4 Steps for Deeper Scripture Meditation

In his famous sermon “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” Jonathan Edwards illustrates the distinction between intellectual and experiential knowledge:

There is a difference between having an opinion, that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness.¹

Here, Edwards highlights the possibility of knowing something to be true of God (and food) without any affective “sense” of that truth. Our experience regularly confirms this disparity: There’s a long road between the head and the heart.

You’ve likely been there before. You carve out time for a devotion, read a passage on the Lord’s majesty or grace—something that you know should thrill your heart—but you don’t feel thrilled. You don’t feel much of anything. Further reflection yields low-level guilt: “Why do I tear up in Toy Story 3 when Andy gives his toys away but struggle to feel something when I read Psalm 23?”

To be sure, it’s a mistake to make “experience” the ultimate measure for whether or not our Scripture reading is “working.” And yet, we should acknowledge that there’s something wrong with being completely unmoved at God’s self-disclosure in his Word.

How can we move forward?

What is Bible meditation?

Imagine that you receive a love letter from your significant other. After reading and understanding the letter, you re-read it a dozen times, perhaps even reviewing certain sentences.

Do you re-read it because you’re struggling to understand what the words mean? Of course not! In fact, it’s precisely because you understand what’s being communicated that you read it again, each read-through deepening your gratitude and affection for the author.

At first, you were “reading.” You were gathering information and making sure you understood what was being communicated. In your last twelve read-throughs, you were reveling in what you had learned. Savoring it. Taking comfort in it.

You were meditating.

For centuries, Christians have meditated on Scripture. Meditation comes after you’ve grasped what a text means. It aims to sense the beauty, weight, and moral force of the truth under consideration. It’s a disciplined lingering over the text that seeks to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8).

There’s no silver bullet fix for spiritual dryness. But more often than not, meditating on Scripture functions as “the bellows of the soul, that doth kindle and inflame holy affections.”²

How do I meditate on the Bible?

Consider these four steps as you begin to meditate on the Word.

1. Prepare your heart

While we may open the Word in a quiet room, we rarely do so with a quiet heart. We often come to our devotions having already read emails, checked notifications, and considered the variety of obligations that will demand our attention and energy that day. Few of us are able to simply “be still” the moment we open our Bibles.

Beyond making sure your cellphone can’t easily distract you, here are two strategies to help you prepare to engage the Lord.

First, address yourself. Have you ever noticed that the Psalmist periodically addresses himself?

• “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name” (Ps 103:1)!
• “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Ps 42:5–6).
• “Return, O my soul, to your rest; for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you” (Ps 116:7).

Before you begin your time in the Word, take a moment to be still and address yourself. Acknowledge the distractions—the laundry that needs to be done, the grass that needs to be mowed, the asinine comment someone made on your social media post. Those concerns will be waiting for you when you’re finished. Remind yourself of your need for communion with God and the privilege of being able to study his Word. Call yourself to hope in his promises.

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Second, ask the Lord to help you understand and engage with the text. In our own strength, we’re unable “to accept the things of the Spirit of God … because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor 2:14). Confessing our dependence on God, we pray that “the eyes of [our] hearts would be enlightened” (Eph 1:18). We plead with the Psalmist, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Ps 119:18).

Having asked the Lord for help, you’re ready to begin studying the Word.

2. Read carefully

Understanding the text you’re reading is a necessary prerequisite for meditation: The truth(s) of the text is the “meal” over which your soul will chew.

While an extended discussion of Bible interpretation methods is beyond the scope of this article, picking up a good study Bible will provide you with some accessible, brief commentary on the passage you’re studying. Additionally, consider the Logos Bible study app to get access to a host of Bible study tools. Finally, it’s often helpful to ask how each word in a verse contributes to its meaning, for example, “If this word wasn’t in the sentence or the author had chosen a different one, what difference would it make?”

