Meditate On The Scriptures

Welcome to The Soul Food Revival Series with your host Jimmy Hilton, “Encouraging Spiritual Intimacy Unto Christ-like Fruitfulness”.  So recently I was reading an excerpt, an article and it is found in the Free Grace Broadcaster issue 245, which is based on the subject of meditation.  And in it, I believe it's probably a copy of a sermon from Arthur W Pink,  titled “Chewing The Bread Of Life”.  And in that article that was reprinted from Arthur Pink, he has a quote that says, “Meditation stands to reading as mastication does to eating".   You might be wondering, “Well, what is mastication?”  Masticate means ‘to grind or to crush food’, you know, ‘with your teeth’. So what he’s saying is, meditation as it is in regard to reading, that's what mastication is to eating.  And his main point was that in reading the scriptures most people fail to meditate on what they’re reading.   So instead they’ll spend more time trying to rush through reading the scriptures of the Bible, so that, there really is no absorption of the Word of God. So therefore the nutrients in the life of the Word never really gets into them because there's really no digestion. So when we look at the scriptures and we are reading just to read through it we're missing a lot. He has this interesting comparison, where he talks about basically that the...what we put in regular food when we’re chewing or fail to chew and when we use our teeth, we’re making our stomachs to be responsible for the duty of what the teeth are to do.  Therefore, when you don't chew, and the stomach is doing the work of what the teeth should've done, then you're at the point of causing pain and discomfort and therefore the reason for digestion problems.  And when we equate that to the spiritual life, we're doing the same.  When we fail to meditate on the Word, then we are doing ourselves harm because were not receiving the sustenance of the Word of God into our lives.   So the question is, “Are you meditating for understanding?”  “Are you able to receive what the Word has in it, because God's Word is Life?”  One of the things that Psalm 19:11 says, it says, “I've hidden your Word in my heart that I might not sin against You”.  The focus of meditation from the psalmist’ perspective was to hide, to digest the Word, so that there would be the strength to not sin against God.  And the reason why the psalmist was focused on that and was able to do that, you can see later on in Psalm 119:103, he says, “How sweet are your words to my taste!  Yes, sweeter than honey to my mouth.  There was an appetite that was developed through meditating on the scriptures through the Word of God.  When we ourselves are willing to take the time to think on the scripture and meditate on that, instead of rushing to read through, we too will find that they are sweet to our mouth,...to our heart, they are more dear than the appetite of our flesh.  So the encouragement here is to not rush through reading the Bible as if you needed to speed read, but instead to take your time to hear.  Taste...taste...taste...taste and see that the Lord is good. Taste what He has.  Allow it to be filtered into your spirit and your soul, so that, you too might grow spiritually strong in the fullness of God. Then you'll find that the passages that you struggle to remember, they'll be ingrained.  They’ll be so ingrained that they'll come out naturally because it'll be a part of your DNA.  It'll be what has brought about the spiritual muscles or fitness that you need. You'll find that you'll be able to live a life more upright than being bent over and weighed down with sin.  This is God’s will.  There's no race.  There's no need to rush through the scriptures to check off on a list, how many passages or how many chapters you read in a night or a day.  If you are one of those individuals, it's better for you to read one passage and take a week and discover other passages through that and gain understanding and insight, than it is to read three h