A Cup of Tea: The Importance of Meditating on Scripture

I love Scripture. I also love tea. Therefore, this analogy really stuck out to me. It's one thing to be disciplined enough to read Scripture every day. It's even more difficult to remember what you read, even just an hour later.

In one of my classes we have been learning about meditation. It's been fantastic. My prof pointed out that most people, when reading Scripture, spend about 2 seconds thinking about each verse they read. Think about that. 2 seconds. No wonder we can't remember what we read an hour later. 2 seconds is nothing. It's like a blink. Or how long it takes to pick out the shoes you are gonna wear with your outfit. Or how long it takes to roll out of bed. Well, you get the idea.

That's all the time we spend on a verse of Scripture? He has been teaching us to meditate. In other words, to take a verse and think about it for at least 30 seconds. There are tons of ways to do this. Here are a few:

1. Pray through the verse.
2. Ask the question, "What does this verse say about the character of God?"
3. Rewrite the verse in your own words.
4. Look for personal applications of the verse.

It might take awhile to do this with all the verses in a chapter of the Bible. So if you read a chapter, just pick one verse to meditate on. It's brilliant - because if we think about the verse even for thirty seconds, then that's FIFTEEN times longer than we would have thought about it to begin with. If we can just remember one phrase from what we read every day, I think we will be amazed at how Scripture really will become alive to us.

So, here is that tea quote I mentioned earlier from a book written by my professor:

"...meditation [is] deep thinking on the truths and spiritual realities revealed in Scripture for the purposes of understanding, application, and prayer. Meditation goes beyond hearing, reading, studying, and even memorizing as a means of taking in God's Word. A simple analogy would be a cup of tea. You are the cup of hot water and the intake of Scripture is represented by the tea bag. Hearing God's Word is like one dip of the tea bag into the cup. Some of the tea's flavor is absorbed by the water, but not as much as would occur with a more thorough soaking of the bag. In this analogy, reading, studying, and memorizing God's Word are represented by additional plunges of the tea bad into the cup. The more frequently the tea enters the water, the more effect it has. Meditation, however, is like immersing the tea bag completely and letting it steep until all the rich tea flavor has been extracted and the water is thoroughly tinctured reddish brown."

- Dr. Donald Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life