Should Christians meditate? Is that something that we should even add to our prayer time? Today I’m sharing how Christians can add biblical meditation to their prayer routine so they can see dramatic changes in their spiritual life.

Resources Mentioned:

Power of Prayer Workbook: https://ashleyvarner.com/prayer
Soultime Meditation App: https://soultime.com
Renew180 (formerly 180Confidence): https://ashleyvarner.com/mastermind

Highlights From the Episode:

Should Christians meditate? Is meditation even something that Christians should consider putting into their prayer routine? Today, I’m going to share some ways that Christians can add a biblical meditation into their prayer routines so that they can see huge and dramatic results in their prayer time. Let’s get started.

Hey there. And welcome back to “The Renewed Mind.” I am your host, Ashley Varner, and I’m so glad that you’re here. All of this month, we’ve been talking about prayer and how we can incorporate different things into our prayer time to really deepen our relationships with the Lord.

So if you haven’t watched some of the previous episodes, a couple of weeks ago, I talked about having a personal prayer retreat. I’ve shown you a tour of my war room. And then last week, I shared just a little bit from my heart about if prayer even changes anything. So today, I wanted to jump on and really talk to you about adding something into your prayer time that will completely change your mindset, your confidence, and that is biblical meditation.

So since we’ve been talking about prayer, I was really thinking about different things that I’ve added into my own spiritual walk and the things that really made the biggest difference for me. I definitely respect a lot of the practices of early Christians, things like solitude and silence and meditation and fasting. I really find those things interesting. And I find it kind of sad that we haven’t incorporated them in our lives now in the modern-day.

I really like to add things into my prayer time that will really deepen my walk with the Lord. And one of the things that I added probably about 18 months ago was biblical meditation. And really meditation gets kind of a bad rap because there’s different types. I wanted to just kind of touch on those things first before I get into some of the benefits of meditation and how you can incorporate it into your Christian life.

So there is Eastern meditation, and there’s biblical meditation.

Eastern meditation is all about emptying your mind. And so whenever you are practicing that, you are taking everything out of your mind.

Biblical meditation, on the other hand, is all about filling your mind with God’s word. And this is something that I think Christians can benefit immensely from. It is all dependent on what your focus is, what you’re meditating on.

Because just putting your mind to a certain thought or a mantra isn’t gonna do much for you. It’s really what you’re putting your focus on. And so if we put our focus on the truth of God’s word, on the truth of who he is, that’s where the power actually comes from, not necessarily you focusing your mind on it, but on what your mind is focused on. As you are considering meditation, I really want to encourage you to make it centered and focused on God’s word.

Now, a couple of ways that you can do this, and you can incorporate this into your daily Christian walk, is the first is to memorize scripture. Now, this is something that we usually practice whenever we’re little, and every week, we’re learning a Bible verse in Sunday school and things like that. But as we get older, sometimes we forget to hide God’s word in our hearts.

Now, I always like to imagine that, what if my Bible was no longer available to me? It’s hard to believe in this kind of day where you can find stuff online, and there are free apps and all of that.

But what if the Bible wasn’t available to you, and you just had to rest on the things that you have remembered from God’s word?

Once I start thinking like that, it really makes me focus and prioritize hiding God’s word in my heart. Because the truth is, while the Bible might be available to us very readily, whenever we’re in the middle of heartache or we’re in the middle of a circumstance, we need to know either where to go in God’s word or we need to just have that memorized and meditated on in our minds.

It’s hard to go back whenever you’re in the middle of pain and hurt. Maybe you’re in the middle of disappointment or in the middle of anxiety, and you don’t really have your mindset focused on, “Hey, I need to grab my Bible and find this verse.” If you aren’t in that place, you need to rest on what you’ve he memorized and what you’ve already gained from God’s word.

So when you make the decision to memorize scripture, it is going to catapult your relationship with the Lord. Because you’re solidifying the truth of what God says into your daily mind and your daily thinking.

So on this channel, we talk a lot about mindset and confidence. And as you memorize scripture, it solidifies truth in your mindset. So if you are struggling with having a mindset that’s just topsy-turvy and all over the place, and you find yourself just in emotional imbalance, meditating and memorizing scripture is going to be a way that you kind of flatten that line out. So it’s not so many highs and lows.

