Steep Your Soul with Christian Meditation

This morning I opened my Bible and found my sweet assignment for the day: Psalm 63 — “a Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.”

• Verse 1: “My soul thirsts for you . . . as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”
  
• Verse 5: “My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food . . .” How will his soul thirst and hunger be satisfied?
  
• Verse 2: “So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary [the wilderness!], beholding your power and glory.” And how will he look and behold?
  
• Verse 6: “I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night.” There it is: meditation.
  

Then we see David’s soul will cling to God (verse 8), and he will “sing for joy” (verse 7) and “rejoice in God” (verse 11), and in David, “all who swear by him shall exult” (verse 11) — all because David, in the wilderness, beholds God’s power and glory through meditation.

Enjoy God in Real Time

My assignment is to finish our evening with Christian meditation. Not Eastern meditation, where you empty your mind and try to find peace in nothingness, but biblical meditation, where you fill your mind with what God himself says, and how God himself leads your mind through his words and Spirit that you might find real peace and joy in him.

The Hebrew for meditate (hagah) in Psalm 63:6 means to ruminate, reflect, muse; we might say to stew (in a positive sense) or to stay on something, abide in something.

It’s the command given to Israel’s new leader after Moses in Joshua 1:8: “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night.” And it’s one of the key words in Psalm 1:2: “[Blessed is the man whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”

Biblical meditation involves fixing the mind’s attention on God, through his revealed word, in order to stir up God-honoring affections in the heart. And that focus on the heart, on the affections, on enjoying God in Jesus Christ is very important. I don’t think it’s Christian meditation without that. This is what distinguishes meditation from Bible reading and Bible study and prayer and outward application.

(Mueller commends “not the simple reading of the word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts” — that is, meditation.)

To summarize an older voice, Father Brakel (Wilhelmus à Brakel, who lived from 1635 to 1711, a Dutch Reformed minister and theologian) uses a series of active verbs: In meditation, the soul reflects upon, reasons about, approves of, delights in, and is astonished about God himself and his things as he has revealed (The Christian’s Reasonable Service, 4:25). Christian meditation begins with God’s revelation. He speaks, and in meditation we reflect, reason, approve of, delight in, are astonished about what God says.

Or, to quote a more recent voice, Matthew Bingham’s excellent 2025 book A Heart Aflame for God says this: Meditation involves “directing one’s attention toward God and his promises as revealed in Scripture with the aim of stirring up God-honoring affections” (131).

Reading Scripture is the first and most basic act. That’s the first thing you do with a text — read it. Studying Scripture overcomes informational and intellectual and integrational barriers to understand God’s word and its good and necessary inferences. Study is a means to something else, but meditation is an end: It seeks to enjoy God in real time, in the moment.

And one way to talk about meditation is that it is the internal application of God’s word to our own souls. Yes, meditation will lead us to external acts, beginning with prayer and then various resolves of the will to love and good deeds, to apply God’s word to our external lives. But meditation is first concerned to apply God’s word to the inner person, the soul — through the mind, to the heart — with prayer being, then, a first response to the word of God received in meditation.

Read, Meditate, Pray

Meditation is a bridge between Bible reading and prayer. According to Thomas Manton (see the 2026 Puritan Treasures for Today release of Holy Meditation, edited by Stephen Yuille):

Meditation is a middle sort of duty, between the word and prayer, and has respect to both. The word feeds meditation, and meditation feeds prayer. . . . Meditation must follow hearing and precede prayer.

There is a proper order among Bible reading and meditation and prayer. This shapes the way I’ve come to think about an arc for morning devotions: Begin with Bible, move to meditation, polish with prayer.

And if this talk of meditation sounds strange to you, you’re not alone. In the late seventeenth century, Father Brakel called meditation “this secret art which is practiced but little” (The Christian’s Reasonable Service, 4:29). And Manton (1620–1677) could lament, almost four centuries ago, “We live in days of action and commotion; we think that we have so much to do and, as a result, too few of us desire to converse with God” (Holy Meditation, 3).

