Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church

Psalm 1:1-2 and Matthew 4:1-11

Let me take a quick survey.  How many of us sometimes screen our calls by letting the answering machine pick up while we listen to see who it is on the other end? Many of us have done this at some time or another.  Now, if we were screening our calls and heard God’s voice leaving us a message, how many of us would pick up and want to have a conversation with God?  What if we got home and God’s voice was on the answering machine, “This is God.  Please call me back, I have something important to tell you,” how many of us would return the call?  Surely, most of us would return that call.  So here is the question, why aren’t we reading our Bibles more?

Surveys of Americans showed that at least a decade ago only eleven percent of Americans read the Bible every day.  More than half of Americans were not reading the Bible even once a month.  Among active Christians only eighteen percent claimed to read their Bibles every day.   Nearly one fourth of Christians admitted they never read their Bibles.[1] I suspect the numbers are even lower today than they were a few years ago.

Several men are in the locker room at a private club.  A cell phone rings on one of the benches as the men are dressing.  As the rest of the men listen in, one man answers and the following conversation ensues.

“Hello?”

“Hi, honey, are you at the club?”

“Yes.  I just finished exercising.”

“Great!  I am at the mall just 2 blocks away and I have a mink coat that is on special I want to buy.  Do you want to see it or can I buy it?”

“How much is it?”

“It’s on sale for $1500.  I’ve been looking at it for several months but this is the first time it’s been on sale.  It’s really beautiful!”

“Okay.  If you really love it that much, go ahead and spend the $1500.”

“Thanks.  While I have you on the phone, I stopped by the Mercedes dealership and saw the new 2011 models.  The salesman is willing to give me a really good trade-in on our BMW.”

“What price did he quote you?”

“Only $80,000.”

“Okay, but at $80,000 it has to have all the options.”

“Thank you.  I love you. Oh, and one more thing. You know the house I’ve been looking at for the last couple of years?  The one with the beautiful view and a fantastic pool and garden?  It was listed at a million and I just discovered from a realtor friend that the asking price has dropped to $850,000.  Can I put in an offer?”

“I guess.  But only offer $820,000.”

“Okay sweetie.  See you later.  I love you!”

The man hangs up the phone and then turns to the other men who have been listening to his end of the conversation and says: “Do any of you know whose cell phone this is?”

How many people treat the Bible as though it were someone else’s cell phone?  If God left a personal message on our answering machine, many of us would treat it as a wrong number and not even bother to return the call.  Do we hear the Bible as God’s personal call to each of us?

Let’s be honest:  many people suspect that this book of stories from so long ago in a distant culture is irrelevant to our lives today.  We do not return God’s call because we figure it is a wrong number.  How can we grow in our appreciation of the Bible?   One way to access the messages of the Bible is to learn the spiritual app of devotional meditation.  How does this spiritual app work? 

Years ago scientists performed an experiment on monkeys.  They placed four monkeys in a cage that contained bananas suspended from the ceiling.  The only way the monkeys could get to the bananas was to climb a pole in the center of the room.  When the first monkey climbed the pole, as it reached for the bananas it was doused with a torrent of cold water.  Upset it jumped to the ground.  As each of the four monkeys made an attempt toward the bananas they experienced the same dousing until all four gave up trying for the bananas.

Then the scientists replaced one monkey.  When the new monkey began to climb the pole toward the bananas, the other three immediately grabbed him.  After a few attempts the new monkey stopped trying to climb the pole, even though he had never been doused with water.  Eventually the scientists replaced all the original monkeys with new monkeys who had never experienced the water dousing, yet none of them would climb the pole toward the bananas.  Without having the same experiences, the new monkeys had clearly learned from the original monkeys.[2]

Like those monkeys, we can learn from others without having the same experiences they had.  Often we learn from their emotions as much as anything else.  We can feel what they felt even though we were not in the situation.  This ability to feel what another has felt is the key to the Christian app of devotional meditation.

Let’s be clear what we mean by the Christian app of devotional meditation.  We are not talking about the form of meditation taught by many eastern philosophies and religions.  Eastern meditation usually teaches a person to empty the mind entirely in order to discover the truth already within.  Eastern meditation generally assumes that each person is already divine and thus already has the truth within.  All we need to do is empty our minds of the distractions and we will discover we already have what we need.