If you’re studying, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men” (Mark 1:17), your observations might look something like:

• Follow me—Jesus doesn’t want us to merely “believe” in him.
• Follow me—We’re called to follow a person, not just adopt new ethics/doctrine.
• I will make—Christ does the work in me. There are no self-made fishers of men.
• I will make—Jesus isn’t crossing his fingers, hoping that he can transform us. Christ-followers will share the gospel.

Crucial clarification: While accurately interpreting the text is necessary, it’s important to remember that the end goal of meditation is not biblical literacy but active communion with God. In this context, interpretive accuracy is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, namely, engaging the Lord with our inner man.

If you carve out thirty minutes for devotion and spend twenty-eight of them diagramming sentences and highlighting verbs, you will have almost no time to prayerfully linger over what you have read. Timothy Keller offers a similar caution:

Serious study of the Bible is something that must be done in order to grow as a Christian, but it is a mistake to spend most of your daily time with God in an in-depth interpretive Bible study. It leaves you little time and perhaps no inclination to meditate and pray.³

With this caution in mind, meditation is often more conducive to studying shorter chunks of text. Shorter passages allow you to give appropriate time to the work of interpretation—a nonnegotiable—without reducing your subsequent meditation to a few brief petitionary prayers.

3. Ask specific questions

There isn’t one “correct” method for meditating on the Word. However, one of the most effective strategies is also the simplest: Ask questions of the text aimed at discerning where the truth it communicates intersects with your life. In making these connections, you are gathering fuel for the prayer—the rejoicing, repenting, and requesting—that will immediately follow.

Ask questions of the text aimed at discerning where the truth it communicates intersects with your life.

You can interrogate this text from at least three angles.

First, what does this text teach me about God? Here you’re asking questions like, “Does this text teach me about God’s holiness, love, faithfulness, justice, compassion, power, etc.?”

If you’re studying Moses’s reception of the Ten Commandments, you might note that:

• God’s holiness is both beautiful and terrifying. He must be approached on his own terms (Exod 20:18, 26).
• God’s grace is seen in rescuing Israel before giving them the law. They are not saved from Egyptian slavery because of their obedience (Exod 20:2).
• God’s supremacy is seen in his demand that his people have no other gods alongside him (Exod 20:3).

Second, what does this text teach me about myself? Spend some time thinking about how the passage may address your beliefs, emotions, and personal holiness. Don’t expect every question to be eye-opening. Some will be illuminating, others won’t. While each text is different, I’ve found that working through a series of questions geared toward deliberate introspection consistently engages my heart.

If you were studying Philippians 4:6–7, your introspection might look something like:

• Does this text reveal sin in my heart? A need that I have? Yes—God’s promise that he’ll “guard my heart and mind” is unsatisfying because my joy is so often rooted in my life circumstances. I also tend to think of my anxiety as “bad” because of how it affects me, not because it reflects a lack of trust in the Lord.⁴
• Does this text offer a promise I should claim? I should seek the peace found in God’s goodness and sovereignty, not in the hope of achieving specific outcomes. Then I can thank God in advance for how he will manage the situation.
• What behaviors or emotions emerge when I forget this truth? I try to increase my control rather than going to the Lord. Rest in God’s sovereign goodness is replaced by worry about whether I’ll get the circumstances I want.
• Does this text teach me how to think about or respond wisely to life’s various situations/people? Not so much.
• Is there something about this text that rubs me the wrong way? Yes, it’s a bit disappointing that the text doesn’t read, “Present your requests to God and he’ll work it out in a way that is agreeable to you.”
• Does this text describe a privilege—hope, joy, security, purpose, sense of worth, etc.—that I’m asking something else to fulfill? Already covered in the first question—I often look to my circumstances for my security.

Finally, how does this text point me to Christ? Consider how your study and introspection direct you to the person and work of Jesus.

• How does Christ provide for my need?
• How does Christ address my sin?
• How does Christ fulfill my longing?
• How does Christ strengthen me to do what I’m called to do?

Asking Christ-centered questions helps you to move beyond “Do better, try harder” and reframes the promises, privileges, or sin struggles you’ve discerned in light of the grace of the gospel.