And this happens despite what we know from “natural law” and what modern society is beginning to remind us of (with all these mindfulness apps and practices): Humans are made to ponder, ruminate, and cultivate the interior life.

“Meditation is like tending to the fire: seeking to keep the fireplace of our souls hot.”

As Christians, we have the biblical examples of Enoch and Isaac and Joshua and David, and surely Jesus. (Sinclair Ferguson: “Jesus’s intimate acquaintance with Scripture did not come [magically from heaven] during the period of his public ministry; it was grounded no doubt on his early education, but nourished by long years of personal meditation.” See his book The Holy Spirit, 44.) The great Christian tradition has long included meditation, and I wonder how much the neglect of this secret art in our day is owing to the modern pace of life.

Whatever the causes (and I suspect there are many), our anxious generation has special need to rediscover this lost art, both to hold back the faith-eroding tides of modern life and to feed our joy for spiritual health and thriving in the Christian life. And pastors perhaps need that all the more.

Now, the Puritans, based on the biblical texts, talk about two types of meditation:

• deliberate, planned, habitual — at least a daily anchor point
  
• sudden, occasional, extemporal, spontaneous — turning the mind and heart Godward in the course of daily life
  

My focus here is on the deliberate, planned, habitual morning meditation.

My Influences

My two main influences have been George Mueller and John Piper. And I believe there’s an important sense in which Scripture itself teaches the sort of approach I want to speak about here, not only in what it explicitly commends and the examples it gives but also in its very nature — in its divine origin and composition and preservation, and in the fact that this book, unlike any other book, is the very word of God.

You might ask, “What kind of engagement does a mass market beach-read deserve? What kind of perusing does a magazine invite? What about a webpage? What about a social media post from your aunt?” Or, “What about a classic book that has survived generations?” Then ask, “What about the living words of the living God?”

Brothers and sisters, if we would only pause to ask that question, and answer it with authenticity, and adjust our lives accordingly to create life-giving, heart-protecting, joy-deepening habits for it (and not let the careless, sloppy, hurried, dutiful way we read other texts in our lives spill over into how we engage the word of God!), I think we’d get there in time to what Scripture calls meditation.

In one sense, this almost lost art of meditation is just how Bible intake grows and deepens over time if this book is from God and for our joy. If that’s true, you learn to read it in certain soul-warming, soul-feeding ways. So, meditation is the timeless answer to the question “How do I receive a book from God for his glory through my joy in him?”

No Rules?

At this point, some say, “Great, just tell me how to do it! The Bible commends and commands meditation. Okay, how?”

Ask a Catholic mystic, and he’s very happy to tell you what to do. How long you got? Hours, days, weeks? The Catholic may be happy to add his instructions to Scripture if it seems useful. But ask a Protestant, and in particular a Puritan, and they’ll be far more careful:

• Father Brakel: “I do not wish to prescribe rules to you. Begin with it and you will experience yourself which way is best for you” (The Christian’s Reasonable Service, 4:30).
  
• Manton: “Do not bridle up the free spirit by the rules of method.” “We do not prescribe, but advise.”
  

Matthew Bingham recently addressed this for us in an essay for pastors at Desiring God:

While the importance of meditation was clearly stated by [Puritan] authors, precisely what the practice should entail has been less clear. It’s not that Puritan authors didn’t write at length about meditation; they certainly did. . . . In their descriptions of meditation, however, they conspicuously avoid providing the reader with detailed directions for how one is to go about meditating. . . . [W]hile one finds page upon page commending meditation and unpacking its spiritual benefits, one does not find much by way of a concrete how-to guide. . . .

This lack of specificity can be frustrating to readers who are convinced of meditation’s significance but unsure how to proceed.

Here’s how I want to help in our last few minutes: not by giving you rules the Puritans wouldn’t give, but by gathering together some of the many images they use to try to communicate a sense of what we’re pursuing in meditation. My hope is that this might help you go about it personally, and “experience yourself which way is best for you” (as Father Brakel says) as you’re led by the text of Scripture and the indwelling Spirit, and enjoy freedom in the details (and different texts will lead you differently from day to day!).

