God’s love is described in the New Testament as something you imaginatively “clothe yourself” with. This kind of Christian meditation brings the transcendent experience of God into your mind and into your body so that you can replace anxiety, insecurity, stress and tension with the better and truer imagination of God’s infinite and intimate presence and love for YOU.
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Body mindfulness and awareness helps you embrace your body — recalibrate your body — with the reality of God’s life-giving presence and love.
We will first focus on meditation and your body. Connecting your physical body with your spirit. Then we’ll add a meditation on Colossians 3:13 to re-calibrate your body and spirit with God’s presence and love..
Colossians 3:12
…as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. …14 And over all these virtues put on love…”
Steve Cuss (Managing Leadership Anxiety)
Anxiety is a signal, not a root cause. Anxiety is generated when we think we need something in any particular moment that we don’t actually need. Anxiety is not just worry and fear. It’s how you react when you don’t get something you think you need.
The point is that anxiety becomes a marker that something other than God’s presence and love is at play in my mind and body.
So when anxiety strikes (elevated heart rate, muscle tension, mental distraction, anger fantasies), some questions to consider:
1) What do I feel I need that’s being threatened?
2) Why do I feel that I need it?
3) Do I really need it?
These questions can help you realize where you’re unconsciously attaching to a want as a “need” and consciously release it by remembering that in Christ you already have everything you need. That you can trust God‘s presence and love and care for you that is far greater than your plan for yourself and your “false self” (old self) that drives your anxieties and fears and insecurities and anger and anger fantasies and stress.
Notice what Paul says before this…
Colossians 3:9-10 (NIV)
…Since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator…
Remember Thomas Merton called this old self the “false self.”
Remember the old self was crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20).
Colossians 3:12
…as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. …14 And over all these virtues put on love…”
Feel this taking off the old self and putting on the new self and “clothing yourself” inside those parts as intensely as you can.
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Our audio engineer is Diego Huaman.
This podcast is a ministry of The Crossing, a church in Columbia, Missouri, a college town where the flagship campus of the University of Missouri is located.