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Podcast: Recover the Lost Art of Bible Meditation in 2023 (David Mathis)

January 02, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How Meditating Differs from Reading and Studying

In today’s episode, David Mathis talks about the foundational yet often neglected spiritual discipline of meditating on Scripture and why it has the power to lead us to renewed excitement, joy, and satisfaction when it comes to God's word.

Habits of Grace

Habits of Grace

David Mathis

This book explores how Bible reading, prayer, and fellowship with other Christians—three foundational “habits of grace”—have the power to awaken our souls to God’s glory and stir our hearts for joyful service.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:52 - Watching, Raking, Digging

Matt Tully
David, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

David Mathis
Matt, it’s great to be talking to you and be sitting in the same room. Usually it’s via distance, but now we’re here in the same space.

Matt Tully
It is really nice. Today we’re going to talk about Bible meditation. As Christians, we talk a lot about reading the Bible, we talk a lot about studying the Bible, but we don’t really talk as much about meditating on the Bible. We don’t maybe think of it as a distinct thing that is worth discussing on its own merits. In your book you use this helpful analogy of watching a movie to kind of illustrate the difference between all these approaches to Scripture. I wonder if you could explain that metaphor and help us understand meditation.

David Mathis
I love talking about the differences between reading, studying, meditating. Reading would be just like going at the normal speed of the medium. You push play on the movie you’re watching at it’s normal speed. To study it might be to go in slow motion or to try to make connections: Oh, that comment that was just made by Maverick goes back to the 1988 movie of Top Gun. You make connections earlier in the film, or other films across the series. You kinda do some studying. Meditation would be like hitting pause, like a freeze frame, and you just pause: Let’s talk about this moment. Let’s enjoy this moment. Did you see what just happened? Can you feel the weight of this moment?* So it’s lingering in that particular space. It’s not just the slowing down of study; it’s even the pausing of a freeze frame. Another metaphor you might want to use to get at it is if reading is like raking. You rake the leaves in the front yard. If you have a small yard, you can do it pretty quickly. It’s relatively quick work to read at normal speed. Study is more arduous. It’s like digging. Get a shovel. Shoveling is more difficult than raking. But meditation then—this is to change the metaphor—meditation is having done the work and sitting on the front porch with a glass of lemonade to enjoy the work that’s been done. That’s what I love trying to emphasize with Christians in Bible reading. We do want to do normal-speed reading. Texts are meant to be read at their normal speed. But in particular, ancient texts are meant to be lingered over. They did not publish quick and easy. They did not have the machines that we have. They did not have the Internet that we have. When they wrote a text, when they put it down on the page, it had a lot of labor put into it. They had thought about it. The biblical texts had been so carefully thought through. They reward the kind of slow, studious, and then also meditative reading where we don’t only ask the question to go back to something else and try to pose questions and have answers, but then also enjoy that reality. God means for his book to not only run in one ear and out the other, but to move down into the heart and to shape us at our core.

Matt Tully
In all of those metaphors that you shared—that of raking and then digging and actually then enjoying the accomplished work there, or even watching a movie and pausing it and you’re kind of really just excited about that one frame that you’re staring, and you also talk about the idea of digging and finding a gem or a jewel underground and kind of just marveling at that thing. Is there something inherent to meditation where there is this enjoying function to it where it’s like a celebration of the beauty of something? Is that a core part of what you mean when you say meditation?

David Mathis
Yes. I would say a core aspect of it. Now, I think there’s also warnings to meditate on. I want to be led by the biblical text. This morning I was reading in Jeremiah 47. There are warnings there. There’s an appropriate fear. So meditation may lead to a kind of reverent fear. The kind of awe that those who know themselves to be in covenant with the one true God, the kind of awe they would have about his power, about how he orients on rebellion and unrighteousness. But that awe is connected to enjoyment, to know ourselves in his Son Jesus Christ. And the fear of warnings should lead us in the end to a kind of enjoyment that we have been brought close to this God. So I do love to tell people that I do love to pursue this on my own, to come to God in the morning in prayer and say, God, show me something good here. I want to find something good. Give me something to enjoy. Would you feed my soul? So I often use the language of Exodus 16 where they were told to gather a day’s portion each day of manna. So I want to gather a day’s portion. I’m not here to read long enough or study enough that I gather up for weeks or for months. God, would you give me a day’s portion here today that would satisfy my soul? So that language of satisfaction, that language of enjoyment, even to say, God, delight my soul, thrill my soul with your goodness, with your grace, with some fresh aspect of the varied glory of your Son, the countless excellencies of your Son. Give me one sight of one of those this morning and feed my soul as I meditate on your goodness to me in Christ Jesus.