Watering the Tree

So, some concrete images to get you going in the right direction:

First, one main Bible image: the well-watered tree of Psalm 1.

Blessed is the man . . .
[whose] delight is in the law of the Lord,
     and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
     planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
     and its leaf does not wither. (Psalm 1:1–3)

Delight leads to meditation, and meditation to increased delight. It’s one thing for a tree to receive rain. But how much rain hits the ground and runs away from the root system? But a tree “planted by streams of water” is a picture of the Christian who meditates daily on the stream of God’s word, from delight and seeking delight. He’s watered daily, not irregularly.

I do have my own images of meditation that I’ve found helpful over the years (steeping a tea bag, yardwork, a movie, “gather a day’s portion” (see Exodus 16:16), and the Puritans have many others, more than I have time for here: climbing stairs, inspecting a house, opening a hatch, reading sacred letters, distilling spirits (such as alembic).

But as I gathered these images in recent weeks, two main categories emerged, one of which has been my own go-to category over the years, and another which is now freshly on my radar. I hope both might be helpful in focusing your soul on what we’re seeking as we come to meditation and seek to “experience yourself which way is best for you.”

Warming Our Hearts

The first macro image is of warming. This is the one that’s fresh to me, and I’m looking forward to making more of it. Maybe Thomas Watson (1620–1686) captures it best, at the general level, when he says, “warm yourself at the fire of meditation.” But we can get more specific.

There’s the fireplace: The temperature of our hearts rises and falls like a fire. As the fire burns, so goes the fuel, and the fire eventually burns down to embers. Meditation is like tending to the fire: seeking to keep the fireplace of our souls hot and not letting it burn all the way down to embers or burn out.

In this fireplace image, several Puritans mention bellows, the bag-like instrument you expand and contract to feed oxygen and intensify a fire:

• Isaac Ambrose: “Meditation is the bellows of the soul that kindles and inflames holy affections.”
  
• Manton: “Ponderous thoughts are the bellows that kindle the affections. They inflame those latent sparks of grace that are in the soul” (23). “[P]ly the bellows and blow hard” (xi).
  
• William Bates (1625–1699) even points to building a fire from wet wood to talk about persisting in it and not giving up too quickly: Meditate “ordinarily till you find some sensible benefit [whether joy or fear or comfort or rebuke] conveyed to your soul.” Persist, he says, “till the flame doth so ascend.”
  

Memorably, Watson points to the effect of a torch in a garden versus the sun:

There is as much difference between the knowledge of a truth, and the meditation of a truth, as there is between the light of a torch, and the light of the sun: set up a lamp or torch in the garden, and it has no influence. The sun has a sweet influence, it makes the plants to grow, and the herbs to flourish: so knowledge is but like a torch lighted in the understanding, which has little or no influence, it makes not a man the better; but meditation is like the shining of the sun, it operates on the affections, it warms the heart and makes it more holy. Meditation fetches life in a truth.

Or boiling water:

• George Swinnock (1627–1673): “Meditation to the word is what fire is to water; though water be naturally so cold, yet put fire under it, and it will make it hot and boiling [zeal!]; so, though your heart be cold in regard of affection to the word, put but this fire under it, and it will boil with love to it.”
  
• Manton: “Our hearts are naturally cold, but meditation makes them hot, causing them to boil with love for God and his word.”
  
• A sidenote on that: Brothers, the most important preparation on Sunday morning is not preparing the sermon; it’s preparing the preacher. And nothing prepares the soul of the preacher like the warming of meditation.
  

Another warming image: wax. Again, Swinnock: “When your heart is like wax hardened, bring it by meditation to the warm beams of this sun, and they will soften it.”

Or the bird, warming her eggs:

• Bates: “The bird leaves her nest for a long space, the eggs chill and are not fit for production; but where there is a constant incubation, then they bring forth; so when we leave religious duties for a long space, our affections chill, and grow cold; and are not fit to produce holiness, and comfort to our souls.”
  
