Spiritual Practices: Meditation and Contemplation

Well, today we're going to be taking a look at another practice today.

We also are set up in our tables.

If you've not been here before, you've kind of walked in.

We're going to have a shortened sermon.

Can I say hallelujah?

Shortened sermon, and then we're going to discuss and practice some of this.

We're going to be taking a look today at meditation as a spiritual practice.

You know, when you hear the term meditation, it can mean very different things to different people.

And in fact, many different religions or many different pathways or many different things have been talked about what meditation is.

I know for me, when I started years ago, whenever I thought of meditation, it was really something that you do kind of on a pillow, you know what I mean, where you have like your fingers out and you do smoke or incense under that, like an eastern style of meditation.

But really, this idea of meditating on God's word and meditation is a deeply spiritual practice that is all throughout Judaism and Christianity.

It's something that's incredibly important for us to do.

In fact, even today, there's this newfound appreciation for meditation.

You see this almost this Western meditation that divorces meditation from a spiritual practice or from God and says, even if you're an atheist, you don't believe in God or anything else, meditating is something that's good for you to do for your brain.

In fact, people who meditate, they can do brain scans, and they see that as you meditate and as you train your brain, your brain has new pathways, and your brain will begin to shrink the areas of your brain that hold stress and anxiety, and the areas of your brain that have self-awareness will begin to grow.

So we even see that God has created just the way that He's created our body.

We are made to meditate and to reflect on God.

So today we're gonna take a look at what does the Bible talk about meditation in this practice?

Is this something that we should be doing?

The answer is yes.

It's something that we should be doing to draw closer to the Lord.

Meditation in the Bible is really a catch-all word.

We're gonna talk about two different expressions of meditation this morning.

I have a little slide here.

I don't know, this side of the room may not be able to see it, but I have a little slide here that talks about meditation at the very top is a catch-all word that describes different, really two predominantly different expressions of meditation.

On the left here, we have meditative prayer, and then on the right, contemplative prayer.

And so we're gonna take a look and talk about what does it mean to pray meditatively, a meditative prayer, and what does it mean to be contemplative?

This is something that we do a lot of the times in our spiritual practices, is that we'll have a catch-all word that meditation kind of means multiple different things to different people.

So this is something that will help us out.

Similar to like, if I were to say, like, hey, let's spend some time in prayer, there are many different ways to pray, right?

There are many different types of prayer.

Some prayers are just praying in the spirit.

You may pray for someone else, you may pray for yourself.

And so, or like worship is another way.

We worship through singing, we worship through giving, we worship through serving.

Many different ways.

And the similar, we meditate, or when we meditate, we can do it in two predominantly different ways that we're going to take a look at today.

But there's a very simple way to think about it is the one way when we talk about the meditative prayer, it's a picture of filling our minds and our hearts with God's word.

Just continually filling and you fill your mind.

Think of if your mind is empty, the meditative prayer, you fill your mind up.

And the other side, the contemplative side, is you rest in God's presence.

You try to turn your mind off.

So rather than spinning and running, you try to shut it off and just rest in the presence of God.

And you just experience.

It's a simple thing that we do.

This is something that is incredibly important for us to do.

It's in we live in society that is just nonstop all the time, moving and listening and to everything.

Have you ever done the thing where like you'll sit down for a moment and kind of catch your breath?

And like the first thing that I do is like, all right, now I'm gonna go ahead and pull out my phone because it's too silent.

I don't wanna, and sometimes we'll even joke about that.

Like, you know, there was for a while there was a thing where people were just sitting on an airplane with no magazine, nothing, no moving, and just sitting there.

And it was something that people are like, you're a serial killer if you do that, right?

If you just sit for an hour and just stare ahead.

But it's really this thing that it freaks us out, it kind of scares us.

The idea of just being alone with our thoughts and just alone for a second, even at the supermarket.

I was at the supermarket this week, and it's like people will be walking around looking at everything else, and then they'll stand in line, and almost like 100% of the people, once they stand, will then pull out their phone because it's just coming, I can't just sit with my thoughts in this one second.

But there's something about that.

When we are quiet before the Lord, we begin to notice what is going on in our hearts.

We begin to notice those areas where we're feeling anxiety.

What we're feeling anxiety about, where there's shame or disappointment.

