Meditation – JOY LIKE SWORDS

This Table is Essential – Communion Meditation

In Luke’s account of the Last Supper, he tells us that:

And when the hour came, [Jesus] reclined at table, and the apostles with him. And [Jesus] said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.

As much as he didn’t want to suffer, he still looked forward with eager expectation to have this meal with his disciples. And I have to tell you that I have earnestly desired to eat this meal with you all.

For a while, we suspended our coming to this table—it wasn’t out of disobedience to the Lord, but because of our love for one another. But over the past few months, as this table has been empty, I have often times felt the urgency, the eagerness, and even the necessity of coming back to this table.

The Lord’s table is as mandated for Christians as it is forbidden for non-Christians. Even though receiving the body and blood of Christ symbolized in this bread and cup doesn’t justify you, it is nonetheless, essential. If we want to pursue holiness in our church, this table is indispensable.

This bread and this cup call out to Jesus’ disciples, saying come and die to sin, come and live to righteousness. It calls us to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God. It calls those at the table to watch out for the spiritual well-being of those sitting next to them.

So, come and welcome to Christ.

Communion Meditation: Seated at the Table

We do quite a bit of standing and sitting in our service. And I want you to know that we do it all for a reason.

Earlier in the service we all stood to hear an assurance of pardon. Think about what’s happening at that moment of the service. We’ve just confessed sin. We’ve come, as it were, into the courtroom of the cosmic judge and we’ve pleaded guilty to all the charges of breaking his law. And once guilt has been established in court, the defendant stands. We stand in order to hear the verdict of the judge.

Two things never change in God’s courtroom—our plea is always guilty—and God’s verdict in Christ is always that we’re pardoned if and only if we’ve placed our faith in him.

But here, at Communion we always receive the bread and the cup seated. Why don’t we stand for communion? It seems like a solemn enough time. Wouldn’t it be better to stand? In short, no it wouldn’t. We don’t stand as we come to this table for the same reason that we don’t stand at Christmas dinner.

You’ve already stood and heard your sins forgiven. Now you sit, as a member of the judge’s family. He’s come down from the stand and taken his seat at the head of the table. And, this table is solemn only because it’s a shadow of the true table of joy and feasting in the coming kingdom.

This table is for sinners—but it is for repentant sinners who have come to lay their sins on Jesus by faith. If you have done that—then sit and enjoy the feast that Christ has prepared for you. And know that after a lifetime of eating only a cracker and a sip of juice—one day you will sit and eat and drink to your heart’s content.

So come, and welcome to the table of the king.

Exhortation: Disruptive Silence

EXHORTATION

Psalm 62:5 says:

For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence,

for my hope is from him.

As Christians in America, our faith runs the risk of being colored and shaded by the values of the culture we inhabit. If culture loves excess, the unconscious church will value self-indulgence. If culture worships success, a blind church will begin promoting growth and numbers more than holiness and true proclamation.

Our culture is obsessed with noise and busyness. The apps on our phones constantly ding, flash notifications, and vibrate. The watch on our wrist begs to show us texts, our heart rate, and the current state of the Dow Jones. We scroll down the social media rabbit hole flicking from a political article to pictures of our cousins, to a viral video about why Pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza. It doesn’t, by the way. Yesterday was National Ice Cream Sunday day, today is National Mac N Cheese Day and tomorrow will be National Tapioca Pudding day.

Our culture has gladly given up the ability and responsibility to sit in silence and deeply reflect on what matters most. Everything in our culture seeks to distract us. It seeks to prevent us from giving our full attention to what matters most.

And into this distracted world, Psalm 62 commands: For God alone, O my soul, wait… in… silence.

Christians, and the churches they belong to combat distraction through cultivating disruptive silence. We bring our phones under the mastery of Jesus Christ and his gospel. We submit our smartwatches and surrender our social media addictions to the Creator King.

In our gathered worship we limit the use of our screens and videos. We obey Psalm 62 several times through scheduled silence. We force our hearts, which are so terrified of the emptiness silence might reveal to come to grips with who we really are so that God can remake us in the gospel of Jesus.

