In other words: capture the mind, capture the man. Whatever really shapes a man’s thinking shapes his life” ( Psalms 1–72, 64). Kidner writes of Psalm 1, “The mind was the first bastion to defend, in verse 1, and is treated as the key to the whole man. In a world like ours, godly meditation is a form of resistance, a retaking and renewing of a mind that once rebelled against God. We will meditate one way or another, and if not on God’s words, then on words supplied by our flesh, the world, or the devil. The blessed man meditates so do the godless nations so does everyone else. Strikingly, as Derek Kidner observes, the Hebrew word for plot here is the same as the word for meditate in Psalm 1:2. Psalm 2, which records the futile fury of unbelievers against God’s anointed king, begins, “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?” (Psalm 2:1). “Biblical meditation calls for thought and feeling more than posture and breathing.” The first verse of the next psalm, however, offers another compelling reason. Meditation makes us strong and fruitful as trees fed by rivers (Psalm 1:3). Meditation protects us from the fate of the wicked (Psalm 1:1, 5). Psalm 1 has already given us several reasons to meditate: Meditation warms and delights our hearts (Psalm 1:2). No wonder he is “blessed” (Psalm 1:1), supremely happy in the God who speaks such wonderful words. The truth has become big and sweet to him, crowding out the alternative delights flanking him on every side (Psalm 1:1).įinally, having worked the truth out in his mind and into his heart, the truth works itself out in his life, setting him on a path of spiritual prospering that is the prelude to a happy judgment day (Psalm 1:4–6). He not only understands God’s word, but relishes it: “His delight is in the law of the Lord” (Psalm 1:2). He also thinks the truth in, pressing it into his soul until Scripture becomes the sap running through every limb (Psalm 1:3). He thinks and thinks, at specific times and also “day and night” (Psalm 1:2), bending his energies toward understanding God’s revealed truth. Here, the psalmist thinks the truth out, filling his mind with “the law of the Lord” rather than “the counsel of the wicked” (Psalm 1:1–2). ![]() Keller’s description finds classic expression in Psalm 1, Scripture’s preeminent passage on meditation. Meditation is thinking a truth out and then thinking a truth in until its ideas become “big” and “sweet,” moving and affecting, and until the reality of God is sensed upon the heart. Tim Keller, summarizing John Owen, offers a concise and helpful description of meditation: And most importantly, biblical meditation focuses not on our breath but on God’s: we give ourselves, with rigorous reflection, to his breathed-out word, until our hearts begin to warm. Biblical meditation, however, calls for thought and feeling more than posture and breathing. The mind is engaged, but not particularly active. In common forms of meditation today, people sit or kneel for a set time, paying attention to inhaling and exhaling breath. What do we do when our hearts grow cold? Many Christians of old, themselves burning and shining lamps, would advise us not only to read God’s word, and not only to pray God’s word, but also to slow down, take a deep breath, and meditate on God’s word. We wake up ashen, needy for the Spirit to breathe on us again. Our hearts, like campfires untended, cool overnight. ![]() Yet we also know what it feels like for the fire to burn low, for a coldness to settle over a heart once aflame. We belong to the fellowship of burning hearts. ![]() We are those who walk on the Emmaus road, our souls catching fire as Christ opens, again and again, the Scriptures that speak of him (Luke 24:32). Though our affections rise and fall, and our zeal boils hotter on some days than others, coldness is not the Christian’s heritage. In Christ, God made our hearts to burn for him.
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