07:14 - What Is Biblical Meditation?

Matt Tully
Okay, so if you were to take a step back, how would you boil all that down into a simple definition of meditation? What is biblical meditation?

David Mathis
By meditation, and this is very important to say because we live in a world that mainly talks about meditation in a very Eastern sense—

Matt Tully
And I want to get into that in a little bit, but keep going.

David Mathis
So we don’t seek to empty the mind of content like Eastern meditation. We want to fill the mind with biblical content and chew on it, so to speak, seek to savor it appropriately and press it into the heart so that we have a whole, solid interaction with the text. That we move beyond just a mental, cerebral grasping or appropriation of the text, and seek to push it down into the heart so that it penetrates to the deepest part of our being. That there’s an emotional response to the text.

Matt Tully
Is that a key part of it, that if we’re not having an emotional response to the text, then we’re not really meditating?

David Mathis
I think so. At least we’re coming short of what we’re hoping for in terms of we want to have this text not just go to the mind. We want it to connect to us and change us in our deepest parts.

Matt Tully
And would you say every text of Scripture should be able to do that, or could do that for us? Even if we’re reading in Leviticus about the law codes for the Israelites, should we expect that if we meditate deep enough or long enough or well enough that we will be affected emotionally in this kind of whole soul type of way?

David Mathis
I do think every text has an appropriate emotional response to it. Some may be more dynamic and significant, and sometimes we may think of emotional responses as really jazzed up or really palpable emotional responses. But there are very thin, subtle, emotional responses. I think every text has those, but in particular, biblical texts, which are sacred. These are inerrant expressions from the one true God through his prophets and apostles. There is an emotionally appropriate response to every text. As sinners, we’re not going to have that, but I want to seek to engage the heart in reading the Bible. And we often come up short. We may come into a particular morning thinking, I’m not letting him go until he blesses me. And it may not be a felt blessing. Maybe the blessing he has for you that day is teaching you the lesson that you can’t just have the emotional experience you want to have every morning. And you know what? It feels flatlined today, and that’s still shaping your soul because even when your heart wasn’t fully engaged, you still came. You opened the book, you laid yourself bare before God, you sought to trust him, and he was working on you, in the grand scheme there, in a way that wasn’t immediately felt as exciting.

Matt Tully
You call meditation “the most misunderstood and most underrated of the spiritual disciplines in the church today.” Why do you say that?

David Mathis
Well, my experience of the church at large is very limited. I’ve got my Southern Baptist background in South Carolina. I’ve got my time in the PCA world during college. I’ve now been in Minneapolis since 2003. I’ve traveled around in some different ways with John Piper in other contexts of traveling. So I can only speak to what I see. I was involved with a campus ministry that really emphasized Bible study, along with evangelism and prayer, but Bible study was really significant. I just have not heard a lot, in my limited circles, I haven’t heard a lot of conversation about meditation. From my perspective, it seems to be a kind of lost art today. A time when it wasn’t a lost art was among the Puritans. It is amazing what the Puritans have to say. Joel Beeke has a great article where he summarizes much of what the Puritans had to say on meditation. I got some quotes here on some of what I have found to be the best angles on meditation from the Puritans. Thomas Watson (1620–1686) says, “Study is finding out of a truth. Meditation is the spiritual improvement of a truth.” So you can hear there it’s the application to the heart. It’s a kind of spiritual-emotional appropriation of the text to the soul. Samuel Ward (1577 to 1640) says, “Stir up thy soul in meditation to converse with Christ. Look what promises and privileges thou dost habitually believe. Now actually think of them. Roll them under thy tongue.”

Matt Tully
That’s interesting right there: “Now actually think of them.” That highlights this thing that we’ve all experienced, that we sort of know something intellectually, we can think of it in this surface-level way, but meditation is kind of really pressing in on it and trying to try to understand it more.

David Mathis
That’s right. The moving from thinking to actually thinking, where maybe there’s not this disjunction between the heart and the head, but a wholeness to the soul. “Now actually think of them. Roll them under thy tongue. Chew on them till thou dost feel some sweetness on the palette of thy soul.” So there’s the sweetness; going for the enjoyment. We use that language of enjoyment. Going for a kind of pleasant spiritual response to the text. Edmund Calamy (1600 to 1666)—I love this one—says, “Be like the bee”—a honey bee here—“Be like the bee that dwells and abides upon the flower to suck out all the sweetness.” George Mueller talked that way about a text, going through it to try to get every last drop of joy out of the text—of goodness out of a text. That’s what meditation does. It pushes pause, and hopefully pushes pause on the hurried, frantic world outside of us that is constantly pressuring us, in the age of accelerations, to do the next thing, do the next thing, finish this up. Meditation seeks to block that out and linger over the word. I want to taste the sweetness in this paragraph, in this chapter, in this verse. God, would you let me taste the sweetness in this text?

