http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15583319/the-messy-way-to-know-gods-will
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Why Don’t We Have Good Friends?
How many close friends do you have in your life today? Take a minute and count them. Do you have more or less than you did ten years ago?
One recent study confirms what you might already suspect: many more of us have fewer good friends than we once did. In 1990, just 3% of respondents reported having no close friends. Thirty years later, that number has quadrupled to 12%. In 1990, one third said they had ten or more close friends. That number has now shrunk to just over ten percent. Nearly 90% cannot name a friend for each of their fingers. It’s not the only study to come to the same unsettling conclusion: Despite the tidal wave of new ways to connect and communicate with one another, we’re getting lonelier.
And that loneliness stifles human life. “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!” (Ecclesiastes 4:9–10). If we try to live and work alone, we’ll stumble and fall alone. And when we fall alone, we won’t have the encouragement, correction, and support we need to get back up and press through our failures, sorrows, and trials.
No matter how many years it’s been, no matter how busy you feel, no matter how few your options are, no matter how much it costs you, you still need good friends — yes, even you.
So why do so many of us have so few of them?
Three Great Walls to Climb
It’s never been easier to make new friends and connect with old ones, so what’s hindering and disrupting these relationships? Drew Hunter, author of Made for Friendship, wisely puts his finger on three major obstacles we face today:
Three aspects of modern culture create unique barriers to deep relationships: busyness, technology, and mobility. . . . These unique barriers can weave together in a very isolating way for us. They encircle us like a rope barrier and keep true friendship out of reach. We may overpower one or two of these strands, but as the saying goes, a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. (30)
What keeps us from meaningful friendships? Busyness, because we fill our schedules so full that friendship feels like a luxury we just can’t afford. Technology, because while it allows for a lot more moments of “connection,” the crumbs it offers leads us to pretend we’re more meaningfully connected than we really are (and leave us starving for more). Mobility, because it’s harder to build real, lasting friendships in places where people are frequently moving away and moving on.
Those three emerging barriers to friendship certainly resonate with my experience over the last thirty years, and accurately explain some of the challenges we face in pursuing friendship in the twenty-first century. So how might followers of Christ overcome the hurdles and find some good friends?
1. Cadence: Live at the pace of friendship.
When did we become too busy for friends? At a cultural level, it’s difficult to trace the many factors (work from home, instant messaging and social media, on-demand delivery and entertainment, explosion of youth activities, and more). At a personal level, the disruption often happens somewhere between college graduation and our first child’s newborn diapers. The adult demands of work and family swiftly swell and crowd out the margin we used to have. The time with friends that used to cost us next to nothing now seems far too expensive.
Rather than assuming friendship is simply a casualty of higher callings, what if we assumed that friendship was still vital to those higher callings? Because it is. “Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13). Of course, if you’re married, your spouse is one valuable voice, but he or she can’t be the only voice. Whether married or single, we need others from outside the home to sing (or shout) reality into our hearts and homes. In other words, we need friends.
“To experience friendship with fellow humans, we need to live at a pace that is human.”
And to experience friendship with fellow humans, we need to live at a pace that is human (which, ironically, may increasingly put us out of step with society). Instead of constantly scrolling by one another, what if we slowed down enough to see and hear and focus on the person in front of us? What if we practiced hospitality, not just with our kitchens and living rooms, but with our time and attention?
How different our lives might be if they were marked by something like the togetherness of the early church:
All who believed were together and had all things in common. . . . And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. (Acts 2:44–47)
Their lives were beautifully full, but not with the tasks, emails, and apps that dominate our days. No, their lives were full with people — with one another. Life was slower in many ways, and yet far more productive for being slow: “And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47).
2. Presence: Find time and space to share.
Technology is not necessarily an enemy of friendship. It can be an unprecedented blessing when employed wisely. Imagine just how much previous generations would have given to be able to talk in real-time, even once, with a far-away loved one (much less actually see them on a screen). The problems emerge when we lean too much on technology — when it becomes a substitute for, rather than supplement to, physical presence. Every human needs food, water, shelter, and regular time with other humans.
