Quotes About Meditation

Through prayer and study, worship and service, we regularly digest God's word into the core of our being, where it feeds and transforms us. Continue

The primary purpose of prayer is to bring us into such a life of communion with the Father that, by the power of the Spirit, we are increasingly conformed to the image of the Son.

In the quiet of those brief hours, listen to the thunder of God's silence.

But all authentic prayer is a scraping of the heart whereby the dregs of the soul are offered up to God. Nehemiah's

There is one major difference that has occurred in the past forty years that does indeed impinge upon the spiritual life. I can state it in one word: distraction. Distraction is the primary spiritual problem in contemporary culture.

One caution: our souls will never grow in God if we read the Bible solely to get ammunition to defend ourselves or to defeat others. No. We read the Bible to be fed. We read it to be converted, to be strengthened, to be taught, to be rebuked, to be counseled, to be comforted. As we sit under the Bible for sustained periods, we will be formed by the experience.

This form of meditation is best accomplished with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other!

We read every verse of Scripture lovingly and attentively, because every verse is a potential summons from God.

Real prayer is life creating and life changing.

accept the Word of Scripture and ponder it in your heart, as Mary did. That is all. That is meditation." —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Way to Freedom5

It is that we should learn to pray even while we are dwelling on evil. Perhaps we are waging an interior battle over anger, or lust, or pride, or greed, or ambition. We need not isolate these things from prayer.

There is one major difference that has occurred in the past forty years that does indeed impinge upon the spiritual life. I can state it in one word: distraction.

What happens in meditation is that we create the emotional and spiritual space which allows Christ to construct an inner sanctuary in the heart.

Our own spiritual formation will be strengthened if, in our busy, crowded, and noisy lives, we find regular times and places for quiet, for prayer, for listening to God. Time alone with God gives us renewed energy to live fully engaged with the world again. Do

We are silent after hearing the Word because the Word is still speaking and dwelling within us. We are silent at the beginning of the day because God should have the first word, and we are silent before going to sleep because the last word also belongs to God." —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together 6

Reading the Bible for spiritual transformation is not a one-sided endeavor: it is a dialogue of human spirit and Holy Spirit.

remember these practices earn us nothing in the economy of God. Nothing. Their only purpose is to place us before God. That is all.

As we see in Ezra's life, committed study of Scripture can bring about much more than merely head knowledge. It can bring God himself into all the recesses of our being, for "the word of God is living and active" (Heb 4:12). Take

Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification. One

One of the fruits of silence is the freedom to let God be our justifier. We don't need to straighten others out.

Bonhoeffer writes, "Real silence, real stillness, really holding one's tongue comes only as the sober consequence of spiritual stillness."6

If we feed our souls regularly on God's word, several times each day, we should become robust spiritually just as we feed on ordinary food several times each day, and become robust physically. Nothing is more important than hearing and obeying the word of God." —David

Of all spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father.

Whenever the Christian idea of meditation is taken seriously, there are those who assume it is synonymous with the concept of meditation centered in Eastern religions. In reality, the two ideas stand worlds apart. Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind. The two ideas are quite different.