Matt Tully
On that front, that gets at maybe one of the most countercultural facets of meditation in my understanding here. It requires a level of patience and calm and just time that is really hard to come by today. Not just in terms of our busy lives where we have lots of things on our calendars, but even just the cultural air that we breathe, as you were saying, that is so predisposed towards distraction and productivity and getting things done and checking things off. Have you found that that’s a challenge? Maybe two questions: Have you struggled with fighting against that in meditation? And then also, have you actually found that you’ve gotten better at that as you’ve practiced?

David Mathis
Yes, absolutely struggled. That’s one of the reasons I appreciate this so much and I’m so passionate about it and love talking to people about it is because of the struggle that appreciation emerges out of the struggle. For years in my Bible reading plan, I would have my boxes to check, and I was far too prone to get the reading done quick, check the box, and move on. And I would regularly feel like—

Matt Tully
Because that feels good, right? It kind of feels good to get it done.

David Mathis
You get a little, tiny dopamine hit from that, but it’s not the same thing as having a spiritual hunger satisfied, as having your soul made happy in God. If I need a little quick dopamine hit, there’s some other achievements I can pursue. The rest of the day there can be quick achievements to check the box and get the little dopamine, but I think our time in the word, our time alone with Christ through his word by the Spirit, should be so much more than that, so much deeper than just that little sense of personal satisfaction. And so over the years, I would say yes, I’ve gotten better at this in a very, I hope, modest and humble way, in the sense of, for the listeners, saying, You can get better in this. This is not something that falls from heaven as a static gift, and either you’re a meditator or you’re not. This is a skill that’s cultivated. It’s an art. We talk about it being a lost art. The Puritans didn’t just automatically know how to meditate. It was something they worked on and developed, and probably it takes all the more work and development and cultivation in our fast-paced age of accelerations in which we live, where even times when we’re not trying to hurry, we’re subtly pressed into manifestations of hurry because of how our age operates.

15:58 - Practical Steps for Meditating on Scripture

Matt Tully
When do you actually find time to do it? Paint a picture of practically when and how long you practice biblical meditation in your own life. Just for someone who’s thinking, I just don’t know when I would do that or how that would actually look.

David Mathis
First thing in the morning before the kids are up. I got four little ones. They’re not as little now as they have been over the last ten years. We have twin boys that are twelve, a daughter who’s eight, and a daughter is five and a half. It’s beginning to feel like I’m out of the years that were most difficult. There were times where daddy gets up early, and I found I need, as a man, I need less sleep than my wife regularly. So if we go to bed at the same time together, there’s an opportunity there for me to get up while everybody’s quiet, the house is still quiet, get some black coffee going, and have time that I hope is unhurried. I mean for these to be the most unhurried, even leisurely, moments of the day. And if my soul can find the right pace over the text, that will form the kind of help that will give my soul a kind of rest that then can journey through an accelerated, often too hurried day of stuff coming at me. But when the kids were younger, so many times I would get down there, the coffee’s done, I open up the Bible and begin to move slowly through the first reading, and then the baby cries. It’s a challenge at that moment to say, *Alright, dad is called to love. Mom can get a little more sleep. It’s time to get the infant, bring the infant here, or the young child. But as the kids have gotten older, they sleep more consistently, regularly. I have some of the best moments of the day to stop, think, pause, and do so over God’s word. I’m not seeking to fill my head with my own thoughts. I want to fill my head with God’s thoughts, and do so in that unhurried manner over the word. I think for somebody starting out, I would recommend blocking off half an hour.

Matt Tully
A half hour.

David Mathis
For me, it’s hard to move into meditation and enjoy it and move out of it naturally in only ten or fifteen minutes. I think if you want to establish a pattern, we all should be able to block off half an hour. And I do think you can make some great headway in that time. One thing I’m looking for is I want to lose track of time. Sometimes in the tech world or business world we talk about having flow.

Matt Tully
Yeah, getting into a flow.

