Meditation

The Holy Spirit wants to be your teacher and guide. In order for this to happen you need to start trying to sense what He is trying to teach you and then exposing yourself to this material over and over again.

The only permanent transformation that takes place in the Christian life is when the Holy Spirit takes a truth in your mind and writes it on your heart.

Mark this down. Meditate on it. Write it on the walls of your heart. You have to come to the place where what the Holy Spirit is saying to you right now becomes one of the most important things in your life. That’s what I’m going to pay attention to. That’s what I’m going to think about. That will be my priority.

May God bless you as you meditate on Holy things.

Meditation

When I read Christian books, I always try to keep a pencil close at hand. If something speaks to me, I make a bracket on the side of the page in pencil. A bracket looks like this ] only larger. I make the bracket as big as the paragraph or section that spoke to me.

When I get done with the book I go on to the next book, but I will come back to the book I just finished in the near future. Instead of rereading the entire book, I will just read the parts I marked in brackets.

You can apply that same principle to things you read online like the blog. If a particular posting or a thread really blesses you, copy and paste it into a file on your computer. Put down the date that you transferred the material. Reread it once or twice a week for a couple of months. This is how you meditate on holy things.

Here is a good example of why marking and re-reading can be so very important. Take the material in this blog on dealing with death. The principles taught in that section really work. I know because I have applied them in my own life.

My take on dealing with death is a little unusual. I've never read or heard anything quite like the material that I have presented to you on that topic.

Hopefully when you read that thread it will bless you. But if you aren't currently in mourning for someone, you will probably forget what you read or where you read it in a couple of weeks.

But sooner or later someone you love will die. And you will need this material or something like it. If you have reviewed that material a couple of times when the time comes when you need to put the principles into practice, you'll already have some of them in your heart. And you will remember where you read it so that you can go back and apply it to your life.

Meditation

All permanent change in the Christian life is the result of the Holy Spirit’s power being released into our inner man. Our souls tend to be like dry, sun baked soil that is in desperate need to refreshing, life giving water. One way for water to reach dry soil is through irrigation ditches. The life giving water of the Holy Spirit flows into us like water through an irrigation ditch. Our responsibility is to understand the process and then open the gates and let the water flow.

The channels through which the living water flows are well know: worship, Bible study, prayer, and attending public Christian meetings. But there is another, vitally important way to receive the refreshing power of the Holy Spirit, and that is by reading good Christian books. But don’t read just any book, read books by authors that warm your heart.

Here are three little tests you can do to find out if you are receiving spiritual life and power from a book or simply receiving information. These same tests will work when evaluating Christian music or listening to preachers and teachers.

First, when I read this book, does it warm my heart? Am I aware of a sense of life giving power being imparted to me?

Second, when I am done reading, is it a little more easy and natural for me to spend a few moments praying that it would have been before I read from the book? Sin in human nature just flat out hates to pray. But whenever you open the one of the channels into your heart through which the Holy Spirit flows, you will find it easier to overcome the sense of resistance that the flesh exerts on us when we decide to pray.

Third, is it a little easier for me to resist the power of sin after I have spent some time reading this author? Is it a little easier to be good?

If an author impacts you in any of these three ways then you are probably going to want to get your hands on as much material as you can from this person and use it to nourish your soul.

As you apply these tests to the various forms of Christian media that you expose yourself to, you will become more and more aware of what the Holy Spirit is trying to do in your life. Jesus promised us that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth and He also promised us that the truth would make us free. We need to put those two things together in our minds and never let them be separated. The Holy Spirit works through the living word and through anointed teaching.

If you start reading a certain author, and you find that he or she is doing you a great deal of good, that doesn’t mean that all of the other authors are in some way inferior – it simply means that the person you are reading has the teaching that the Holy Spirit wants to impart to your life right now.

Meditation

Whenever you are exposed to any material of a spiritual nature, you should always be listening with your heart while you are understanding with your mind.

If you get a sense in your heart that this is material that you really need, or that God wants you to pay special attention to, then you need to mark it and go back over it again and again until it sinks in.

“Wow, Pastor, that sermon really spoke to me. It was almost as if you knew about my situation before you preached it.”

Get the tape or the CD and listen to it over and over again. If it wasn't recorded, review your notes periodically.