In this age of noise, one of the greatest ways you can take a stand is by cultivating moments of silence before your God.

This reminds us of our need to confess our sin, so let’s bow in prayer now.

CONFESSION

Our Father,

You are great, and your throne is exalted. In your hands are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks are yours as well. You made the sea and you formed the dry land with your hand. In response to your majesty, we come and worship. We bow down. We kneel before the Lord, our God, our maker.

We know that your majesty demands silence, yet we live in a world of noise. Your beauty commands our gaze, but our eyes wander. Father, we live in a distracted world. We rarely break away from our digital routines to enjoy silence before you. We impulsively open our phones, but we neglect your Word. We fill up our days with busyness and crowd out prayer. Indeed, Father, we suppress the truth in unrighteous distractions.

Lord God, we are sinners. And you know all of our sin. Nothing is hidden from you. We know that you are the forgiving God and so we ask that you would bring to mind anything we have not yet made right with you so that we might do so.

We confess our individual sin to you now. Hear our prayers.

We ask all this in the mighty name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Please rise for the assurance of pardon.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

The Lord is merciful and gracious,

slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

He will not always chide,

nor will he keep his anger forever.

He does not deal with us according to our sins,

nor repay us according to our iniquities.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth,

so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;

as far as the east is from the west,

so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

Psalm 103:8-12

If you have placed your faith in Christ, then in Christ your transgressions have been removed from you, and your sin is forgiven.

Getting into Narnia

“No,” he said, “I don’t think it will be any good trying to go back through the wardrobe door to get the coats. You won’t get into Narnia again by that route… Eh? What’s that? Yes, of course you’ll get back to Narnia again some day. Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it.” -The Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

You must strike a difficult balance in your devotion to God. Psalm 1 tells us to meditate upon God’s Word day and night. In other words, the devotional life depends upon a routine method of experiencing God: meditation. On the other hand we know that our encounters with God never happen exactly alike.

One evening I meditate and the Spirit speaks. The next morning my heart is cold, cracked, and callused. Almost nothing has happened. I’ve only slept. How could I sense God’s love so deeply and 9 hours later feel a million miles from him?

One Sunday the prayers and songs of the church break my heart and drown my sin in grace. Next week I worship, but there’s a height or depth my heart isn’t reaching as it did before; or the effort required seems to have doubled.

You never get into Narnia the same way twice. When the Spirit of God gives you a moment of piercing clarity and assurance just be in the moment. Don’t try to remember how you got to that moment. Don’t try and replicate the moment later. It won’t work. Do your daily meditation as the Scripture commands and wait. Gather with the church to sing, pray, and wait. God’s presence, the high assurance, only comes by his grace, not our effort.

Equip Notes on Meditation

Last month I taught at a discipleship event on the topic of meditation. Below is a link to a PDF of my slides from the event. I admitted freely in the talk that I’m indebted to Tim Keller for his thoughts and research on the subject. Consider going to his ministry resource site, gospelinlife.com, and purchasing his series on meditation. Don’t be surprised when you hear anything that sounds familiar.

Meditation

Sensing the Scriptures

I’ve had an ongoing conversation with a handful of church members about meditation on the Scriptures. We’ve been talking about how we practice meditation, what it is, and how we can increase in the blessing it brings to us. We all agree, as do many Christians throughout history, that meditation moves from merely reasoning the words of Scriptures towards sensing the words.

Just as we have 5 physical senses, taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing that we use to live in and experience the world around us, inwardly our imaginations possess those same qualities.

If I asked you to think about your mother’s voice you can hear it. She doesn’t have to be in the room with you, but you hear her speaking. Her voices lives inside you.
Remember, when as a kid, you walked barefoot outside in the height of Summer? You’re running down the line of woods near house and the sweetness of honeysuckle washes over you. Following your nose, you locate the vine overflowing with white and butter-yellow blossoms. Carefully pulling the stem, that one drop of nectar hits your taste buds.

In meditation we imaginatively use our senses, much like we do in remembering, in order to contact with and hear the text.

