Meditating on God and His Word

To meditate on God and His Word is to calmly and quietly fix the mind upon the great fact of God and His Word until that fact has time to enter the mind and pervade it with its influence. Meditation is the quiet thinking, the applying of the mind attentively to the great truths of the Bible and the Author of it. We must meditate on God’s law that we might come to know it as we should, and then to love it, and then to practice it. No one can live a holy life without serious and frequent reflection of the mind upon the truths of our great salvation and the love of God. You may be able to live a good moral life; you might have an exterior life good enough to hold the confidence of man, but holy living comes from the living Word of God hidden in the heart. Holy living is not only the refraining from doing the wrong and the doing of the right, but it is the refraining from doing the wrong from an inward principle of holy hatred of the wrong inwrought in the heart by the Holy Spirit, and a doing of the right in the life and holiness of God. It is more than the good deeds done by human life; it is good deeds done by the life of God in the human life. There is a vast difference. There is danger, great danger, in holiness professors attending to the outward life to the neglect of the inward life. So long as they do not do anything wrong, and so long as they do things that are right they think themselves safe. We can live good lives and, like the church at Ephesus, lose the love of God out of the soul. Right living may be only man in action; holy living is God in action. Meditation is positively necessary to the keeping of God in the life.

Meditation is the holding of Bible truths in the mind until the virtue is steeped out of them and enters the mind and heart. It means to be in the midst of a matter, to have it in your very center. You need not fear losing yourself in meditation on the law of God. The more fully you lose yourself in meditation on God the more you will be like Him. You cannot love Christ very deeply without meditation. You cannot become strong or pure or deep in God without letting the mind dwell lovingly on Him.

Dear Christian reader, do you meditate? Do you go apart each day and with the mind wholly detached from every thing of earth, fix it quietly, calmly on God and some portion of His Word? Do you become lost to every thing of earth in the loving thought of God?

“There is a blest pavilion,
A sacred inner court,
The place of God’s own dwelling
With all the world shut out.
Oh, holy resting place!
Oh, calm and pure retreat!
Where God unveils His face,
And life is only sweet.”*

Do you enter into this holy place with the world shut out and there commune with God, there think of His love and the great plan of salvation until your soul is aflame with heavenly love and light and peace making it the easiest thing in the world to come out and practice the wonderful truths of salvation? If you will meditate on the theme of salvation as you should, life will become sweet and the truths of salvation will naturally live themselves out in you. But the question is: do you meditate? Very, very few of you do. Oh, how can we help you? Will you not spend fifteen minutes twice a day to deep, profound thought of God? We beg of you to do it. Will you not do it for your soul’s sake and for Jesus’ sake? If you do not, there will be things getting into your life that ought not to be there. There will be a little too much talk, a little restlessness and impatience, a little fret and worry, a burdening of the cares of this life, and perhaps bits of worldliness will get in and you will not know it, and you may go to some places where Jesus really would not go. But, oh, beloved, if you will practice meditating on God and His law day and night, there will be a holy flame enkindled in your soul and such heavenly sweetness and peace that the cares of this life, and fret and worry will no more light on you than flies on a heated furnace.

There are many preachers and thousands of people professing holiness that talk beautifully about meditation, saying what a blessed and glorious thing it is, and yet they do not practice it. My dear reader, you must do more than talk, and more than read this and say it is good and true. You must meditate in all that the word means. Meditation brings God into the soul and causes you to live holy in every act of life.