Christian meditation takes the opposite viewpoint.  It assumes that we do not have the answers already within ourselves.  We are not God.  Rather, the Bible contains God’s truth.  The problem is that the Bible contains this truth folded into stories based on other people’s experiences.  Thus, accessing the truths of the Bible means we must learn how to feel what they felt as they experienced God.  How do we do this?  Christian meditation uses our imagination and our senses.

The spiritual app of devotional meditation invites us to use all our senses when meditating on Bible stories.  We imagine in the story what it would have been like to be there.  What might we have smelled?  What sounds would we have heard?  What about seeing the sights, touching the textures, and tasting the flavors, all in our imaginations? 

Years ago a good friend wanted to tell the life of Jesus to his children.   Using his imagination he decided to tell the story of Jesus from the viewpoint of a dog.  He pretended to be a dog that belonged to one of the disciples.  I later had a chance to read his accounts of Jesus from a dog’s viewpoint.  What particularly caught my attention was the dog’s description of sick people coming to Jesus for healing.  How many of us have read about Jesus’ healing the crowds, but never thought about the smells?  From the dog’s perspective, there would have been terrible, disgusting smells coming from the sick people who were nursing infected open sores.  I realized I had never considered those stories using my sense of smell.

Jesus must have practiced the app of devotional meditation during his forty days of fasting in the wilderness.  Was there any particular part of scripture that he used for those meditations?  It is worthy of note that each time Jesus responded to the devil’s temptations, he used scriptures having to do with Israel’s forty years of wandering in the wilderness.  He most likely was meditating on Israel’s forty years in the wilderness during his own forty days in the wilderness.  Thus, when the devil tempted Jesus to turn stones into bread, he responded with a scripture having to do with the manna in the wilderness.  We can see how Jesus meditating on Israel’s hunger in the wilderness helped him find God’s response to his own hunger. 

When the devil invited Jesus to jump from the temple, what comparable experience could he have meditated on from Israel’s time in the wilderness?  His response was to quote a passage from the time Israel ran out of water (Deuteronomy 6:16).  They complained that God did not really care for them since they were out of water.  They tested Moses and God by demanding water immediately.  Jesus used this story to respond that one should not test the Lord our God.

We can use devotional meditation to sense the feelings of Jesus as he faced the temptation to jump.  Most likely, we cannot relate to the specific details.  I doubt that many of us have ever been tempted to jump off a building in order to test whether Psalm 91 is literally true.  Most of us do not expect God’s angels to catch us if we jump off a building.  Perhaps through meditation on the feelings of the experience, however, this story might become more relevant to us.

How many of us have felt at some time or another that God is not really there for us?  Most of us have been knocked down by life so that we have felt deep sadness and confusion, wondering whether God really cares.  Some of us even have had suicidal feelings, “If I leap to my death, neither God nor anyone else would really care.”  If any of these feelings are familiar, then we can meditate on the devil’s attempt to plant seeds of despair in Jesus’ mind.  While we are not Jesus, the Son of God, we too have heard the whisper of the devil saying, “Go ahead and jump.  See if it is true that God’s angels will catch you!”

Okay, maybe starting to meditate on something Jesus faced is too great a jump for many of us.  How about if we practice the spiritual app of devotional meditation with something a little closer to home?  How about practicing this spiritual app right now by pretending we are at an actual event from the life of Jesus?

Let’s try a lectio divina of Mark 8: 1-10.  Now, before we proceed, let me address the question in most minds right now... Lectio what?

If you have never practiced a lectio divina it is an ancient practice coming from the fifth century of Christianity.  It involves purposely meditating on a Bible story in order to hear God’s whisper to our hearts.  The modern version of this involves listening to someone read a Bible passage out loud three times followed by three moments of silence and meditation.  The first time we listen for anything that jumps out at us.  Then we pause in silence and use our imagination to feel what we would have felt if we had been there.  The second time we listen again for some key aspect of the story that might have special meaning for us.  My former spiritual director used to picture it like gazing into a moving stream of water and then ask me, “What sparkles so that you want to pick it up and examine it more closely?”  The third time we ask the Lord to reveal to us the implications for our own lives. 

Let’s try it.  Listen to our Bible story: Mark 8:1-10.

What is the Lord whispering to your heart?

[1] Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Apps for the Christian Life (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1991) 27-28.

[2] John C. Maxwell, Failing Forward (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000) 47-48.