In Bible study we de-contextualize and isolate texts. We dissect words, relationships, structure, and meaning. We stand over and above the text as interpreter. We bring our questions to the Bible ask it to answer us. We reason with the text. Our rational capacities engage, and the result is knowledge and understanding.

In meditation we see, taste, touch, smell, and listen to Scripture. We sense it. The Word becomes our guide as we sit under and beneath it. We don’t ask it questions, as much as it addresses us and calls us to answer. We sense the text. We descend with the mind, down into the heart. We laugh, smile, cry, gasp, and wonder. Truth becomes light. Law becomes pain. Grace issues forth into song.

Jonathan Edwards left us an example of what it means to sense the Scriptures:

I very frequently used to retire into a solitary place, on the banks of Hudson’s River, at some distance from the city, for contemplation on divine things and secret converse with God: and had many sweet hours there. I had then, and at other times, the greatest delight in the holy scriptures. Oftentimes in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart. I felt a harmony between something in my heart, and those sweet and powerful words. I seemed often to see so much light exhibited by every sentence, and such a refreshing food communicated, that I could not get along in reading; often dwelling long on one sentence, to see the wonders contained in it; and yet almost every sentence seemed to be full of wonders.

He’s reading the Bible, but he’s being touched, and handled. Looking at words on a page he senses his interior person pulsing with harmonic vibration in response to the Word. The words taste sweet, yet in them he also submits to a superior strength pressing against him. Every sentence deserves the attention to detail given to a mouthful of wine, wonders beyond wonders available to the patient and perceptive. Meditation is participation in the living world of the text.

How to Meditate: Luther’s Garland Prayer

5 centuries ago Martin Luther’s barber asked him how to pray. Luther responded with a 40 page letter entitled A Simple Way to Pray that has been read and practiced by Christians ever since. Last night I shared one of Luther’s methods for meditating on God’s word with our church. It’s called garland prayer.

As a garland is made by intertwining multiple strands of greenery, Luther teaches us to weave a 4 strand prayer. Here’s a simplified, and somewhat modified, outline of Luther’s method:

1. Find a Quiet Regular Place for Morning and Evening Prayer

First, when I feel that I have become cool and joyless in prayer because of other tasks or thoughts (for the flesh and the devil always impede and obstruct prayer), I take my little psalter, hurry to my room,

It is a good thing to let prayer be the first business of the morning and the last at night. Guard yourself carefully against those false, deluding ideas which tell you, “Wait a little while. I will pray in an hour; first I must attend to this or that.” Such thoughts get you away from prayer into other affairs which so hold your attention and involve you that nothing comes of prayer for that day.

2. Begin with a Prayer of Acknowledgement

… kneel or stand with your hands folded and your eyes toward heaven and speak or think as briefly as you can:

O heavenly Father, dear God, I am a poor unworthy sinner. I do not deserve to raise my eyes or hands toward You or to pray. But because You have commanded us all to pray and have promised to hear us and through Your dear Son, Jesus Christ, have taught us both how and what to pray, I come to You in obedience to Your Word, trusting in Your gracious promises. I pray in the name of my Lord Jesus Christ together with all Your saints and Christians on earth as He has taught us

I’ll typically begin my time of reading and meditation by echoing this prayer. I am usually sitting and I open my hands. There’s nothing super spiritual about opening my palms to God. It’s just a cue to my heart that I am opening myself up to receive from God whatever he chooses to give me.

3. Read Slowly

as time permits, I say quietly to myself and word-for-word the Lord’s Prayer, Ten Commandments, the Creed, and, if I have time, some words of Christ or of Paul, or some psalms, just as a child might do.

This is where meditation begins. You must read slowly, word for word. And do not just read. Taste. See. Hear. Meditation is sensing with the mind. Theophan the Recluse defined prayer and meditation like this, “To meditate is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever present all seeing, within you.” George Muller encouraged us to not let our Bible reading become like water flowing through a pipe.

4. Practice Garland Prayer

I divide each commandment into four parts, thereby fashioning a garland of four strands. That is, I think of each commandment as first, instruction, which is really what it is intended to be and consider what the Lord God demands of me so earnestly. Second, I turn it into a thanksgiving; third, a confession; and fourth, a prayer.

