My goal in this podcast — Christian Meditation for A Bigger Life — is to help 21st-century Christians in the always distracted digital age — to connect with God with your whole being — including your body — and to wire into your brain the reality of that embodied connection in each moment. And I think most of us as Christians are often living unconsciously anxious and tense lives with a kind of disconnection between our body and mind, and disconnection between our body and God’s Spirit. Where our “Christian faith” has become almost exclusively about certain beliefs rather than an embodied experience with God’s Spirit who is always 100% present with us and in us in the NOW.
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Just imagine being alone right now with the Lord of Heaven and Earth, who rules over every detail in your life. “Not even a sparrow falls to the ground apart from the care of your Heavenly Father,” Jesus says in Matthew 10:29, “and he has numbered the very hairs of your head.” Jesus’s point was the same as Psalm 118:1, that you can trust in his goodness and his steadfast love for you right now. He rules over everything in his entire universe, and he is right there at your right hand. Imagine this – your entire body resting secure in the love and care of your Father in heaven.
Meditation is focused, intentional thought. Using your imagination to better see/envision unseen realities. Using your biblically guided imagination to experience God in a way that replaces built-up tension and stress and anxiety in your mind and body with a renewing and calming awareness of and experience of God’s presence in all his goodness and his steadfast love for you.
We now know through recent neuroscience and advanced imaging technology that our brains are constantly re-wiring to match our experiences and our environment. And what we do, what we see, what we say, what we think, how we react or respond to perceived threats is always changing our brain in our neurons and connections between neurons. This is why we can get good at a new skill like typing on a keyboard or playing scales quickly on an instrument or playing a sport. And we can change our brains to get better and better at responding to perceived threats with stress and anxiety. Or we can get better and better at perceiving God’s presence in all his ruling power and goodness and steadfast love in those situations instead. All by being transformed by the renewing of your mind — the re-wiring of your brain. The Bible has been telling us this all along even if neuroscience is only recently discovering it.
This is why Christian meditation is so important for you to learn how to do. To train your brain to do. It’s a discipline that is hard to do at first but gets easier and much more enjoyable with practice. It’s easy to feel too busy for it and want to move on to the next thing. That’s a big mistake if you want to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Because not only does this kind of meditation transform how you see and think of reality, but it will also transform your body in so many ways by removing stress and anxiety and insecurity and anger from your body.
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Our audio engineer is Diego Huaman.