A Christian Meditation with Psalm 36:8-9

Christian meditation can help refocus your mind on God's presence using biblical imagery to get the stress, anxiety, and anger out of your heart and out of your body. Take about 20 minutes to meditate with this episode. By listening to this podcast episode, you’re carving out a quiet time to be alone with God. Using meditation to recalibrate your mind and heart and even your body with the vertical reality of God’s presence and God’s promises. Using your biblically guided imagination to experience God’s presence and promises to you in a way that replaces stress and anxiety and worry and even shame with God’s peace and joy and assurances. This is something God’s people have been doing for thousands of years. Remember what Paul writes in… 2 Corinthians 3:18 (NIV) And we all, who … contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. A synonym for contemplate is to meditate. Biblical meditation is a focused imagination that “contemplates the LORD’s glory” (2 Cor 3:18), and brings transformation by recalibrating your whole self, including your body, with God’s Spirit. Let’s take the time to do that now. (But first, if your podcast app is set to skip silent sections, disable that now.) Biblically guided meditation gives you a quiet time with God — where you can contemplate the Lord’s glory by meditating on biblical pictures — images — of God for you to experience God in a deeper way by using your imagination in meditation. The eyes of your heart. A common image for God in the Bible is a clear, abundant stream of life-giving water. Like when God calls himself “the fountain of living waters” in Jeremiah 2:13. That’s a picture for you to set your imagination on in mediation so you see God and experience God in a deeper way. So David meditates on this, speaking of those who take refuge in the LORD… Psalms 36:8-9 (ESV) They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. For with you is the fountain of life… Let’s meditate using this same biblical image…picture this! Focus your mind on imagining this reality. The I AM is a river of delights — a fountain of life — that your whole self – including every cell in your body — is satisfied by. Feel this image in your body. Try to feel your whole body (every cell) bathing and drinking from the I AM who is the river of delight and fountain of life. Only God can give life-giving “living waters” to your body. Your soul. Your mind. Your whole being. Using the eyes of your heart, see this reality as true for you — picture yourself drinking in delight from the abundance of God’s fountain of life. Feel your body floating in God’s river of delight. David’s imaginative meditation is ultimately prophetic in that he gives a poetic picture of what will ultimately be true when heaven comes back to earth when Jesus returns. Revelation 7:17 (ESV) For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water… Revelation 22:1 (ESV) Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb… Psalm 46:4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. But there is a reality to this you can experience now through a kind of mental time travel — meditation is a way to feast on the abundance of God’s house. A way to drink from the river of his delights. A way to experience God now as our “fountain of life.” Because it’s true now. The I AM inhabits eternity. Who he will be for you when heaven returns to earth in Jesus is who he IS for you now by his Holy Spirit. This is a meditation on an image with a promise. Picture this — “springs of living water” — “the river of the water of life, bright as crystal,...