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Psalms 27:4 NIV
Poetic, imaginative language. David is using his imagination because there was no physical temple in David’s time. We can experience God’s temple that way too, but not about some earthly temple. Genesis 1 presents all of creation as God’s temple. And the last two chapters of the Bible do the same.
This is the ultimate promise of the whole Bible’s story. That one day when Jesus returns to bring heaven back to earth, all the earth will be God’s temple.
For us, to dwell in the house of the LORD is to belong in his family, and to one day live with the joy and wonder and awe of his visible presence. To experience “the beauty of the LORD.”
But for now, like David, we can experience this ultimate joy and wonder and awe for our lives through Christian meditation. Using our imagination — the eyes of our heart.
John Mark Comer
“Worship and joy start with the capacity to turn our minds’ attention toward the God who is always with us in the now.”
Daniel Levitin in his book, This Is Your Brain on Music, writes…
“Petr had just completed a study in which he kept track of people’s brain waves while they listened to music and while they imagined music. He used EEG, placing sensors that measure electrical activity emanating from the brain across the surface of the scalp. Both Petr and I were surprised to see that it was nearly impossible to tell from the data whether people were listening to or imagining music. The pattern of brain activity was virtually indistinguishable. This suggested that people use the same brain regions for remembering as they do for perceiving.”
Envisioning God being with us and in us is a kind of seeing with what Paul calls “the eyes of our heart“ in Ephesians 1:17-18.
Christian meditation is a time to spiritually focus your mind and your body on God‘s presence and all that that means for you.
Psalms 27:4 NIV
Right now you are in the temple of the LORD by being inside his creation, and as the NT says, your body is also a temple of the LORD. So make this verse, given to you by God’s Spirit, your imagined reality right now. Remember, you’re using your imagination to see invisible realities.
You’re in the presence of the One Being who is infinite. The One Being is the Source of all existence, the Giver of all life, who is God forever and is 100% present with you right now.
Christ has brought you into “the house of the LORD” through his bodily death and bodily resurrection. When God looks at you, he looks through the eyes of his perfect and eternal love for you.
“One thing” — the Ultimate pursuit. It’s kind of like when Jesus says in Matthew 6:33, “Seek first the kingdom of God … and everything else will be given to you too” — when you seek other things first, ultimately you will end up with nothing in end, and end up with nothing but anxiety and insecurity along the way. But if you focus first on the Ultimate Thing, ultimately you get everything.
To have Yahweh forever (the I AM, Source of all existence, Giver of all life, God forever, 100% present), to belong to him and his “house” “all the days of” your forever life, to have your forever life filled with his love and beauty in his restored creation, THAT’s the Ultimate you were created for and that you’re heart wants whether you realize it or not. So realize it now in this meditation.
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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.