Meditation and Close Communion with God
This age is unfavorable to a close companionship with God and an intimate acquaintance with his truth. The hurry and bustle of business, the increasing multiplication of duties, the thousand and one demands upon our time, are calculated to drive God from our thoughts. We need more meditation. Our souls do not dwell enough in the region of holy and devout contemplation. We are in no danger of becoming mystics. When great business matters claim our attention, we pause and think. Shall we not, then, give solemn thought to the greatest of all business, the active usefulness and immortal glory of our souls and the souls of others? When we read the truth, do we think about it after we read it? Is it food? Does it strengthen us? We would have more piety if we had more meditation. Look at the early ages of Christianity. Then Christians were given to much contemplation. Those were ages of deep spirituality and sublime devotion. Modern sermons fall short of the pathos which is breathed out from the impassioned utterances of Augustine and Chrysostom. Somehow we haven’t the unction which the fathers had. Only now and then are our hearts fired and our tongues loosed, while they seem to have been continually near the throne. The secret is, they continually walked with God. Those periods in the history of Christianity in which there have been the deepest piety and the greatest results from labor for Christ, were those times when men turned away from the world and communed with God. The preaching and writing of those periods are fragrant with piety. Witness Flavel’s “Redemption,” Baxter’s “Reformed Pastor” and “Saints’ Rest,” South’s, Barrows’ and Ridgely’s Sermons, Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Jeremy Taylor’s “Holy Living and Dying.” A close, personal communion with God would work wonders among his people. We are assimilated to that of which we think most. Thought is the source of outward character. As the stream cannot rise above its source, character cannot rise above the thought out of which it grows. Then it follows that we would have more holy character if we had more holy thought. May it be said of our Bibles, “out of sight, out of mind”? Most Christians read their Bibles, but do they meditate on the momentous truths contained in them? How vast are those truths! The soul is expanded when it comprehends them; it is lifted up from the realm of sense into the realm of spirit and is enveloped in a divine atmosphere. The duty of devout meditation is inculcated in the Scriptures. The psalmist says, speaking of the upright man, “In his law doth he meditate day and night.” Again, “I will meditate in thy precepts and have respect unto thy ways.” “Thy servant did meditate in thy statutes.” “I will meditate in thy precepts.” Says Paul to Timothy, “Meditate on these things.” Some one may say, “I haven’t time to give my mind much to thoughts of God and his truth.” What should be the chief concern of this life? Should it not be to walk with God and hold constant communion with him in order to be the better prepared for that more perfect communion with him, on which the Christian shall before long enter? Have we ever lost anything by living near Christ? Are not his smile and love worth more than houses and lands and fine raiment?—Central Baptist.