And so this meditation, this practice that we do helps us to bring our true selves to God, not the distracted self, not the self that just says the quick lines, everything's good, but the lines that are honest.

And this is something that is very special to me.

Several years ago, maybe three, four years ago, I went on a had a week where Gina and I, we went to uh a center called the Center for Spiritual Renewal, and we it's in Virginia, and we just got a chance to just take a breather and a vacation and just be out in nature.

And I was meeting with one of the counselors there.

And usually a lot of times when pastors take a week off to go get counseling or go to this place, they're in crisis mode.

We were not in crisis mode, we just decided to go.

And he began to talk about this idea of contemplation and about praying.

So I've been on a journey the last several years of really trying to lean into this, which is very not me.

I am not, I am not quiet, right?

You guys know that.

I don't even think my mic is on today.

Like, I am not quiet, I am not somebody who like likes to rest and sit down, so it's been very different.

But I've been working really hard over several years.

A year and a half ago, Brains and I, we went to a spiritual retreat that just leaned into all of like the just mystical side of God and just that's that loving, nurturing side.

And it wasn't a retreat on meditation, but you spend a lot of the time in that space.

And so it's very special to me.

It's something if you come to my house, or when you come to my house next week for uh the chili cook-off, I have like a little patio that I built and a little space where I go outside and I meditate in the mornings, and it's just so special.

So I'm super excited to be able to talk about this today.

So the first practice we're gonna be talking about is this uh meditative practice here, the meditative prayer.

So, what this does is it helps us linger with God's word.

We see this throughout the Psalms.

In fact, the very first Psalm, Psalm 1, talks about this practice to meditate.

I'm gonna read it here.

It's so Psalm 1, verses 1 through 2.

Psalms 1:1–2

It says, Blessed is the one who does not walk in the step of the wicked, or stand in the way that sinners take, or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and night.

You get through the second verse in the book of Psalms when it starts bringing up meditation, how important this is, right?

You think this is important for us to do?

If like the second verse in the book of Psalms is telling us to meditate on something day and night.

So the Hebrew word meditate is really fascinating.

I love getting into the ancient languages.

The Hebrew word is haga, H-A-G-H, Haga, and it describes reciting or murmuring words and pondering them to yourself.

Almost like if you were to like chew something, if you were to get like a, you know, I don't know, a big like mouthful of like candy, like starbursts, and you're just kind of chewing it over, and it just takes kind of forever, and then halfway through your jaw starts hurting, and you know what I mean?

It's it meditation has this idea of pondering over and over and over again, reciting over.

What's fascinating, what I absolutely love, this word haga is used, Hebrew word for meditate is used in Isaiah 31 when describing a lion.

And you wouldn't think that lions meditate, but what it is what it is expressing in this idea is a lion who growls.

So it says that a lion will growl or a lion will meditate.

So you know, like you have dogs, right?

My my uh my dog Cosmo, he'll bark and kind of be very loud, but every once in a while you'll hear like a low growl.

And that's uh terminology you can say, like, so what are you trying to say?

Are we supposed to growl?

Is that what we're supposed to do?

You're not supposed to growl.

But growling implies this kind of low murmur, constantly kind of in the background idea.

That's what meditation, to Hebrew, when they hear the term meditation, and when it's talking about a lot of the places in the Psalms, is this low murmur where we take a word or phrase or law and we just constantly go over and over in our mind.

And this is very different than how a lot of the times I read scripture, because I'll tell you what, what I want to do is I want to like get through it.

I'm like, I got, all right, we've got to read through the Bible of the year, we've got to read about three and a half chapters a day, so let's just go ahead and read and power through it.

But that's not meditating on God's word.

Meditating is to take one verse or one passage and just chew it and just growl, just kind of go over and over and over again on it.

My favorite verse to do this with is Psalm 46, 10, where it says, Be still and know that I am God.

And I will just sit with that verse.

In fact, we're actually going to practice for a little bit of a short time of meditating and um contemplative practice.

And this is a verse that I'm going to read.

And I love it.

It's something where I just say over and over again, be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am God.

This, if we go back to our little graph here, this expression of meditation, I think is a it's a lot easier for us to wrap our minds around this.

It's much easier to wrap our minds around, okay, I get a verse and I just say it over and over again.

Doesn't mean we do it all the time or we whatever else, but it's really something, filling our minds up is something that we could do, right?