The apostle Paul used the technology available in his day to communicate with his brothers and sisters in the faith, but he knew that writing was no replacement for eye contact: “I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you — that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine” (Romans 1:11–12). He knew there were graces that ink and paper couldn’t carry. There was a whole class of encouragement reserved for living rooms and dining tables. He knew that something critical and intangible happens when two or more are gathered in the name of Jesus in the same space.
This doesn’t mean friends boycott technology. It does mean we acknowledge the weaknesses and limitations of technology (even the best technology), and love one another accordingly. A good place to start might be to quickly audit your current friendships and ask roughly what percentage of your interactions are physical or digital. The results will vary for people with different personalities in different circumstances and stages of life, but for every stage, circumstance, and temperament there should be some consistent, meaningful presence. It is worth fighting for more regular time to be face to face with at least a few good friends.
3. Permanence: Rediscover the value of staying.
Lastly, perhaps the largest hurdle of the three: mobility. It’s never been easier to pick up and move, which means it’s often much, much harder to find and keep long-term friendships. Just think for a minute about how many of your friendships in just the last two years have been disrupted by some major life change and the accompanying move. We’re the goodbye generation.
The depth of friendships our souls need won’t happen overnight. These gardens of trust require years, maybe decades, of patient attention and tending. So how do we make and keep friends in a day of so many goodbyes? The first thing to say may be hard for many of us to hear: rediscover the value of staying put.
How many people do you know in your circles who would forgo a better-paying, more-satisfying job in a more appealing city for the sake of Christian friendships and community? Building the kind of friendships that really matter and bear fruit requires the kind of sacrifices fewer today are willing to make. In the early church, and for most of history, this kind of permanence was simply a given. Picking up and moving was too costly. Today, permanence is becoming a discipline and a virtue. We might wonder, How many who are uprooting and leaving now will eventually come to realize what they lost and wish they had chosen church and friendships over convenience and job opportunities?
Some friendships, however, will survive moves and time zones, through some serious creativity and persistence, but very few will thrive. A few of my best friends today were once down-the-road friends (or even share-a-bathroom-and-a-kitchen friends), but are now several-states-over friends. We’re not as close as we once were, but we do what we can to stay in touch. The apostle Paul, for one, was a faithful long-distance friend, though it seems he was always planning a visit. He writes to those he knows well, loves more, and yet can’t walk over and see anymore:
“For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:8).
“[Timothy] has brought us the good news of your faith and love and reported that you always remember us kindly and long to see us, as we long to see you” (1 Thessalonians 3:6).
“As I remember your tears, I long to see you, that I may be filled with joy.” (2 Timothy 1:4).“However faithful our faraway friends are, we all need down-the-road friends.”
Long-distance friendships are possible, and can be precious, but they are a little like walking uphill, requiring extra effort with every step (like writing twenty-eight chapters to the church in Corinth). They can’t be our only close friendships. However faithful our faraway friends are, we need down-the-road friends. And hopefully a few of them are down the road for the long haul.
4. Substance: Brave the depths of conversation.
Busyness, technology, mobility — those are three real and developing hurdles to friendship. We should all be aware of them and make some plan for clearing them. As I wrestled with each of them, though, I couldn’t help seeing a fourth major barrier, one that is by no means modern: triviality.
How many of our potential friendships — real, meaningful, durable friendships — have died on the rocks of sports, shows, or headline news? How many conversations began and ended on the paper thin surface of life? How often was God left out completely? The greatest challenge to friendship today may not be our schedules, phones, or moving trucks, but just how easy it is to peacefully float along above the rich depths of real friendship.
Social media can certainly aggravate the issue, but this temptation isn’t new. Satan has always been seducing us into the shallows of superficiality and distracting us from the depths of friendship. So how do we wade deeper? Through courageous, Christ-exalting intentionality: “Let us consider” — really consider — “how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:24–25).
If we commit to this kind of reflection, this kind of commitment, this kind of encouragement and correction, this kind of love, real friendship will emerge and endure. But we will need to be brave enough to go there, to spend more of our conversations in the deep end.
So, if you find yourself among the overwhelming majority of people without enough good friends, slow down enough to find some, make some regular time to be in the same room, fight harder to stick together longer, and then consistently press through the trivial to the more meaningful and spiritual. Pursue and keep the kinds of friends who stir your heart and life to better know and enjoy Jesus Christ.