Luther applies the garland concept specifically to the Ten Commandments, but it can be applied to any passage. When you read the passage ask two simple questions to find the instruction:

What does this teach me about God/Christ?
What does this say about who I am or who I should be?

Here’s an example of taking a short passage and practicing the garland method:

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Instruction: Our Father. Jesus doesn’t say, “My Father.” He says, “Our.” Now what does that mean? It means that we aren’t just saved as individuals. We’re saved into a family. We have brothers and sisters in Christ.

Thanksgiving: Thank you God, that you’ve given me a family. I don’t have to be alone in this world because of what you’ve done!

Confession: Forgive me God, some of my brothers and sisters irritate me. I don’t like being around them, and I certainly don’t feel like loving them in your name. Jesus died for me just as much as them. Forgive me.

Supplication: Make me more aware and thankful for my family in you. Change my heart towards that family member I can’t stand. Give me an opportunity to serve them in love

5. When Your Heart Begins to Flood with Goodness, Stop. Do Not Move On.

If such an abundance of good thoughts comes to us we ought to disregard the other petitions, make room for such thoughts, listen in silence, and under no circumstances obstruct them. The Holy Spirit Himself preaches here, and one word of His sermon is far better than a thousand of our prayers.

6. Proceed with Vocal Prayer

Having devoted yourself to meditating on God’s Word, then move on to normal, vocal prayer. Pray through your requests.

When you practice this method your Bible reading will cease being like water running through a pipe.

What are Spiritual Disciplines?

Growing up as a left handed person can be a real challenge. At times it feels as if everything in the world is made for right handed people. Have you righties noticed that your desks in school had an extended support for your forearm when you write? Lefties don’t have that. Have you ever realized that doors typically open toward your right? The English language, written from left to right, means that left handed people smudge ink or graphite onto their hand. Many left handed people are never taught to write properly, and for most of my life I had the ugliest handwriting.

About two years ago I was finally sick of my “chicken scratch” thank you cards and decided to improve my penmanship. In order to do that I had to practice handwriting disciplines. I’d print off these sheets from the internet on how to properly form letters. Whenever I had five or ten minutes to spare I’d pull out a sheet and slowly start writing. Let me tell you, when I first started it was atrocious. I couldn’t even follow a dotted line on paper. It looked about the same as if my 2 year old tried it.

But slowly, over time, my writing became comfortable. I could trace the exact movement of the line with fluidity. I didn’t have to exert nearly as much effort to see results. And even though my handwriting is far better now, I’ve noticed that if I go for any period of time without coming back to those sheets my handwriting suffers. I make slight changes. I don’t form the letters exactly right. A little sloppiness creeps into my thank you notes.

Now, the spiritual disciplines are for your spiritual growth what those handwriting sheets are for my penmanship.

Donald Whitney, in his Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, says:

The Spiritual Disciplines are those personal and corporate disciplines that promote spiritual growth. They are the habits of devotion and experiential Christianity that have been practiced by the people of God since biblical times.

Just as there are disciplines that help you develop mentally and physically there are disciplines that God’s people have recognized help develop and mature our spiritual life. Just like my hand didn’t naturally know how to form letters properly our fallen souls don’t naturally know how to properly devote ourselves to God and experience his life on an ongoing basis. Christian’s throughout the centuries have realized this and devoted themselves to various practices designed to foster spiritual life. Below is a list I have adapted from Kenneth Boa’s book Conformed to His Image.

Solitude and Silence
Prayer
Journaling/Reflection
Bible Reading and Study
Meditation
Fasting
Chastity
Secrecy
Confession
Fellowship
Simplicity/Stewardship/Sacrifice
Corporate Worship
Service
Witness

Disciplined spirituality makes a concerted effort at shaping the affections of the heart and the will towards love for God and obedience to his Word. These practices train the soul towards what it does not do naturally. I’m sure you probably observe a few of these disciplines and have thought about some of the others. In future posts I’ll fill out more detail for the individual disciplines, but for now I’d love to hear about your experience with the spiritual disciplines, what books have helped you understand/practice them etc.