Talking about facing the reality of his pancreatic cancer, Tim Keller recently said, “I came to realize that the experiential side of my faith really needed to strengthen or I wasn’t going to be able to handle this. It’s one thing to believe God loves you, another thing to actually feel his love. It’s one thing to believe he’s present with you. It’s another to actually experience his presence.”

One way God‘s people have been experiencing God‘s presence and love for thousands of years is through meditation. Meditation is learning to experience unseen realities using our biblically guided imagination. 

When we don’t live lives empowered by our biblically guided imagination, our Christian experience gets reduced to merely theological doctrines and moral rules. Of course, true biblical doctrines and moral boundaries are essential for living spiritually healthy lives. But if that’s all our “Christianity” is it will not produce spiritually healthy lives because something very very big is missing. 

And that kind of Christianity always gives way to more powerful imaginations. But because those other imaginations go against the grain of reality, our lives become fragmented from reality in God’s universe. And the fruits of fragmented, unreal lives appear in our mind/spirit as worry and fear and insecurity and self protection and frustration and anger and resentment. And in our body as stress and tension and anxiety. 

This is a “Christianity” and life that’s missing the infinite awe and intimate presence and connection with Christ. The I Am. It then becomes little more than an ideology with a set of ethics. Our faith gets reduced to beliefs and commands.

Biblically guided meditation gives us a better imagination. The reality of the bigger story of all that God is for you in Jesus is a far better imagination. Explosive with wonder and beauty and glory and joy and life promise. Infinite awe and intimate presence!

2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

2 Corinthians 5:21 (NIV)

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

BEHOLD. You are in Christ. You are a new creation. Feel this new creation reality into your body. The life of God’s Spirit in you. The creator. There is something freeing and empowering and life-giving knowing that you are a creation. You don’t have to create yourself. You are a creation of God. The one who loves you.

This is imagery of life replacing death. New creation replacing death and decay. 

Where I live there’s a woods behind my house. I’m recording this in May. In the spring each day it’s kind of like a time lapse photography of new life replacing the old death and decay. It starts on the ground of the woods. Green starts to appear and you see more and more of the ground slowly becoming more and more green each day. Then smaller plants begin to bud and slowly a bit of green starts to fill the smaller branches of the smaller plants lower to the ground. After a couple weeks they start to become lush with green. Then some trees begin to bud and there are some trees where you can see small sprouts of green leaves in the tall branches. But there are other trees that still look like it’s February. Completely bare branches. The dead look of winter. In one sense it seems to happen fairly fast over the course of a month or more. In another sense it’s a slow process. Some trees that are coming alive still look dead. Other places look more and more alive but not near what they will be a month from now. It depends on your perspective of time. Not much happens in an hour. But lots seems to happen in a week. Especially a warmer week with lots of sunshine. Colder weeks seem less so. Day by day.

This is what it’s like to be in Christ. A new creation has begun but the process takes time. You are in the already/not yet. But you have God‘s promise and you have his Holy Spirit to give you confident expectation that breathes/speaks life into you right now. Feel this into your body. Behold.

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Our audio engineer is Diego Huaman.

This podcast is a ministry of The Crossing, a church in Columbia, Missouri, a college town where the flagship campus of the University of Missouri is located.