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The Neglected Meaning of Advent
Today marks the first of four Sundays traditionally celebrated by the church as the season of Advent. And with live nativity displays, Christmas plays, and Advent calendars you’d be forgiven if you thought that Advent was only about the birth of Jesus.
But there’s more to Advent than the Bethlehem stable. Historically, the church has focused as much on anticipating the return of our glorious King as celebrating his birth. By examining the history of Advent, we recover this season’s neglected meaning.
Easter First
The earliest church centered its liturgical calendar around Easter. In fact, little evidence exists for the celebration of Jesus’s nativity during the first two centuries of church history. The New Testament, after all, discloses little detail concerning the time of Jesus’s birth. Of the Gospels, only Luke’s narrative hints at a time of year: lambing season in early winter when shepherds would have needed to keep watch over their flocks (Luke 2:8).
Where the Scriptures were silent, early Christian authors were too. There is no mention of birth celebrations in Christian writings from the first and second centuries.1 The earliest church, instead, focused on what the New Testament described with great detail — the final days of Jesus the Messiah. 2 For this reason, the celebration of Easter at the time of the Jewish Passover was the primary focus of Christian practice from the earliest days of the church — a celebration Paul implies in 1 Corinthians 5:7–8.
Despite the absence of Christmas celebration, by the end of the second century there was significant interest in determining a date for Jesus’s birth. This interest probably reflects the church’s apologetic emphasis on Jesus’s physical birth in the face of those who were skeptical of his full humanity. While there was vigorous debate around possible dates, by the early fourth century consensus emerged around two likely candidates: December 25 and January 6.3 Over time, the former became the traditional celebration of Christmas and the latter the celebration of Epiphany.4
From Easter to Christmas
But why December 25? Based on their understanding of Daniel’s prophecy, some early Christian writers reasoned that Jesus was conceived on the same day that he was later crucified. Tertullian (ca. 155–220) calculated that Jesus was crucified on the 14th of Nisan, the equivalent of March 25 on the Roman (solar) calendar — exactly nine months before December 25.5 Christians, therefore, reckoned the date of Christmas from their observance of Easter. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) relayed this understanding in On the Trinity: “He is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also He suffered . . . but He was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.”6
That Jesus was conceived on the same day he would eventually give up his life may at first seem unlikely. But consider, as the early church did, the equal unlikelihood that the Messiah’s propitiatory death would exactly coincide with the celebration of Passover.7 As Peter confessed, all events, whether seemingly inconsiderable or inestimably significant, are guided by God’s “definite plan and foreknowledge” (Acts 2:23). His works in creation and his ways in history are beautiful and symmetrical (Psalm 18:30; Isaiah 46:10).
From Christmas to Advent
The precise origins of Advent celebrations are more difficult to determine. By the middle of the fourth century, celebrations of Jesus’s birth on December 25 in the West were increasingly common. A longer period of celebration like that of Lent (the period of fasting and reflection preceding Easter) soon developed around it. In 380, the church council in Saragossa set apart three weeks in December, culminating in the celebration of Epiphany.
So also, the church in Rome began formalizing Advent observances. The Gelasian Sacramentary of the late fourth century includes liturgies for five Sundays leading up to Christmas. By the mid-sixth century, bishops in France had proclaimed a fast on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from November 11 until Christmas Day.8 Pope Gregory I (540–604; also known as Gregory the Great) further developed the Advent liturgies by composing prayers, songs, readings, and responses for congregational worship. Over the next century, these practices spread to England. Finally, around the turn of the millennium, Gregory VII (1015–1085) standardized the four Sundays leading up to December 25 as the period of Advent.
Advent’s Neglected Meaning
Despite the challenge of tracing Advent’s origin, two things are historically clear about the celebration itself. First, in contrast to Lent (a somber season of fasting, reflection, and meditation on the suffering of Christ), the weeks leading up to Christmas were full of jubilance and festivity. In Advent, the church looked back to celebrate the incarnation as the fulfillment of God’s promise to deliver his people from sin, Satan, and death (Genesis 3:15). The church rejoiced with the apostle John, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Advent celebrations often concluded with baptisms and highlighted new life and union with the incarnate Christ.