If you're ever wanting to remember something, do that for memorization.

What do you do?

If you want to memorize something, you say it over and over and over and over and over again.

So we know how to do that.

This next piece that's here, this second movement or expression, this contemplative prayer, this is something that is very foreign to us.

It's very hard.

And this is making room for God's presence in our lives, making room for Him.

And rather than activating our minds, we try to shut our minds off and just experience His presence.

The Psalms also talk quite a bit about this.

There's this one verse, Psalm 62.5, it says, For you, for God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.

So here David is saying, My soul, just quiet.

How many know sometimes our minds and souls are just constantly going, even when I'm praying, right?

I whenever I whenever I generally pray, I mean, you see me, I kind of, when I even when I preach, I move around left and right, and I know I drive the cameraman crazy.

Sometimes I'll be sitting down and I'll moving, and all of a sudden you have to see him move around.

I do that.

Well, I do the same thing when I pray.

Whenever I'm praying, I love to move around.

It's hard for me to wait, soul, just be silent.

Just be silent.

If you read the rest of Psalm 62, he talks that life is not great.

There are people who are threatening him, people who are being deceitful.

He doesn't resolve everything.

In the midst of the chaos, he's saying, just take a minute.

Just be silent.

Many times with silence, as we talked about, things begin to get exposed, and we can feel unsettled, or maybe you realize how tired you are or how hungry you are.

There's this other verse that I absolutely love.

And this contemplative part of meditation.

Psalm 131.

This is David again speaking, but I have calmed and quieted myself.

I am like a weaned child with its mother.

Like a weaned child, I am content.

King David was a pretty like powerful dude.

He was a warrior.

He killed Goliath.

He was Israel's greatest warrior.

He did all of the amazing, strong, powerful things.

And yet we see this side of him that talks about resting in God's arms.

And I we do the same thing with God, where we really like to focus on God's power and might and strength, right?

Like, God will fight our battles for us.

We sing those songs, and a lot of times it's like, God, I have a battle.

I need to fight.

We need God on our side, which is good.

I think that's part of God.

And that is also like a masculine energy a lot of the times, that's sometimes we can bring to God.

But I'll tell you what, this is something that may be controversial too, or will maybe sound controversial.

Did you know that God is not a man?

He's not.

He's not a man.

He's a spirit.

God is just as much a woman as he is a man.

He's the best of both.

And what I love about David, and when you read his Psalms, he talks about God's might and his power, but he talks about how he, like a little child, the sleeping baby, will lay in God's arms.

This nurturing side of God that sometimes, at least for me, I need to hear.

This side of God that is just resting and relaxing.

See, when we have times where we meditate, where we calm and quiet ourselves, this is the posture that we should be taking.

There is nothing when you have a baby that is making lots of noise, there's nothing like just crazier in your mind, just chaotic than a young infant screaming, but there is nothing more peaceful than a young baby just resting in its mother's arms.

And that's the posture as we spend a contemplative time with him, where we just ease our minds and we learn to rest in God's love and rest in him.

Now, this is hard to do.

I've only been doing it for three or four years, and I don't feel like I'm very good at it yet.

I'll be honest with you.

It's challenging.

It's something that in our Western tradition is just not around all that often.

You have to train yourself that as your mind wanders, ever have that wine mondering, like wandering thing you know you're talking about.

There's a Christian teacher that I love.

As I begin to get into this practice of meditation, his name's uh Dr.

James Finley.

He was a Catholic priest, he left the priesthood and became a psychotherapist, and he trains people on how to meditate and how to do this contemplative practice.

And one of the things that I love about him, and he actually has a podcast that I'll listen to to do like a guided Christian meditation through.

Absolutely powerful and really great.

Well, one thing is he encourages compassion towards you as your mind wanders.

Because I'll tell you what happens when I try to spend time just focus on the Lord, and then I start thinking about what I'm gonna eat for dinner, and I start thinking about work, or I start thinking about did I turn that light off up there?

Or like, where's my phone?

I don't feel my phone.

Where would that be?

And as my mind begins to do that, I have a lot of shame towards myself and a lot of like frustration towards myself.

And he uses the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15.

It's a story about a son who goes and he sins, squandered his inheritance, and he comes back to this father, and it says in Luke 15 that a father sees a son a long way off and accepts himself with open arms.

