Meditating on God’s Word
“I will lift up my hands toward your commandments, which I love, and I will meditate on your statutes.” Psalm 119:48
I am currently reading Justin Whitmel Earley’s book “The Common Rule: Habits on Purpose for an Age of Distraction.” Earley has eight rules of life which he believes bring peace to our days and help us learn how to better love God and our neighbor. One chapter that has stuck with me deeply is his challenge to read scripture every day before looking at our phones.
It’s so easy to start the morning by groggily checking email or scrolling through social media, but what we often don’t realize is that what we do forms who we become. If we continually look to an outlet other than God to find our identity, security, and peace, we are going to come up empty handed.
Earley says this: “Each morning presents us with these questions: Who am I? And who am I becoming? Each morning, the Scriptures answer the same, as God says, ‘You are my child, and you are becoming like me.’ That is something to stand the day on.
We can’t become ourselves by looking inward, and we can’t become ourselves by staring at our strange reflections in the screen. We have to look into the Word. Like the apostle Peter said, ‘To whom shall we go? You have the words of life’ (John 6:68).”
The Word of God is our go-to source for purpose, affirmation, and identity, and throughout the Psalms, we find passages filled with declarations similar to Peter and Earley’s. In Psalm 119, the psalmist tells God that he will worship God’s commandments and meditate on his statutes, all for the purpose of love. The psalmist knows that no good thing comes apart from the Father (James 1:17). He has seen the transformation that happens when meditating on God’s word, and the same is true for us.
The more time we spend in scripture, the more confident we become in our identity. We don’t have to seek approval or acceptance from the world or the people in our lives. Instead, we can see clearly that God loves us, sent his Son to die for us, forgives us of our sins, fills us with the Holy Spirit, and equips us to be His hands and feet in the world.
We see that we are loved beyond reason, welcomed into a family, and never alone. We need to be in the scriptures in order to be shaped by them, and the more we invest in time in the Word, the more we will see it change our lives.