• Manton: “When the bird leaves her nest and is absent for a long time, the eggs grow cold and do not hatch. Likewise, our desires grow cold and dull without meditation” (24).
  
• Watson: “Meditation hatches good affections, as the hen her young ones by sitting on them.”
  

Feeding Our Hearts

The second major image, and this is the one that has informed me most over the years, is food: chewing and tasting (enjoying).

• Father Brakel talks about the empty soul being filled in meditation.
  
• Manton: “Faith will starve unless it is fed by continual meditation on God’s promises” (10).
  
• Samuel Ward (1577–1640): “Stir up your soul [in meditation] to converse with Christ. Look what promises and privileges you do habitually believe, now actually think of them, roll them under your tongue, chew on them till you feel some sweetness in the palate of your soul.”
  

Honey is a treat to be savored, not rushed. Cows chew the cud and seem to be in no hurry. I have not spent much time on farms, but I have never seen a cow that seemed in a rush as it chewed. So it is for us in the feeding of meditation.

One of my favorite images is from Edmund Calamy (1600–1666): the honeybee. He says be like “the bee that dwells and abides upon the flower, to suck out all the sweetness.”

“Our aim is to enjoy the true God and real Jesus, crucified and risen, alive and reigning.”

Which brings us back to Mueller, who talked about “searching . . . into every verse, to get blessing out of it.” His prevailing image was feeding, which has been so influential for me. He talks about seeking “food for my own soul.” And his morning meditation being “not for the sake of public ministry of the word; not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon; but for the sake of obtaining food for my soul.” And Mueller has such a holy consumerist approach, you might say, or Christian Hedonistic: He “continually keep[s] before me that food for my own soul is the object of my meditation.”

Mueller says, “The first thing the child of God has to do morning by morning is, to obtain food for his inner man.” Oh, how desperately Christians in every age need this, and I fear it may be more embattled and neglected and threatened in our day than at least in recent generations. Our people need this to survive the unceasing tides of information and disinformation and algorithms in our generation. And we pastors need it. And we need to lead our people in it.

One last food image from Manton: “Joy and delight are fed by meditation, for [meditation] turns God’s promises into food” (26). Then Manton quotes Psalm 63:5–6:

My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food,
     and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips,
when I remember you upon my bed,
     and meditate on you in the watches of the night.

This brings us back to the daily pursuit of God and our joy in him: turning the thirst and hunger of our souls to God for satisfaction by beholding his power and glory through meditating on his word.

Slow Down and Go Deep

I know the unfamiliar can sound complicated, but there is a real simplicity in this. One way we might sum up meditation is to say: Be a Christian Hedonist with God’s word. When you open the Bible in the morning, you’re there for gain. You’re there to get your soul happy in him. You want to enjoy some sensible spiritual benefit. You come to warm your cold heart. You come to eat and drink and feast and satisfy your hunger and thirst — no apologies.

And, amazingly, God is honored when we come like that to him — when we come as a hedonist, saying, I’m here to feed on you, God. I’m here to warm my cooling spirit on you. O God, you are my God. Earnestly I seek you, like a thirsty soul seeking water, like a hungry soul seeking food.

We were made for this. You have the word and the Spirit. You can figure this out. “Begin with it and you will experience yourself which way is best for you.” Set aside enough margin to be unhurried. Find a quiet place and block out distractions. Open God’s word with some modest plan and follow its order and read by his Spirit and look for places to slow down and pause and go deep.

And lest you go with the wrong impression, that this “secret art” and its joys are in any way inaccessible to the ordinary Christian, I echo this clarifying word from Matthew Bingham: In meditation we “really are not doing anything more complicated than slowing down and reflecting honestly on the ways that biblical ideas intersect with [our] own hearts and lives” (157).

Our aim is to enjoy the true God and real Jesus, crucified and risen, alive and reigning; to commune with him; to experience the thrill of marveling at him, knowing him, lingering in awe of him — and so to have our hearts warmed and fed, that we might go in peace, and joy, into our callings.