What is often neglected, however, is that Advent celebrations also looked to the future. The term “advent” (Latin, adventus) translates the Greek parousia, a word that in the New Testament always speaks of the Messiah’s second coming. Advent looks forward to the final realization of all that Jesus’s incarnation at Christmas put into motion. For this reason, instead of the Gospels’ birth narratives, Advent sermons often centered on eschatological passages (like Luke 21:25–36 and Matthew 24:37–44) or on the Triumphal Entry (Matthew 21:1–9) as a joyful anticipation of Jesus’s victorious second coming. Leo I (400–461) reminded his congregation that Christmas looked both backward and forward:
Hence because we are born for the present and reborn for the future, let us not give ourselves up to temporal goods, but to eternal: and in order that we may behold our hope nearer, let us think on what the Divine Grace has bestowed on our nature on the very occasion when we celebrate the mystery of the Lord’s birthday. Let us hear the Apostle, saying: “for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. But when Christ, who is your life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory” who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost for ever and ever. Amen.9
Songs of the Second Coming
This future orientation was reflected not only in sermons, but also in song. In the sixth century, a series of seven Advent songs emerged, one for each day of the week leading up to Christmas. Called the Great Antiphons (or the “O” Antiphons), each expresses longing for the Messiah’s return:
O Key of David and scepter of the House of Israel;you open and no one can shut;you shut and no one can open:Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.
This rich tradition of looking back and looking forward has been passed on to Reformed Protestant denominations. In the Book of Common Prayer (1549), Thomas Cranmer (1489–1555) used material from the Gelasian Sacramentary and the writings of Gregory the Great to develop Advent liturgies reflecting on both Christ’s nativity and his second coming. While many contemporary services focus on themes of hope, joy, peace, and love, Cranmer’s Advent liturgies are primarily focused on Christ’s future appearing.10
We may neglect Advent’s future-orientation in our contemporary celebration, but, intriguingly, the theme of Jesus’s second coming runs deep in our favorite Christmas carols. Isaac Watts’s (1674–1748) “Joy to the World” celebrates Jesus’s glorious return and his future kingdom where sin and sorrow are no more (Revelation 21:4):
Joy to the world! the Savior reigns;Let men their songs employ;While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plainsRepeat the sounding joy,Repeat the sounding joy,Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.
No more let sins and sorrows grow,Nor thorns infest the ground;He comes to make his blessings flowFar as the curse is found,Far as the curse is found,Far as, far as the curse is found.
Finally, consider John Mason Neale and Henry Coffin’s “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” a translation of the ancient Great Antiphons:
O come, Thou Key of David, comeAnd open wide our heavenly home;Make safe the way that leads on high,And close the path to misery.Rejoice! Rejoice! EmmanuelShall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, Desire of nations, bindAll peoples in one heart and mind;Bid envy, strife, and quarrels cease;Fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.Rejoice! Rejoice! EmmanuelShall come to thee, O Israel.
History illuminates the richness of Advent’s celebration and anticipation. And one practical way of recovering the deep joy of this future-oriented season might just be to believe what we sing.
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Start the Day Happy in God: The Lost Art of Bible Meditation
“I’m just not feeling it today.”
How often have you reached for that excuse? Many of us can be quick to cast ourselves as the victim of a sluggish heart.
Now, making peace with a pokey heart is a very strange phenomenon, even as it now is a widespread assumption and typically goes unquestioned. It may be no big deal if we’re talking about whether you want peanut butter on your breakfast toast. But far more is at stake when this becomes an excuse for neglecting God, whether in his word, prayer, or Christian fellowship.
Specifically, this excuse has served to undermine habits of spiritual health related to beginning each day with the voice of God in Scripture. Some of us are gaunt, frail Christians because we’ve learned, like our world, to cater to the whims of our own fickle hearts rather than direct them and determine to reshape them.
Your Pliable Affections
In what may be his most insightful and deeply spiritual book, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (2014), the late Tim Keller introduces us to a side of the great English theologian John Owen (1616–1683) that is especially out of step with modern assumptions. Owen, according to Keller, would not be so quick to grant the excuse, “I’m just not feeling it today.” In fact, he likely would respond forcefully — and many of us might be better for it.
