One of the bigger problems that the western church has suffered in the past 40 or so years is it doesn’t encourage meditation anymore.
Meditation, which we read about in the Psalms, is quite simply taking a passage of scripture and turning it over in your head. It doesn’t necessarily have to be scripture; it could be a prayer to God, or something God told you, or anything like that. You just have to eliminate all the other distractions around you that could get your mind to wander—obnoxious music, noise from the TV, ringing telephones, and so forth—and just concentrate on the words God has given you, and ask for the Holy Spirit to enlighten you. And see if you don't hear him talking to you quite clearly.
The problem is this sounds much too much like eastern meditation. And of course it would. Both are forms of meditation. Eastern meditation is different in that you clear your mind. Middle eastern meditation requires you to fill your mind—with the word of God.
Unfortunately, there are some idiots who are so convinced that any meditation is evil—that any resemblance to eastern meditation means it’s a devilish scheme to corrupt Christianity—that they’re trying to anathematize Christians who do this. They can’t believe it’s God speaking to the people who meditate on his word; it must be a temptation from the devil. Dispensationalists in particular believe God doesn’t talk to his people any more; he stopped talking once scripture was written, because he supposedly said everything he needed to say. Seems to me any teaching that shuts off God from speaking to his people would be devilish, and any teaching that discourages meditation on God’s word would make a person the least in the kingdom of heaven.
To be fair, if you’ve been wrapped up in eastern meditation, it takes a while to snap out of the mindless nonsense and meditate properly. But to chuck all forms of meditation just because you’ve been doing it wrong—well, it’s as if you said, “Up to this point I have been eating nothing but junk food. I must reform. So I will stop eating altogether.” Or it’s as if you decided that because you were wrongly praying to Krishna, prayer is wrong and you shouldn’t pray to Y
It’s just dumb. And it encourages the worst kind of stupidity. People who don’t meditate will never get beyond a certain point in their Christian walk. They’ll be too busy looking out for heresy and compromise to ever get any deeper in their relationship with God.
They won’t ingrain any Scriptures in their heart. They might think they have, ’cause they’ve memorized some favorite verses. ’Tain’t the same thing. I’ve memorized lots of verses, but I never did anything with them—and they never did anything to me—until I meditated on them. If I never meditated on them, I’d be reciting them whenever I wanted to prove a point, but they wouldn’t have changed my life; they’d simply be another tool in an arsenal I could use to knock other Christians around with my brilliance.
And if these people never hear God talk—and they’re convinced he simply doesn't do that any more—we can obviously see why.