in your life is financial. After you have completed your Bible reading, review what you’ve read and search for any texts that address or might apply to finances. Then consider what the text says, perhaps praying through the text or using one of the previous methods to meditate further. If the immediate concern in your life relates to your family, look for those verses that would have something to say about relationships. If you are wrestling with a persistent question, go back over all you’ve read in the past few minutes and scan it for something the Holy Spirit might illumine in relation to the answer. When you ask the Author of Scripture, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18), you may be surprised by the texts He uses to give you insight, understanding, or application regarding your issue or question.
[My above issues were not financial, but form #16, of meditation partially describes how I came to deal with my problem.]
And the final type of meditation I am posting, of the 17 types Whitney described,
Meditation Method #15: Find a Link or Common Thread Between All the Paragraphs or Chapters You Read
If you read one chapter and it has, say, three paragraphs, then search for a connection between all three. In Luke 15, for example, there is a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son. All are found, and there is rejoicing. In Mark 5 we read of Jesus demonstrating His divinity by exercising authority over the spiritual realm, over illness, and over death. If you read from more than one book of the Bible, look for a common thread in all that you read. Can you, for instance, see Jesus in the various chapters of your reading? Or how does each relate to the gospel? Or how would each speak to the “current crisis” in your life? You may eventually conclude from one or more of the chapters you’ve read that you can’t see any application whatsoever to your current crisis. But even when that’s so, there’s profit in mentally scouring the Scriptures, examining and reflecting on them in a way that’s far more thoughtful than mere reading.
Whitney, Donald S.. Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (pp. 65-67). The Navigators. Kindle Edition.
For other related posts, that further explain meditation: self-observation / assessment; planning to deal with sin; journaling to identify sin and plan obedience (the ESV study Bible intro to Proverbs, describes the man that plans to obey as the Prudent man, a different aspect of the Wise man) see Categories: Jonathan Edwards. The post titles are 1-3 “A glimpse into the Spiritual Journey of Jonathan Edwards.