Roots Of Righteousness
HEY weren’t preachers or priests? In fact, they weren’t official representatives of any particular religious tradition or group.
But when four famous young musicians named John, Paul, George, and Ringo traveled to India to study something called transcendental meditation with a guru named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, people knew the world was undergoing a spiritual revolution.
Ever since the 1960s, a time of growing popularity for centuries-old Eastern religions and newfangled New Age cults, many people have assumed that meditation is a non-Christian practice.
But as this psalm shows, God has been encouraging his followers to meditate on His Word for millennia.
There are 150 Psalms, which are poems designed to be sung with musical accompaniment. The idea of meditating upon God and his Word actually appears throughout the Psalms and through much of the rest of the Bible.
Much of the time, many of us are going in a dozen different directions at once. Our hearts are torn, our minds are divided, and our prayers are fragmented and superficial.
Meditation helps us go beneath the surface of our jumbled, overactive minds and tap into the richer veins of God’s love and mercy.
Many people find that silence and solitude make it easier to meditate. Finding silence in the twenty-first-century world isn’t always easy, but it helps if you can turn off the TV for a few moments.
Solitude can be equally elusive at times, but some people find that taking a brief walk in a park gives them a few moments of the precious isolation they need. (The fact that the backdrop is God’s beautiful creation doesn’t hurt either.)
God wants you to meditate on him, but that doesn’t mean you have to go live in a monastery.
Here’s how Thomas Merton, one of the twentieth century’s most famous monks put it: “Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally.”
Meditation is a God-ordained way of doing this. And if we practice it regularly, we will discover the deeper roots of God’s righteousness.
Father, help me slow down enough to be alone with you and listen to what you have to tell me.