Now there’s still going to be highs and lows in your life, but instead of them being really high and really up and down, up and down, what you’re going to see is you’re gonna see it really just soften. And as you meditate on God’s word, as you take it, and really fill it into your mind, what you’re doing is follow his commands. All throughout scripture, in the Psalms, David talks about meditating on God’s word, meditating on his law.

As we really make our priority to have God’s word deep in our hearts, it changes our identity. It changes who we are. Because what we’re doing is we’re replacing our thoughts with God’s thoughts. And those are the best thoughts to have, right?

Another easy way to incorporate meditation into your prayer time is by using an app that I love called Soul Time. Now, this isn’t, I’m not an affiliate. This isn’t sponsored or anything. This is just an app that I found that really helps me and benefits me. And it made it easy to incorporate meditation into my prayer time from the very beginning.

Whenever you start adding meditation into your prayer time, say you come in, you’re reading the Bible, you pray, maybe you prayer journal, and then you want to meditate after that, using an app like Soul Time is gonna be really beneficial for you.

Soultime Meditation App: https://soultime.com

Soul Time has small daily meditations. They’re usually about three minutes long that you listen to, and it’s kind of like a guided prayer, basically. It has scripture and questions for you to reflect on. And it just takes just a couple of minutes a day to start with. Now, they do have longer meditations. I’ve done some that are 15, 20, 40-minutes long, but you don’t have to start that deep, right? You don’t have to start that in-depth into your meditation.

I would actually recommend starting small. I would say, start with a verse that’s very small. You could use 1 John 4:8, which says, “God is love.”

Now, it goes on from there, but if you just wanna meditate on the fact that God is love, you can take that scripture, really meditate on that, just for a couple of minutes, and say, “Lord, I know that even though I’m dealing with hard circumstances, I know that you are full of love. I know that you are loved. And so I know that you have my best interest in mind. I know that I can trust you with my life.”

That’s where those thoughts of meditation lead to. So when you start with, God is love, and you let that truth really infiltrate your heart, it turns into more positive thinking. It turns into a positive mindset that’s more directed towards the Lord and less on the things of this world.

And so whenever we memorize scripture, whenever we take time just to have a guided prayer time, it changes who we are. And I wanted to share this on its own because it seems like in our world right now we’re always so busy. We’re always on the go. We’re always doing something.

My boys laugh at me because if I’m sitting watching a show on TV or a movie or something, I can’t ever just be doing one thing. I might have my laptop on my lap. I might be reading a book. I’m always doing something, checking my email as I’m watching a show with them. And so sometimes they say, “Mom, just stop and don’t do anything.”

My family realized this just yesterday. We had a day off, our first day off in a long time. My husband had been working some crazy hours last week. And so yesterday, we just did nothing. We slept in, we got up, we ate breakfast, and then my husband took another nap. We just did nothing. And sometimes you need that time of rest.

And if you can get tiny doses of that through meditating on God’s word on a daily basis, you are going to see it change the person that you are. So if you find yourself kind of like me, where you’re always having to go, go, go, where there’s always something happening or going on, find ways to intentionally stop and rest and fill your mind with God’s word. That’s really what meditation is all about. It’s about taking something and focusing your mind on it.

So that might mean, God wants me to rest. That might be what you meditate on. It might be, God is always with me. It might be specific verses that you’re memorizing, saying, “To fear not. For the Lord, your God is with you wherever you go.”

There might be things in your life that you’re struggling with, that you need to have very specific, focused thinking time around. Because as we do that, as we build that discipline, God is going to honor that, and he is going to meet you where you are in your prayer time. So don’t be afraid of meditation.

Make sure that you’re meditating on the right things. Make sure that you’re meditating on the truth of God’s word. Because things like affirmations and mantras and all that, they’re just fine. But if you’re not focused on the truth and the power of God’s word, that’s really where the power of meditation rests, is in what you’re meditating on.

So I hope that this helped. Let me know in the comments if meditation is something that you’ve had in your life, and make sure that you check out, on our YouTube channel, we have some meditations that are actually completed. I’ve had so many people tell me through my DMs and through my emails that they’ve enjoyed this first meditation that I started on the channel, and I’m happy to start adding some more. So there’ll be one meditation added on the YouTube channel every month. And I really hope that these are things that really catapult your personal prayer life so that you can start experiencing God in a new way by renewing your mind so that you can see your life transformed.

All right, that’s all I have for you today. I hope that you enjoyed this episode, and I will talk to you next time.