Christian Meditation is a quiet time for you to re-integrate and re-calibrate your mind with your body. And re-integrate and re-calibrate your mind and body with God‘s presence with you and in you. Remember the quote from the apostle Paul in Acts 17:28 – In him you live and move and have your being.
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It’s important to use meditation to try to feel your whole body, bringing your mind and body back into an integration where you embrace your whole entire body as part of your soul. Your body is an important part of who you are eternally. That’s why you will have a bodily resurrection in your salvation. Not a new body, but a transformed body without decay or sin or mortality. When we embrace our bodies as part of who we are, we are able to live as God intends. And we’re able to present our entire selves, including the members of our bodies, to God’s Spirit.
So an effective way of feeling your body is to focus on breathing and relaxing the entirety of your body and at the same time focus on feeling your body relax. This is re-integrating your mind with your body in meditation. So take some time now to bring your mind’s awareness on relaxing your whole body with each breath. And focus on feeling your body relax.
Try to imagine your mind feeling your body from within. As if your mind is going inside your body and feeling your whole body.
A big reason we focus on getting good at learning how to feel your body from within is because that’s how you can feel biblical images into your body. So before I get up to preach on Sunday, I ask God to fill me with his Spirit, and I focus on feeling my whole body and imagining his Spirit filling every cell in my body as his holy temple. Imagining my whole body being filled with God’s Spirit. This is a much more biblical way to think of it than just limiting God’s Spirit to your “spiritual” self. You are an embodied temple of God’s Spirit. So think of your body this way, and use your imagination to feel this biblical image into your body.
Psalms 19:14 ESV
Psalm 19:1–4 NIV
The universe is an accurate picture of God in some ways. A finite picture that significantly “declares the glory of God” by “proclaiming the work of his hands.”
Psalm 139:13–14 NIV
Paul Davies (The Goldilocks Enigma)
“Biological organisms are immensely complex... To a physicist they look nothing short of miraculous. …The living cell contains minuscule pumps, levers, motors, rotors, turbines, propellers, scissors, and many other instruments familiar from a human workshop…. The command and control functions of the cell are encoded in its DNA database, which implements instructions through intermediary molecules using an optimal mathematical code to convert software instructions into hardware products with customized functionality. And this is just one cell. In a larger organism, vastly many cells get together and cooperate to form organs such as eyes, ears, brains, livers, and kidneys, many of them immensely elaborate in their structure and function. The human brain alone has more cells than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So it all adds up to a package of marvels that boggles the mind.”
Psalm 19:1
Psalm 139:14
Psalms 119:27 (ESV)
Psalms 19:14 ESV
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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.