David Mathis
That’s right. I want a kind of devotional flow where I’m not watching a clock. In fact, I like to turn my phone over and put it away from me as much as possible that my subconscious would think the phone’s not nearby, the phone’s not going to be a distraction. This is a time to lose track of time and to be with God over his word in an unhurried way. And I do think that as you start at say half an hour, you might find, and I would say this to somebody, you don’t need to artificially increase that. But you can increase it as you want to. You might find out that over the course of, I think you need to give it weeks or months.

Matt Tully
So there’s a level of stick-to-itiveness that’s required for this.

David Mathis
Absolutely

Matt Tully
You’re painting this picture of like, it’s just so wonderful and so satisfying and fulfilling, but I would imagine there’s people listening right now who have said, Yeah, that sounds great, but I’ve tried this and I get distracted, I get bored. It’s hard work.

David Mathis
That’s right. Reading the Bible is a lifetime pursuit. Learning to meditate is a lifetime pursuit, like so many skills in our lives that we never think twice about. We don’t think, Oh, I’ll pick up some golf clubs and I’ll shoot par on 18 holes. That’s a skill you develop over time. I would say in terms of regularly rich, satisfying, like you’re feeling where my soul has been so shaped by these regular encounters with Christ through his word, that there is a reasonable expectation of tasting some genuine sweetness in his word on a daily basis—that may be years in the making. And that worth it. If you begin the process, you might go several days where you don’t feel any blessing. Now, there may be real engagement there that you’re just not yet sensitive enough to feel and that’s manifest in your own consciousness. But you’re being shaped over time. And what’s so important is shaping of the heart, shaping of the mind, and that kind of encounter with the risen Christ over his word, where it does—in my experience and the experience of others—it does really happen over time. I would say stick with it.

20:54 - The X Factor in Bible Reading

Matt Tully
And that maybe is a natural lead-in to something you call the X factor in Bible reading and in Bible meditation. I wonder if you could unpack that. What is the X factor in Bible reading?

David Mathis
That was just something that came to me years ago in terms of trying to help both my own self and other Christians think that as we come to God’s word, this is not like coming to a textbook. It’s not like studying for a class. This is not like working on a PhD. This is not mere study.

Matt Tully
Not even like reading a beautiful poem.

David Mathis
That’s right. It is not just me and this text. The Holy Spirit accompanies and binds himself to God’s word in a way that is different from other texts. So I would say if you’re studying whatever or reading something else, sure, pray for God’s help. God, help me to understand this. But the Holy Spirit is committed to God’s word in a special way. And so I love reminding Christians to not think that it’s just you and your Bible. That is such a low, pathetic view of devotions. Me at a table, with a book. It is so much more than that. It is you at a table, with the book, with the power of the Holy Spirit and the risen Christ, who is alive and is on heaven’s throne, and he is knowable through his word and by the Spirit. It’s legitimate to talk about this as communing with Christ through his word. This is how he communes with his people. So it is an amazing thing to sit down at a table with the book and the power of the Spirit. That’s the X factor in Bible reading—the power of the Holy Spirit to open our eyes, to work on our heart. So it’s not just me, in my own strength, shaping my own heart, working on the heart, pounding the biblical text into my own heart. I’m saying, God, help me. Holy Spirit, help me. Would you do this? Would you give me spiritual tastes? Would you satisfy the spiritual appetite with your goodness, your sweetness? Risen Jesus, I want to know you. Would you show me your glory? Show me your grace in and through this text in your work by the power of your Spirit in these moments.

Matt Tully
I think something that Christians can wrestle with though is we want to believe that there is this X factor—namely, God himself, the Holy Spirit there with us. These are his words that he’s using in us to shape us and change us, but sometimes our subjective experience of reading the Bible, meditating on the Bible, just doesn’t live up to that. It doesn’t feel like that. Have you ever wrestled with that? Why do you think it is that it isn’t more obvious that this is this sacred, amazing, powerful text that we have in our day-to-day experience?

David Mathis
I’ve definitely wrestled with it. I know that’s the experience of some on a one-time try, on a few weeks, on a few days. There is a real shaping of the soul that happens. So if you were to say to someone, All right, here we go, run a 5k. There may be some who have trained themselves, and their body has been shaped by that demand, that distance, that practice, and they’re ready to go. Most are probably going to start from scratch and need to maybe just need to walk for ten minutes to begin with and eventually pick up the legs and jog a little bit. And so this is how it works with our bodies. It also is how it works with our souls. Our souls are moldable, shapeable— our emotions, our heart. There’s a kind of fitness. Many of us begin, when we come to God’s word, unfit to engage with the holy God through his word in that way. And there’s a kind of reshaping that needs to happen to the inner man—not just the outer man for running or some sport, but the shaping of the inner man that comes. And so I love to encourage people that the first time you go out and run, you don’t do a 5k. And the first time that you come to encounter God through the Bible, there’s work that needs to be done. There’s some shaping, there’s some conditioning that needs to happen in the soul that if you stick with over time, it will happen.