Owen would at least challenge whether our initial feelings determined anything significant at all. He surely wouldn’t say to skip God’s word (or prayer or church) to cater to whatever unspiritual inclination you woke up feeling. Rather, he might say, as Keller summarizes, “Meditate to the point of delight.” Don’t give in to your heart’s first inclinations. Rather, take hold of them, and direct them. Open the Bible, and turn your attention to the one who is supremely worthy, and keep your nose in the Book, and your mind on Jesus, until your sluggish heart begins to respond like it should.
That’s striking counsel for a generation conditioned to “follow your heart” and, in time, presume to reshape our external, objective world based on the subjectivity and flightiness of our own desires.
How often do we hear even Christians concede, as a veiled excuse, to be “wired” a certain way? Indeed, God has wired us in certain ways. But how often do we resign ourselves to being hardwired in ways we’re actually far more pliable? And the world’s not helping us with this. Our society has come to feign plasticity in precisely the places we’re hardwired (like biological sex) and to pretend hard-wiring in the places we’re actually plastic (desires and delights).
Long before anyone talked about neuroplasticity, Owen believed in what we might call “affectional plasticity” — that is, your desires and delights are not hardwired. They are pliable. You can reshape and recondition them. You can retrain them. You may be unable to simply turn them with full effect in the moment to make yourself feel something, but you can reshape your heart over time. Oh, can you. Your desires, good and bad, are not simple givens. Stretched out over time, as the composite of countless decisions, they are wonderfully (and hauntingly) chosens.
Recondition Your Heart
In chapter 10 of Prayer, Keller adds his commentary to Owen’s premodern insights for a much-needed perspective on the wedding of God’s word with our prayers through meditation. It’s a perspective on forming and reforming our pliant hearts that will challenge readers today. It will frustrate many, but certainly inspire a few.
In general, we are far too easy on our minds and hearts. We grant we can train the body. In fact, you’re always training the body, whether for the better or the worse. And most will agree that you can train the mind — “the mind is a muscle,” so to speak. You can set it on a particular object and learn to keep it there. It will take practice. Such training is vital for engaging with God’s word as we ought, and few skills are more difficult or important to cultivate.
And far more controversial, you can train your heart— not just in sinful emotions to avoid but also in righteous emotions to entertain. With a Bible open in front of you, you can learn, as Keller summarizes Owen, to “meditate to the point of delight.”
Three Stages of Meditation
Some well-meaning Christians set out to read their Bibles, don’t feel much (if anything), move on swiftly to pray a few quick, shallow petitions, and then embark on their day. Owen would say, with C.S. Lewis, you are far too easily pleased — that is, if you’re even pleased at all. Rather, Owen would have us wrestle like Jacob across the Jabbok, until light dawns. Wrestle with your own sluggish soul. Direct it. Turn it. Grapple with it until it does what it’s supposed to do, and feels more like it’s supposed to feel about the wonders and horrors of the word of God. Say, in effect, to the God of the word, “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” and discipline your heart to receive the joy for which God made it.
Now, a few clarifications are in order to recover this lost art of meditation. Owen distinguished between study, meditation, and prayer. Meditation is the bridge between receiving God’s word (in reading and study) and responding back to him (in prayer). Meditation, says Owen,
is distinguished from the study of the word, wherein our principal aim is to learn the truth, or to declare it unto others; and so also from prayer, whereof God himself is the immediate object. But . . . meditation . . . is the affecting of our own hearts and minds with love, delight, and [humility]. (quoted in Keller, Prayer, 152)
Meditation, then — distinct from study and prayer, though overlapping with them — might be parsed into three sequential stages.
1) Fix Your Mind
Begin with Bible intake, through reading, and rereading — the slower the better. And as we encounter various knowledge gaps in what the passage says and means, we might turn briefly to some “study” to “learn the truth” or rightly understand the text. Beginners will have more questions and need to navigate how frequently to stop and study or just keep reading and pick up clues as they go. But the main point is that meditation begins with immersion in the words of God.
Unlike Eastern “meditation,” which seeks to empty the mind, biblical meditation requires the filling of the mind with the truth of God’s self-revelation in his Son and Scripture. We don’t just up and meditate — not in the deliberate sense. We begin with Bible, fixing our thoughts on God and his Son through the content of his word.
