6 And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,
7 Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.
Exodus 34:6-7, The Bible
The purpose of the Bible is not to tell you what to do; its purpose is to describe God's character. In this blog post, I would like to elaborate on that statement.
What is God's character?
God's true character is love. If we meditate on God, we will eventually start to behave like him, but in the proper way, not the way we assume.
This is God's desire, that we progressively change through the practice of meditation. It's not a must, but it is kind of inevitable if we meditate.
Take for instance, I practice playing the piano sometimes. I have to meditate on the piano to get better. What I mean is that I must stop assuming I know the song I'm learning and play the song slowly (with a metronome, of course). Assuming "I know the piece" is pride. If I try to play that way, I will never truly understand the song and its nuances.
To understand the song, I must play the piece slowly. The piece must be broken into parts, and each part repeated a number of times. After which, I, almost inevitably, get better at playing the song.
But this learning is not only about learning the songs I like. I also have to do exercises that seemingly have nothing to do with the song. In the field of piano, these exercises manifest themselves in the form of Hanon exercises, scale exercises, chord exercises etc. Once these are completed, you will gain a new mastery of the instrument.
God is the same way. To truly learn about him, we must consume him slowly; we must meditate on his word. After meditating on his word, we will learn the true meaning of love.
However, God's word is not always what we want to do. It could be against what our desires are (like playing boring scale exercises), but there is a lot of learning in that too.
After all this, is the part we enjoy. In the piano practice world, this is known as improvisation. We can play with the melody or the structure of the song all we want because we know the essence of the song.
With God, meditating on his word will give us a glimpse of the depths of love and what it truly means to love.
How do we meditate on God's word?
1 Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
Psalms 1:1-2, The Bible
My theory of the most ideal way to meditate on God's word is to read God's word slowly, verse by verse, and read the verses repeatedly a couple times. After you finish reading, you do some mindfulness meditation, then go back to reading, only pausing to answer to important things like eating, showering etc.
I didn't read this from anywhere, I kinda derived it. I came to this conclusion from understanding the faith vs works parallel. You either walk by faith or walk by works (or by sight); you either depend on God to do things for you, or you do them yourself. Everytime you do things yourself, you are taking matters into your own hands.
Another thing is that the Bible says our righteousness is like a filthy rag. This means that we cannot please him through our good deeds, nor our praying, nor our fasting, nor our praise; we please him through having faith on him:
But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Hebrews 11:6, The Bible
5 Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
6 In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.
Proverbs 3:5-6, The Bible
From the scripture from Proverbs above, it shows that we are to trust in him, which is the same thing as having faith in God. We should acknowledge him too for what he's done, or like the Psalmist puts it:
I will meditate also of all thy work, and talk of thy doings.
Psalms 77:12, The Bible
I think we can learn a lot from David; after all, he was a man after God's own heart.
Now I know we may not have the time to meditate God's word, and there is no pressure. I try to read as much as I can. I miss a couple days of my daily reading, but it's okay. I'm human; we're all human. God created us this way and we should never be ashamed.
But we can be grateful. We can learn to appreciate all that is around us and the love he shows us even if we don't deserve it. There is a lot to learn from God's character
The bottom line
The Bible is not a rule book; it's a guide. Stop with the work mentality. Have faith in God and let God do the rest.