I believe God is calling us on and deeper into Him. He is calling us to become even more holy. Holiness mean being separated from and distinct from the world.

To become more holy I am going to suggest a new approach, a new something this morning. Earlier this week God gave me these verses:
Place these words on your hearts. Get them deep inside you. Tie them on your hands and foreheads as a reminder. Teach them to your children. Talk about them wherever you are, sitting at home or walking in the street, talk about them from the time you get up in the morning until you fall into bed at night. Inscribe them on the doorposts and gates of your cities so that you’ll live a long time, and your children with you, on the soil God promised to give your ancestors for as long as there is a sky over the earth. 11 v 18-21

I believed at first they were a prelude to talk about holiness, but this morning I woke with a new conviction, a conviction that God wanted us to learn to meditate.

To be holy is to desire something that is good. But becoming holy is not something you can do without God’s help. This morning I believe God wants to take us deeper into Himself through the discipline of meditation.

Right at the start of the verses God gave me, it says, “Place these words on your hearts”.

To become holy, we need to be practicing Scripture memorisation and meditation. Without it, victory is unlikely, if not impossible.
So what is meditation? Memorisation - easy - just learn it but what is meditation? Meditation could be said to be the exact opposite of what society encourages at the moment. In society today, we see three things majored upon; noise, hurry and crowds. It is what the Devil majors upon for if he can keep us engaged in muchness and manyness he will rest satisfied. For meditation we must be willing to go down into silences, the inner world of contemplation.
What I am not talking about quickly! I am not talking about some eastern religion, where we are encouraged to empty ourselves or empty our mind to reach some spiritual nirvana. This emptying encourages us to seek some blissful state by taking ourselves totally out of the world. I’m not talking about the modern psycho mumbo jumbo, where we look to control our brain waves so that we can get physiological and emotional well-being.
Christian meditation is so much more. It is about detachment from the confusion around us in order to have a richer attachment to God and to other human beings. It leads us to the inner wholeness necessary to give ourselves to God freely, and to the spiritual perception necessary to attack social evils. It is probably the most practical of all spiritual disciplines, not taking us out of the world but actually placing us with a better understanding of how to help the world!
It is encouraged throughout the Bible. Right at the start of the Psalms we read a call on all God’s people to emulate the ‘blessed man’. How? “delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night”. Psalm 1 v 2. We can go on Psalm 119 v 78 “As for me, I will meditate on your precepts”. Isaac went out to meditate in the field in the evening - Genesis 24 v 63.
Many of the great Christian thinkers provide examples of being meditators. St Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Madame Guyon, Bernard of Clairvaux, Juliana of Norwich, Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Merton and many more…. There is a prophecy in Amos that a time will come when there will be a famine in the land, ‘not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.’ Well today that time has come to pass. It is now. When have you heard of a great meditator? There doesn’t seem to be any more meditators of the word. The last seem to be years ago. It seems to be something forgotten by the Christian church. In fact couldn’t that be why so many people are turning to the eastern religions, they need to meditate and the Christian church isn’t providing it. We need to as a church be the example that provides for the world.

