5 Steps to Help You Practice Meditation

Don’t Neglect Meditation Given the stress early modern writers laid on meditation as a revealed duty incumbent on all Christians and not an optional add-on, it is worth asking whether contemporary evangelicals have neglected or even forgotten this once-esteemed practice altogether. In his study of Puritan meditation, David Saxton suggests precisely this, arguing that large swaths of the contemporary church are marred by a “shallow spirituality” and that this shallowness has spread in large part because “over the last century believers have lost a regular focus on Christian meditation.”1 Likewise, Marian Raikes laments that “although evangelicals do have their own godly heritage of meditation (in the Puritans), they have largely lost sight of it” and that “few evangelical pastors seem to be either teaching or modelling meditative skills.”2 Surely these criticisms do not accurately describe every contemporary context, but when I reflect on my own experience of growing up in an evangelical church, they don’t seem too far off the mark. I remember frequent encouragements to read my Bible but few if any mentions of meditation, and certainly no one was insisting on the centrality and nece...