The Internal Path of Knowledge
How often have you read something about God, listened to a sermon, or discussed the Bible with a friend or in a life group, and then weeks have gone by and nothing has changed in your life? I’ve been there often. You know that you learned about God or what he desires for your life, but that knowledge never moves out of your head. It’s often said the longest distance is the 18 or so inches that it takes for knowledge to go from your head to your heart.
The distinction between head knowledge and the heart, the human will, is that until our heart responds to truth our lives will not be conformed to it. Until our wills see the immense value or magnitude of the truth, it will not bend and change. Because of our sinful nature, instead of naturally responding in worship and obedience to God, our wills apart from Christ are bent towards disobedience and rebellion.
How then do we go about applying God’s truth to our hearts that we might respond rightfully? One writer asks it this way, how do we “[move] from intellectual issues to exciting the heart’s affections in order to free the will for conformity to God?” Do you see the pathway here? When we see God’s truth that comes through His word, it needs to move from intellectual knowledge (the head), to stirring up our affections for God (the heart), that our will would be transformed and we respond rightly to God.
How do you start down this internal path of knowledge? Meditation.
The idea of meditation can bring with it some baggage. Eastern religions describe meditation as emptying one’s mind. The idea being that it is helpful to remove one’s conscious thoughts in order to come to peace with an idea. Ironically, this even goes against most formal definitions of what it means to meditate which is to think deeply about something.
How then should Biblical meditation look? J.I. Packer, in his book Knowing God, gives a helpful framework. He starts with the same problem we are addressing today, “How can we turn our knowledge about God into a knowledge of God?” That is, how do we take head knowledge down the path to our hearts? He answers, “The rule for doing so is simple but demanding. It is that we turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.”
He then gives the prescribed method of meditation, “meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the words and ways and purposes and promises of God.” Packer goes on, “its purpose is to clear one’s mental and spiritual vision of God, and to let his truth make its full and proper impact on one’s mind and heart.”
These descriptions are so helpful. The idea is to take every concept of who we think God is, and what He is calling us to do, and to subject them to the truth of God’s word, the Bible. We take these truths that we read, or we hear preached, or taught, and then we turn them over and over in our minds, dwelling on them, and seeing how they apply. As we go about this process it leads us to pray and ask God for greater wisdom, and to worship and praise Him as we see him revealed in the scriptures. I think Packer describes the task well, it’s both simple and demanding.
I think the reason that so often we aren’t seeing the life change we are hoping for in our lives is because we aren’t taking on the simple but demanding task of meditation over what we have learned. The 18 inch path from our mind to our hearts is short, and the path can be simple, but it demands that we focus on it and plan extra time to execute it.
The ways that you could go about meditating on God’s words could be a whole other post. To help you get started I recommend this short guide from Donald Whitney, who wrote an entire book on the spiritual disciplines. Today as you read from God’s word, will you try 1 or 2 of his suggestions? Remember, the goal is to move from an intellectual knowledge through meditating on God’s word, in order that our hearts would be stirred up in affection towards God.