So what is meditation? There is a danger of only thinking of meditation in terms of detachment. Jesus warns us about an unclean spirit leaving a man, the spirit goes and finds seven other spirits more evil than himself and they return to the man and find him empty so they enter in and dwell there. The man finds himself in a worst position. Luke 11 v 24-26.
Meditation is not about emptying ourselves and leaving ourselves empty - it is about emptying our mind in order to fill it!
What is meditation about?
Meditation has no point unless it is firmly rooted in life. Meditation will often yield insights that are deeply practical, almost mundane. e.g. Back to where I started, how to relate to your wife or husband. How to deal with your finances. How to deal with that business decision. Many people assume that they will reach some sort of ecstasy - and yes there will be times when you do, but it is more about the mundane and dealing with ordinary human problems. Morton Kelsey has said, “Christian meditation that does not make a difference in the quality of one’s outer life is short-circuited.
Another thing to remember when preparing for meditation is to remember who you are entering a commune with. This is again where eastern meditation misses the boat, it is about self or communing with self to become more calm, to reduce blood pressure or to reach nirvana. Christian meditation is about the actual contact and communion with God. And remember God is not some cosmic bellhop ready at our beck and call. The history of religion seems to be about having a human mediator, meditation takes that away because we are in direct communication with our creator.
And here is a warning, if you are not serious about your Christian walk then stay away from meditation. Meditation is threatening to us. It boldly calls us to enter into the living presence of God ourselves. It tells us that God is speaking in the continuous present and wants to address us. This is not just for religious professionals, it is for all of us - why would you want to miss this unless you have something to hide or maybe you just don’t care. Do you want to hear God’s voice - then listen and meditation is the place to be listening. To desire to hear His voice is not enough, we need God’s gift of grace. So right now let’s pray together, stop and pray for his gift of grace so that we will have the desire to hear His voice.
“Father God, I pray for those folks who boldly hold out their hands. They are the ones Lord who seek your gift of grace and who want to desire to hear your voice. Grant it so to them now Lord. Amen”
Now that’s done - you don’t have to keep seeking that grace, you just need to start meditating. Ok so steps to preparing:
1. Start to pray without ceasing. 1 Thess 5 v 17. If we are constantly being swept of our feet with frantic activity or a mind that is harassed and fragmented, we are not going to be in a state to meditate. We need holy leisure! We need a sense of balance. We need to take time to rest and enjoy beauty, we need an ability to pace ourselves. We need to seek holy leisure with ruthless determination. Don’t allow those voices to creep up on you… but you need to do this, you need to do that. What is more important to you?
What about a place for meditation? Well you need to find that place of comfort and quiet for you. But I am going to be bold here and suggest something else. I am going to suggest that we need trees and the wind, maybe some water. I am going to be even bolder and ask whether we could find that together. A place of retreat. Many people talk about building a retreat centre, well maybe we could start with a place to meditate? What do you think? Seek God and see what he says. Maybe we could club together and buy a field in the name of The River Church and turn it into a place of retreat.
Posture is important. We need to be relaxed and stress free. Tension can be telegraphed in body language.
However, I hasten to add there are no laws, these really are just suggestions!
Ok meditation. Meditation is best entered through our imagination, through our dreams. In learning to meditate we need to pay attention to something we are quite often already doing! For fifteen centuries Christians overwhelmingly considered dreams as a natural way in which the spiritual world broke into our lives. If we are convinced that dreams will be a natural way to enter into meditation then we can do three practical things:
1. Ask God to inform us through our dreams. Be willing to give God that space.
2. Record our dreams. Watch the patterns etc.
3. Interpret our dreams. We can trust God to bring discernment. But maybe we need to talk it through with someone more experienced but as you grow you’ll get the hang of it.
As you start don’t think you can tackle Mount Everest. Start small - maybe five or ten minutes a day. Firstly start with what Richard Foster calls a palm up, palm down exercise. Palm up, you hand over to God all that is of concern to you. “I give my anger towards… I surrender my anxiety about not having enough money to pay my bills. I release my fear about going to the dentist this morning, etc” Now turn your palm over in a symbolic gesture of letting go - release it!
Now turn your palm up as a symbol of your desire to receive from the Lord. “Lord I receive your divine love for my wife. Your peace about the dentist, your patience about my bills. etc.”
Practice this until it becomes natural. There are other ways of achieving this - talk to others. This exercise might take a period of a few weeks or even months to attain. What you are doing is learning to prepare for meditation. Now you can start to meditate. Choose something in the created order and meditate on it. A leaf, a bird, nature is the simplest way in which God shows Himself. You can even meditate on a baby crying! Think of Jesus in the cradle. Pondering creation is an excellent way to start to meditate. You will also want to think about Scripture and this is what we are going to do now.