And obviously, when we spend time in meditation and our mind wanders, it's not sinning, it's just a normal aspect.

But I love how he paints that picture that this is the loving God, that every time our mind wanders and we come back to him, it's the father just like, I'm right here.

I know you went somewhere else for about those eight seconds, but I'm right here again.

And he receives you again and again and again and again.

The goal of contemplative prayer is to experience the oppressive love of God.

James Finley puts it this way.

He describes God's love as he says it's an infinite and self-donating reality that continually sustains existence.

He'll describe it in the practice that if all of a sudden God stopped loving you, you would cease to exist.

And so when we quiet our minds and our hearts, we tap into that expression of feeling and experiencing God's love in a powerful way.

A lot of the times I know when I was especially just at the beginning, but even now, if you're like, okay, I'm gonna commit to five minutes of trying to rest in this contemplative prayer space, I almost spend the first three minutes wandering and thinking about whatever else, and then two minutes beating myself up.

But that's a normal process of us returning back and gently coming back to him.

I use a practice where I say here.

So as I'm sitting and my mind wanders, I'll just mutter when I feel a wandering, I'll just say here.

Either out loud very quietly or in my mind.

And it's just my way of saying, I'm back, Jesus.

Here.

Kind of like present almost.

You know what I mean?

Back in those days.

Like, okay, I'm back.

I went over there, but I'm back.

And as you begin to do that, you train yourself to tap into God's love.

It's incredible.

So there's an ancient practice.

Bob, can you pass out those uh those sheets?

We're gonna uh about ready to, we're gonna enter into a practice where we're gonna practice this idea of contemplative prayer where I'm gonna make everyone be quiet for a minute and actually practice this.

But on the back of this sheet that they're passing out, there's something that I would encourage you.

Last week I gave some homework, some optional homework.

This is also optional homework to do.

This is the process called Lectio Divina.

This is something that was created in the 12th century, so it's 800 years old.

And a lot of the Christian, a lot of the monks and a lot of the priests began to realize, man, there are many different ways for us to pray and to meditate, and for us.

Do we have some extra over here?

Oh, okay.

Um so they began to recognize that there are many aspects to praying and many different aspects to meditation.

And so this is something that they recommend to do as a process.

I do this process whenever I'm out.

Meditating, I do this process.

Uh, some people say, Hey, you can do it in 20, you know, 15, 20 minutes.

I usually go through, it takes about 45 minutes.

Uh, sometimes I don't always go in this order, but I do every single one of these fives.

I'm just gonna read them quickly as you go through.

So, this process of Latin Ovenus first is prepare, and you'll see the Latin words underneath them, silencio.

It's to settle in, become aware that God is with you, quiet your mind and body, and offer yourself to Him and begin to take a few short breaths.

Then you read, you read a passage, you read some one of the Psalms or something, but then you you listen for it.

What words, what stand out?

Where is the spirit drawing your attention today?

And then the next one is to meditate, where you stay, and remember that idea of growling over it, you growl over scripture, or you take the scripture and you just chew it and you go over and over and over again.

You don't just read it.

I'll tell you what, it's so hard for me sometimes when reading God's word, it's like I just read it and I just check the box and kind of go through it.

You find a spot and you're like, no, we're gonna sit here in this passage.

And then the next part is you pray out loud, you let the scripture lead you into prayer, and you talk with God.

And then the last one is this where you contemplate God, where you sit there and you have this contemplative.

You're like, okay, now that I've done this, I'm gonna sit and quiet my mind and just experience the fullness of God's love.

So this is a good little guide for people to do.

Again, you don't have to do it.

Um, it's been incredibly helpful for me.

So, what we're gonna do now is before we get to our time, I want to lead us into a practice where we're gonna take a minute and we're gonna practice this contemplative prayer, where we're gonna practice this getting our breath and bringing our minds to the Lord.

So it's something that we're gonna be challenged with.

Before we do that, I want to play a quick video.

This is a one-minute video that I'm going to play.

I've spent lots of time trying to learn how to do this, and I've looked at everything else.

This is a video from an ABC news program called Nightline, where somebody 12 years ago, he talks about meditation.

He, the Dan Harris is the person, he divorces meditation from religion.

He says, You can be religious or not.

So, but the way that they talk about and the way they use like graphics to describe these intrusive thoughts are like better than anything I've ever seen.