2) Incline Your Heart
Fixing our thoughts can be difficult enough, but inclining the heart is imponderable for many. Not because it can’t be done, but because we have been socialized to assume it can’t. So, this is where Owen (and Keller) seems forceful, and surprising. But Owen counsels us, having fixed our minds on God’s word, to “persist in spiritual thoughts unto your refreshment” (Works of John Owen, volume 7, 393). That is, meditate until you begin to feel the word. Preach to yourself until you begin to feel more like you ought. Does the word declare God’s majesty? Feel awe. Does it warn sinners? Feel fear. Does it announce good news? Feel joy.
The goal is not to meditate for a particular duration of time, but to meditate until the point of delight, to persist “unto your refreshment.” The apostle Peter speaks of the present, not merely the future — of joy the Christian experiences now, in this age, not only in the one to come — when he says, “Though you do not now see [Jesus with your physical eyes], you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8). Inexpressible, glorified joy is offered even now, and by no better means than fixing our minds on the word of God himself and meditating until he smiles on us, and warms our souls, with some real measure of delight.
Owen offers hope for those who think this is impossible: “Constancy in [this] duty will give ability for it. Those who conscientiously abide in its performance shall increase in light, wisdom, and experience until they are able to manage it with great success.” Keller then comments, leaning on Psalm 1, “Trees don’t grow overnight. Meditation is a sustained process like a tree growing its roots down toward the water source. The effects are cumulative. You must stick with it. We must meditate ‘day and night’ — regularly, steadily” (161–162).
Questions arise not only because of our sin but our humanity. Owen knew this every bit as much as we do, if not far better. Anticipating our objection, Keller writes,
Owen is quite realistic. He admits that sometimes, no matter what we do, we simply cannot concentrate, or we find our thoughts do not become big and affecting, but rather we feel bored, hard, and distracted. Then, Owen says, simply turn to God and make brief, intense appeals for help. Sometimes that is all you will do the rest of your scheduled time, and sometimes the very cries for help serve to concentrate the mind and soften the heart. (Prayer, 161)
A huge difference lies between occasional realism and a daily pattern of resignation. There’s a world of difference between a lazy beginner and the wise veteran, who has learned the lost art and come to experience the third stage with regularity, despite the “sometimes” of dryness and distraction.
3) Enjoy Your God
In the final stage, we give vent, or give space, to the enjoyment (or crying out) begun in the second. We fan the flame of fitting affection for the truth in view. This is the high point of meditation — enjoying God in Christ — which fills our souls with “an answering response.” As Keller comments, we “listen, study, think, reflect, and ponder the Scriptures until there is an answering response in our hearts and minds” (55, emphasis added) — which leads us to prayer. According to Keller,
meditation before prayer consists of thinking, then inclining, and, finally, either enjoying the presence or admitting the absence and asking for his mercy and help. Meditation is thinking a truth out and then thinking a truth in until its ideas become “big” and “sweet,” moving and affecting, and until the reality of God is sensed upon the heart. (162)
And this “sensing of God on the heart,” through meditating on his word, issues in our response of prayer.
Without immersion in God’s words, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow but also untethered from reality. We may be responding not to the real God but to what we wish God and life to be like. Indeed, if left to themselves our hearts will tend to create a God who doesn’t exist. . . . Without prayer that answers the God of the Bible, we will only be talking to ourselves. (62)
So, we want our prayers to be prompted by and tethered to the intake of God’s word. “We would never produce the full range of biblical prayer if we were initiating prayer according to our own inner needs and psychology. It can only be produced if we are responding in prayer according to who God is as revealed in the Scripture” (60).
Not Just Truth but Jesus
Keller ends this blessed tenth chapter with Jesus himself as the chief focus of our meditation. Not only did the God-man delight in the word of God like the happy man of Psalm 1, but he himself is “the one to whom all the Scripture points” (163). As Christians, we learn to meditate both with him and on him.
In our reading and rereading and study and lingering over Scripture, we persist to know and enjoy not just truth but the Truth himself. For Christians, the final focus of our meditation is personal, and both perfectly human and fully divine in the person of Jesus Christ.