4. Respond to the text

Finally, you’re reading to turn the fruit of your reflections into prayer.⁵ Many Christians have found it helpful to pray along the lines of the three movements represented in the Lord’s prayer.

Rejoice:⁶ Praise and thank the Lord for what you saw in the text—for his mercy, grace, patience, faithfulness, holiness, etc.

Fight the urge to move immediately to petitionary prayer. Asking for daily bread is important, but it shouldn’t replace “Hallowed be thy name.”

Repent: Confess any sin that your study has revealed. Rest in the promise that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

That said, this is not a time for self-loathing or unending idol hunts. Sometimes, you won’t be able to discern any sin in connection with your text. Don’t feel like authenticity requires that you sit long enough to feel bad about something. Simply move on.

Request: First, ask God to help you apply what you’ve learned so that you might be a doer of the Word and not a hearer only, deceiving yourself (Jas 1:22).

As you pray, don’t forget that God uses means to achieve his ends. While asking “Help me stop lusting” is well-intended, God usually mortifies our sin through grace-fueled effort rather than giving us instant “victory” through one powerful moment of surrender. It’s better to ask, “God, help me have the discipline to avoid the media that tempts me to lust and the situations that present me with opportunities to fail. Help me see others as people to love and not objects for use.”

Second, pray for other people and life-specific circumstances. Here you might think in “concentric circles,” beginning with yourself and moving outward toward family, friends, neighbors, church, city, and world. This helps keep your spiritual life from becoming myopic and forces you to look outward to the needs around you. Consider systematically praying through your church’s membership directory (if they have one) or using Operation World to pray for the advance of the gospel among the nations.

Conclusion

Thomas Watson insisted that “The reason our affections are so chill and cold in spiritual things, is, because we do not warm ourselves more at the fire of meditation.”⁷

To be sure, we shouldn’t expect every devotional time to be life-changing or charged with emotional intensity. The most mature Christians have “meh” devotions. Feelings aren’t the litmus test for efficacy. Run-of-the-mill devotions nourish your soul too. And yet we should do our best to move beyond mere interpretation and engage our inner man with old promises and new beauties.

Meditation seeks to do just that. While not an automatic formula for spiritual warmth, it “hoists the sails of the soul in hopes of experiencing the gracious wind of God’s Spirit.”⁸

As we make a Scripture-fueled effort to delight ourselves in the Lord (Ps 37:4), we can be certain that we’ll gradually behold more of the glory by which we’re “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor 3:18).

Share your thoughts

What are the best practices for meditating on Scripture? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Chase Krug’s suggested resources

• Keller, Timothy. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. Penguin, 2016.
• Owen, John. The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded. In The Works of John Owen, vol. 7: Sin and Grace. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1862.

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• What Is Prayer? Ways to Pray, Example Prayers & More

1. Jonathan Edwards, Sermons (Hendrickson, 2005), 93.
2. Isaac Ambrose, Media: Middle Things (London, 1649), 274.
3. Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (Penguin, 2016), 249.
4. The anxiety I have in mind here owes to a failure to trust God with the future, not merely a deep “concern” about something (cf. 2 Cor 11:28) or anxiety that stems from biological dysfunction (e.g., generalized anxiety disorder [GAD]).
5. Remember, the four steps in this article represent a suggestive outline. There’s no reason to artificially delay prayer until you’ve completed the sections above. Simply make sure that at some point you move from observation to exultation; from discerning your own heart to addressing the Lord.
6. I first heard the “Rejoice, Repent, Request” paradigm from Kevin DeYoung. I think it’s an improvement on the ACTS paradigm (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication) because it’s more natural to keep adoration and thanksgiving together.
7. Thomas Watson, “A Christian on the Mount, or a Treatise Concerning Meditation,” in Discourses on Important and Interesting Subjects, Being the Select Works of the Rev. Thomas Watson, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: A. Fullarton & Co., 1829), 256.
8. Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, rev. ed. (NavPress, 2014), 219.