Meditation: To think deeply, to reflect upon.
Here are four meditation techniques. Some of these work better for some scriptures than others. Three of them do not require any materials and can be done anywhere (although it’s probably best to concentrate on driving and not scripture when you are in your car).
When thinking about God and scripture remember :
- Ask God’s Spirit to guide you and ‘bring you into all truth’
- Ask God to help you obey what you have learned
- Practise what you have learned
- And always thank God for answers (and everything else)
Word Emphasis Meditation
Going through a passage several times,
- putting emphasis on each word separately
- thinking about why that word is there
- and what it means in this passage
Then think about what some common meanings for the word are.
Picture Visualisation
Some pictures lend themselves to funny or memorable pictures and thoughts. They can help you understand the meaning or help you remember more clearly.
Here are some examples
Word Study
A word study can be part of Bible study (using specialised books and resources) BUT by using basic resources (like a dictionary or thesaurus) you can quickly meditate on scriptures.
This will help you gain a deeper understanding, as well as improve your Bible memorisation.
Inspired Imagination Meditation
Sometimes we miss the small details of a story because we skip over familiar details.
Some times we let our culture and way of doing things get in the way of understanding.
One way to get more out of the Bible passages is let your Holy Spirit lead imagination fill in the gaps.
This isn’t a license for pure fantasy, but with some questions, some thought and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit you can get more out of stories and parables
Further Study
Bible meditation is helpful to deepen your thinking about, and memorisation of passages. However it is a much better tool when linked with further knowledge. We would recommend looking at some of our Bible Study articles.
In particular the Visualisation and Imagination articles- looking at using the 5W questions to further study the Bible, is a good place to start.
A look at the tools section will also give you some great resources to improve your meditations. Maps, pictures, concordances showing the original language, as well as Bible dictionaries and encyclopaedias are all fuel for the fire of your thoughts and learnings. Don’t forget to also look at the big picture so you can fit your learning into the over all frame work of God’s message.