So it's only a minute long.

I'm gonna play the video.

Just watch, and he goes through this process of how to enter your mind.

I'm gonna go ahead and start and play it.

It's gonna, it's only a minute long and it starts right away.

So it's gonna be very loud and abrupt.

So don't get scared with this because we can't like turn it down and turn it up.

We're gonna miss half the video.

Um so I'll go ahead and start it now.

We ready?

Here we go.

Isn't that like that's exactly how my mind is?

Where it's like you'll take a moment and you'll begin to just try to pray, and then immediately all these random thoughts start coming to your mind.

But how he focuses is is on this, and it's taught in Christian circles to do, is you sit straight, you breathe, and then as your mind begins to wander, you just begin to gently come back to the Lord.

So we're gonna practice this together right now.

Another thing that we do is it's useful to have tools.

So I have a I have a little bell here.

So this is a bell, it's called a singing bowl.

It's actually an instrument, started out as an instrument.

And this is a bell that is used uh you know, many different practices to meditate.

Um and I I really like it, you know, to start and end a prayer meditation.

I like it.

I'm gonna get here so the Mike can hear it for online.

But just like I just like the sound of it.

See how it just is very calm and peaceful.

And this is something that um is used in Christian circles.

It's used uh in that, but it does sometimes freak some people out because you look at it and it's also used in kind of ancient other Near East areas uh for meditation.

Uh, you know, it's it's I I would just say, because I've I've talked about meditation, and like I said, this idea sometimes will freak people out.

But what I really like about it is we see that throughout the Old Testament, David talked a lot about using harps and lyres and all these instruments in order to worship God.

And all those instruments that he talks about all didn't start with Hebrews.

Those were all secular other instruments used to worship other gods.

But David took all those instruments and says, I'm gonna turn them and we're gonna use it to worship Yahweh.

And so I use the same thing for the bowl here.

There's really no powerful in the bowl, you can use a string or some other way, but it's just a great way for me to kind of enter in.

And what this does is it's a really good way that if you're gonna do it, I'd recommend either getting a bell or just some type of starting pistol.

Because it's really hard to all of a sudden know when am I meditating and when am I not?

Like what is the threshold and everything else.

So I'm gonna bring this out, we're gonna stretch our minds today.

Um, and if it's kind of weird and it's hard, everything else, you know, there are some Christian traditions who sing hymns and they really don't like that we use guitars or anything, other parts uh for the worshiping of the Lord.

But again, it's something that I uh really love to do.

So this is what we're gonna do.

We're gonna practice this all together.

So we're gonna start.

Everyone go ahead and just stand up, and we're gonna spend a minute in this practice.

And the goal of this time, I said stand up, I meant sit, I meant sit up straight.

Sorry.

Yeah, that was my bad.

False start.

Yeah, I'm not listening to Dan Harris, clearly.

Sit up straight.

And I want everyone to just focus on the breath.

And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna recite this passage from Psalm 46, be still and know that I am God.

That's gonna be our meditate, meditative part.

And then we're just gonna enter in and do, like it said, focus on the breath.

And the goal with this, and my prayer as I was praying about doing this time, is for you just to feel that oppressive love of God in this short amount of time.

As we do that.

So begin to breathe.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still being a little bit of a So Lord, as we just spend a time quieting our souls, I just pray that you would in these moments where we can just quiet our minds, that we would be able to tap into that of just love.

Love is not a part of who you are, it is who you are.

Help us to learn how to quiet our minds and to continually press into you, Lord.

Your name we pray.

Amen.

Just feel kind of that peace and that rest.

I it's even hard for me.

I just I watch the video and I'm practicing it, and about halfway through, I'm like, okay, so what am I gonna do?

We're going back to my notes, like pulling out of it, and everything else.

But well, I hope that this just kind of gives again some tips, some practical ways that we can really embody meditation, both through experiencing the Lord, but learning to rest in his presence and quiet our minds and souls.

So now on the backside, we're gonna break up into groups and talk.

We have a couple different questions that we'll talk about here and to go around and for us to talk about.

Um I'll give you the same thing every time.

If you're somebody who likes to talk, please do not talk over everyone else or the other group, but to actually uh allow everyone to share.

So let's go ahead and break up into our groups and talk, and then in about 15-20 minutes, I'll go ahead and pull this back together and then close.