Over the years I’ve kept in my garage three machines that prevent the grass from reclaiming my property.
I own a large riding mower, a standard size push mower, and a weed whacker.
For a long while I actually had three different gas cans.
One contained straight gasoline, another was mixed with oil to a proportion of one to 25, and another was oiled one part to 50.
If I had chosen to pick up any of those gas cans at random and filled the tank of any particular machine, the odds were 2-1 that something was ultimately going to go seriously wrong.
If I then showed up at the repair counter of the hardware store and complained, “This machine is a mess,” the mechanic would have looked at me a bit sideways and said, “Well, sir, you subjected it to conditions for which it was never intended.”
Actually, I think he would have been more likely to say, “What kind of dork arbitrarily puts any kind of fuel into his machines?”
Good question.
The author of the very first Old Testament psalm feels certain there is a God-provided set of conditions by which life will go well for us:
“Happy are those…[whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night” (Psalm 1:1). When it comes to human hearts, not just any fuel will do. Our call is to habitually meditate on the words of Scripture.
The Hebrew verb translated “meditate” has several nuances of meaning. One coveys the act of muttering.
During the pre-literary era – long before the contemporary luxury of owning and carrying around private copies of Scripture – those committed to the Word memorized vast portions of it. They would habitually speak aloud various Bible texts, under their breath, as a kind of continual recitation.
By muttering the content of Scripture, over and over, our minds can be trained to come back to the things of God as a kind of home base.
Since we no longer live in an oral culture, however, muttering has lost a bit of its edge. It might be best not to mutter, for instance, when going through airport security.
The same Hebrew verb also connotes chewing – that is, working out the meaning of what God has conveyed to us through a kind of spiritual rumination.
The secret to nurturing our inner worlds is to keep God before our minds as often as we can. Our minds inevitably return to what we think is most important – whether our investment portfolios, or getting payback for past hurts, or reflecting God’s goodness in the midst of chaos, or showing up those snobs who disrespected us, or winning the big contract, or hoping our team wins the big game.
God has made us in such a way that our minds inevitably linger on what we value.
In other words, when it comes to spiritual vitality, we can’t afford to fuel our imaginations with just anything.
Chew on God’s Word.
It’s the ideal fuel for the human soul.
コメント