Archive: Preach Yourself a Sermon
Taken from Talking About Prayer
by Richard Bewes@1979 and used by permission of lnterVarsity Press.
Ever tried preparing a sermon? Perhaps not. But have you ever tried preparing a sermon for your own consumption? This is roughly what Christian meditation is. It is allied to prayer, but distinct from it. In the words of Archbishop Anthony Bloom, ‘Meditation is an activity of thought, while prayer is the rejection of every [distracting] thought.’ Which, when you think about it, is true. When praying, you are engaged in a battle against the intrusion of outside thoughts, so that full concentration may be given to God.
But in meditation, thought plays a very full part. Most of us westerners don’t really know how to use silence. There is a constant clattering around us for much of the day. We find ourselves chattering and talking, as though life were one great cocktail party. Indeed there are many who, one suspects, are such compulsive and opinionated talkers that by their very garrulity they shut themselves out of God’s Kingdom, never giving themselves a chance to stop, listen, and think.
We are so conditioned that for much of the time our thoughts are knocking haphazardly around, like bumper cars at a funfair. Meditation is the art of channeling thought in a single direction. Is it productive? Very. Back in the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton, when praised for his great contribution to our understanding of the universe, remarked, “I had no special sagacity—only the power of patient thought.” He made his discoveries, he said, “by keeping a subject constantly before me until the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.”
The Kikuyu people of Kenya have a good word to describe this activity. It is the word meciria (mesh-eeria). By it is meant more than simply thoughts. It means thoughts with a difference, directed, powerful, original thoughts.
Bring this into the Christian context, and we’re talking of a kind of applied thinking which has changed and shaped society repeatedly in the last 2,000 years. For by Christian meditation we mean reflection and thought which is channeled and guided by God.
Malcolm Muggeridge once made the point that the most vital elements in the Christian story are those which, over the centuries, have stemmed from dissidence rather than agreement. Luther and Wesley are prime examples of this phenomenon. Here were men—and there have been many of them—who were able to pick up a seed thought, absorb it, study it, and then communicate it—even against the established thinking of the time—and society was changed as a result.
How can we ensure that the seed thought is truly from God? We are right to be wary of the many meditation groups that have mushroomed around the world in the last few years. It is possible to lose your own identity and to fall prey to strange and even demonic powers by the thoughtless opening of your mind. And the technique, advocated in Transcendental Meditation, of reciting a meaningless word to oneself, implies the absence of true relationship, the absence of any real personality in God Himself. Christ’s way is to resist the technique of reciting mantras as a way to God. “When you pray,” He urged, “do not use a lot of meaningless words, as the pagans do” (Matthew 6:7). Meditation ought not to take place in a vacuum.
Your thinking is like your radio listening. Tuning is required. And while technique is not of the essence, nevertheless we value a few familiar landmarks on the radio dial—even if only the X of Luxembourg, or the Y of Sony! Similarly in meditation, we need a few handles to grab hold of. Without those handles our thoughts are undisciplined, untuned, and unproductive. One married couple I knew, both fresh to the Christian faith, began with Bible page numbers. “That was a nice bit, Brian, on page 240 of the Good News Bible!” It was only later that they got into the swing of books, chapters, and verses.
How then do you meditate?
You take a thought from the Bible. It may have occurred in a passage from your regular reading of the Bible. It stands out somewhat from the page. You take it and begin to “chew” it over in your mind. It may not be a hefty chunk, perhaps only a sentence, a word sometimes.
“I thirst.” I remember meditating on this phrase one Good Friday. It was spoken by our Lord, while He was dying on the cross. I tried to let my mind revolve around these words, much as one might walk round a chandelier, picking out first one shaft of color and then another as a different facet presented itself. The agony of dying in a sun-baked city in the Middle East, exposed to the crowd, the hostility, the flies. The reflection that He had chosen this way, in accordance with the Father’s will, so that the Scripture from Psalm 22 might be fulfilled:
My strength is gone,
Gone like water spilt on the ground.
All my bones are out of joint;
My heart is like melted wax.
My throat is as dry as dust
And my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
Anything else about Christ, and thirst? Yes, He had come to satisfy people’s thirst. Wasn’t it somewhere in John’s Gospel? Hadn’t I heard a sermon on it? … The woman at the well! Jesus had said to her, “Whoever drinks the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again ” (John 4:13). And now here He was … thirsty. Then, Good Friday’s message is that by His dying thirst, Christ provides a way of satisfying the thirst of the world. Thirst … for what?
I remembered a biography I’d once read about the evangelist George Whitefield. As a young man, searching desperately for peace of mind and soul, he’d recalled the words “I thirst,” and reflected that they were uttered just before Christ’s own anguish came to an end. Whitefield himself had cried out in helpless despair, “I thirst!”—and peace, forgiveness, and integration had flooded in.
Thirst. … Do Christians thirst? I remembered reading another biography—about D.L. Moody who, although committed as a Christian leader, was thirsting for more of Christ’s Spirit and filling in his life. Had he found fulfillment at the hands of Christ? A sentence from the biography floated hazily back into my mind: “The dead dry days were gone. I was all the time tugging and carrying water. But now I have a river that carries me.” Lord, if you can do that for the woman you met at the well, if you can do it for Whitefield and for Moody, then you can do it today. Thank you for the thirst you endured—for me.
What was I doing? Preaching a sermon on two words only, just to myself. And now it was beginning to turn into prayer. I find that a helpful pattern of Christian meditation. It need not be a prolonged activity at all. Two, perhaps three minutes are enough, initially. These can grow naturally into something rather longer as progress is made. Such seed thoughts can be taken into the day, and meditated upon yet again at different moments. Indeed, they can help to shape the very day itself—and the life.
I once heard an eminent psychiatrist give a lecture. Some 70 of us were listening to him. He told us that the therapy he suggests for many of his patients is an exercise in Christian meditation last thing at night before dropping off to sleep. A seed thought, something to reflect on, something that can, even during sleep, get to work upon the subconscious.
“You know the uncanny way in which you can so often will yourself to wake up early, simply by instructing yourself the night before?” he challenged. “It’s the same principle here. I tell my patients to chew over the selected phrase from the Bible as they drift off to sleep. First thing in the morning—there it is again. It’s been with them all night. I wouldn’t claim that they all turned into devout Christians. But one thing I’ve noticed in countless instances. If they kept up the pattern night after night, their whole disposition and outlook at the end of a month was radically, even magically, improved.”
But it’s not magic really. James 1:21 states the principle clearly. “Accept the word that He plants in your hearts, which is able to save you.” The King James version uses the phrase—”the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.” Engrafted—that’s precisely it. It becomes a part of our life and character. Meciria. Deep thoughts, life-changing thoughts. It’s the same thing.
0 Comments