The Puritans got it right, so
they spent at least a period of time every day in what they
called deliberate meditation, where they would deliberately
get alone with God. They go through like an eight-step process, where
they would first read scripture, they'd memorize something, they'd
then meditate on everything they knew about it, they'd go to prayer,
they'd then make holy resolutions, how to change in their life,
they'd record things in their diary, and then they'd sing a
psalm before they finished their meditation and pray and give
thanks. That type of thing is very foreign to us. In a way,
it's like a prolonged but more focused personal devotion period. But they also practice what they
called occasional meditation. And what that was, was during
the day, I mean, I'm sitting here and I might look over there
at a door and I might start thinking about Christ as the door and
everything I know about doorways and entrances, entrances into
heaven and to hell, and I just might... in the two minutes I
have, I just might meditate on how a door is symbolic of a lot
of spiritual truths, a gateway into heaven, a gateway into regeneration,
and just feed my soul with good thoughts. And that's very foreign
to us as well. But the Puritans said, when you're
close to God, these spontaneous, occasional meditations, will
naturally spring up in you. And you should feed your mind
with them through your deliberate meditation. So you just kind
of meditate your way through the day at appropriate times. So they train their people to
meditate. And today, we've got such a deluge of the digital
era that we live in that I scarcely think most people can meditate
three minutes. When's the last time that you
sat down in a chair and meditated for five minutes on heaven, your
future home. You probably meditated more on
where you're gonna go on your next vacation than you did where
you're gonna go for all eternity. It's crazy. And so what I did
was I went through all 21 of those books and I recorded each
author, all the subjects they said we should meditate about
and I made a chart of them and I discovered that The four most
common subjects that the Puritans said we should meditate on are
really all in the area of eschatology. Heaven, Hell, Death, and the
Judgment Day. Those are the four most common
subjects. So they were really eternity oriented. They were
thinking this life is a preparation for the life to come and we need
to meditate on our eternal destiny, its joys and its potential sorrows
if we don't live a life of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.