Living Hope

“To be spiritually minded … is to have our minds really exercised with delight about heavenly things … especially Christ himself as at the right hand of God.

Spiritual mindedness is developed, exercised and reinforced by meditation.  By … .  meditation, I intend the thought of some subject spiritual and divine, with the fixing, forcing, and ordering of our thoughts about it, with a design to affect our own hearts and souls with the matter of it… . In meditation our principal aim is the affecting of our own hearts and minds with love, delight, and humiliation… .

Because persons are generally at a great loss in this duty of meditation … I shall … give briefly two or three rules for the directing of believers to a right performance of this great duty, and they are these:

Meditate on God with God, that is, when we would undertake thoughts and meditations of God, his excellencies, his properties, his glory, his majesty, his love, his goodness, let it be done in a way of speaking to God, in a deep humiliation and abasement of our souls.

Meditate on the word in the word; that is, in the reading of it, consider the sense in the particular passages, … looking to God for help, guidance, and direction, in the discovery of his mind and will therein, and then labour to have our hearts affected with it.

What we come short of in evenness and constancy in our thoughts … let it be made up … by frequent returns of the mind to the subject proposed to be meditated upon.”

John Owen