I love having quiet times with God. There is nothing like experiencing God’s love, touch, and blessing in stillness with Him. His job is to be our Lover; ours is to be His beloved. I love letting God touch me. He draws me into Him, erasing all of the striving, pressure, frustration, and frantic pace of life.
Meditation is about finding our rhythm with God. When we couldn’t have cared less about Him, God couldn’t have cared more. Before we knew Him, He took the initiative and reached out to us. “We love Him because He first loved us,” says 1 John 4:19. We responded to what He did, and He answered our response. Like a dance, we went back and forth — and we still do. God moves, we move. The Father works, we work. The Holy Spirit engages, we engage. Everything we do flows out of our relationship with God. Meditation provides us with the inward anointing to reveal the Presence of God.
All of life in the Spirit flows from the inside/out. Coming from the inner man of the Spirit, through the soul as a vehicle of expression which uses our body to demonstrate to the outside world who we really are in the Spirit.
Meditation is a fabulous spiritual discipline that enables us to see in the Spirit. It is the eyes of our heart being enlightened so that we can know (i.e., understand and experience) who God is for us. (Ephesians 1:18).
Prayer is the process of finding out what God wants to do and then asking Him to do it. Meditation is an important precursor to that effort. Before we pray, we ought to meditate, read, think, listen, and be still. Reading the Bible does reveal the will of God to us because confidence and prayer go together. By meditating on the Word of God, the way I pray is shaped.
Several months ago, our church leadership team read Romans 8:35–39 together:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written:
“For Your sake we are being put to death all day long; We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The difficulty is that our emotions can become more time for us than the gospel if we let them.
Emotions can be as strong and as hard to arrest as a runaway horse. We can place more power and emphasis on them than the revealed word of God in scripture.
“I feel really disconnected from God,” we say. However we fail to see that against what the Lord says in scripture. “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” “I am with you always.” “Nothing can separate you from My love!”
Reading a passage like the above can infuse Christians with confidence. What a great thing to pray! Nothing can separate us from the love of God: by meditating on it, this truth embeds itself deep within our spirits. Our minds become renewed through the power of God’s love. We give our inner being the opportunity to access the Holy Spirit and be changed.
In Psalm 46:10, God gave us an important instruction: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Stillness releases a capacity in us to receive truth at a deeper level. “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:23–24. “He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.” Learning how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in the midst of problems and difficulties is vital. Without that help, we miss the wealth of our spiritual journey.
It is perfectly possible to bring ourselves to a place of peace. It is a simple discipline. Having practiced this for thirty years, I can now bring myself to peace in any situation within ten seconds. I have learned how to retreat back into my spirit and find the peace of stillness that meditation births in me. It has become simple for me, like using a computer or driving a car. Without stillness, our experience of God is limited. Stillness is a precursor to rest in the Lord, drawing us into a continual experience of His presence.
Put simply, we have to hear God’s silence before we can listen to His voice. A silence exists in God that is so knowing, so healing, so releasing, and so embracing, that all kinds of things can be communicated to your heart. The silence is almost deafening: “Deep calls unto deep at the noise of Your waterfalls; all Your waves and billows have gone over me,” as the psalmist sang (Psalm 42:7). That capacity to enter stillness can release an unbroken communion with God and bring us into a place of being God-conscious.
-This article is an excerpt from Approaching the Heart of Prophecy which is available for $10 at Brilliant Book House through the end of May.
“Fly Home” by The Wandering Angel licensed BY CC 2.0