Matt Tully
Do you think there’s a danger, David, when it comes to how we think about Bible reading and bible meditation, of going too far on this journey of looking for this emotional connection, or maybe we call it a spiritual high that would come with that, and denigrating just the intellectual value of studying and thinking carefully about who God is and just knowing him better and knowing ourselves better? Do you have to wrestle with that? Is that something that we should be aware of, of looking too much for this subjective experience and maybe downplaying the value of just knowing God?

David Mathis
Absolutely. I think modern people, or maybe just humans in general, often suspect that more can happen in the short run and don’t expect how much can happen in the long run. So I would pair our unrealistic expectations of felt emotional experiences in the short run with far too little expectation for what God might do in the long run. There is a training of the soul, a shaping of the soul that can happen in God’s word that maybe we don’t even have the categories to think about that long term, and you won’t experience it until you’ve gone through it. But God’s kind to give us little tastes, give us bursts, give us some unexpected gift along the way. But you’re right, it’s very easy for us to expect some emotional high, which is not promised in Scripture, which should not be the kind of thing that we focus on. But yes, there is a role in moving from—we’ve talked about those categories—reading, going deeper in study, and then taking that study to the next degree in meditation. And I would say this: it’s cumulative over a lifetime. Engaging with the Bible is a lifetime pursuit. And as you work through the Bible, as you work through texts throughout the Bible, those texts illumine other parts of the Bible. You understand the Gospels better by understanding parts of the minor prophets and the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is so hard to understand. But as you move through the Bible year after year, month after month, there’s a cumulative effect. These ancient texts become more immediately accessible to a mind that has been shaped by that practice over time.

Matt Tully
So I hear you saying that there’s both patience required in, This morning, as I meditate on this passage of Scripture, I need to be able to slow down and take my time, but we also need a level of patience more broadly as we seek to meditate over the course of days and months and years, that we’re going to see the effect of that. We’re going feel the effect of that probably over time, not in every instance.

David Mathis
Low expectations up front, patience and high expectations in the long run.

27:59 - Deep and Profound Change

Matt Tully
Maybe a final question on that point, David. I wonder if you could just summarize how has biblical meditation, as you’ve exercised that muscle and developed those habits of grace, how has that changed your life?

David Mathis
Well, I sure hope that the change is so deep and profound that it affects everything. I sure hope I’m a far better, or a little bit better, husband than I would be otherwise. I sure hope it’s far better. I think I’m more equipped as a father, having been shaped in the last twenty years, let’s say. So I just turned forty-two years old, and I graduated from college I guess around twenty-two years old. So as an adult out of college now, it’s been about twenty years of trying to journey my way over and over through the Bible. I hope that affects the way I think, the way I feel, the way I go through life, the way I see the world. I hope it affects how quickly I think about God. I hope that there are resistances built up for the pressures of our secular times. I hope I’m not as quick to be snookered by secular expectations and assumptions. It’s hard to give particular manifestations other than I got something to start my day off that’s fresh, that’s sweet (let’s hope) and that I can share with somebody else. I love being able to share with our team at DesiringGod, with our teaching team as we get together. Usually on Mondays I’ll try to share something fresh from that morning or from the weekend that has been sweet to my soul and that we can pray for our week. And as a pastor and teacher, there are concepts, sweetnesses, and goodnesses in God’s word that are immediately affecting my teaching all the time. But I don’t want to presume that every listener is a pastor so that the applications are just public teaching. I would encourage pastors as you linger over God’s word, don’t make it regularly to be a passage you’re preparing for teaching.

Matt Tully
Don’t be thinking, How do I preach this?

David Mathis
Yes. First and foremost, engage with Christ through the text, and then fruit is born through that. And sometimes you go back to that fruit. And so instead of Here’s the assigned passage, let me find something in it, it’s, I’m working my way through God’s word, quite apart from any coming teaching assignments, and there’s a growing catalog of beauties, of glories, of fruit that I can then pluck from to share with others, or make into an article, or have a contributing part of a sermon or in a seminary classroom.

Matt Tully
David, thank you so much for helping us think about this, as you say, neglected spiritual discipline, but one that in some ways is the capstone of what it is we’re doing and we’re seeking when we read the Bible.

David Mathis
Amen. Thank you, Matt.

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