The Kind of Meditation That Christians Should Avoid

how do you see meditation what about mantras so i'm assuming this is usually comes from an eastern religion influence but i don't want to read into that so meditation to mantras what do you think so yeah it kind of depends on what you mean by meditation like to me biblically meditation is like uh the word means like to chew the cut or at least the etymology of the word it's like when an animal choose cud and then puts it back and brings it back and chews it more and the idea is like you're thinking something over so like when a mathematician is working on a hard problem you could call that meditation but in our culture we usually use the term to mean something else and when it comes to easter from eastern religions it can sometimes mean something else so um let me throw out a few thoughts in case that's the direction it's going it's sort of like a mindlessness kind of like um so one of the reasons why this meditation stuff is entered in uh to christian circles one of the reasons is because there are there is a group who have said like let's go into these eastern religions and let's borrow whatever we can and that's a dangerous thing to do this is something that's happened many people have done this through the years they're like oh okay the eastern mystics like let's kind of dig in there and let's let's get what we can from their behaviors and christianize it let's kind of try to make it sort of christian and this is just a dangerous practice in general because practices lead to beliefs and they come from beliefs and there's reasons why they're doing what they're doing the way they're doing it and why christians biblically aren't really doing that and so you want to try to make sure that your practices are consistent with what we find in scripture it's like the blueprint god gave us so let me give you some examples of this um jesus said when our when we pray not to think we'll be heard because of our many words so some people will say mantras and they think they're going to create something with their with their words they're going to say it over and over and over again they're putting it out to the to the universe or maybe they'll go oh no no to god i'm christianizing it right i'm putting it out to god but they think they'll be heard because they're going to repeat it over and over and over again and i think that what jesus is showing us is that that kind of thing annoys god to put it sort of clumsily i think that he doesn't like it when we just say the same thing over and over and over again because we think lots of words now he'll hear me instead of thinking god is gracious and loving and patient and he's always listening um that's a danger it also is akin to what we would see in the first century with magic spells where they would use certain phrases and repeat them over and over again to try to create some sort of magical effect and this is something god doesn't want christians to be involved in and jesus you know he comes into that culture and he doesn't teach us to do those things he had the opportunity to tell us to do that he didn't so i think generally with meditation uh i don't know exactly what they mean maybe they mean something that i'll consider more innocuous but if it's borrowing from eastern mysticism if it's starting to look like like magic spells like you're repeating the phrases if it's the kind of prayer jesus told us not to do if it's mindlessness instead of being thoughtful and considering the you know the goodness of god or looking at creation and considering that god made that then i'm going to be you know wanting to probably move away from it yeah

Channel: Mike Winger

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Id: z1JEwJFScCA

Length: 3min 8sec (188 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021