Meditating on God’s Word: Create It

Art and music are wonderful ways to spend time meditating on God’s Word. The act of creating allows us to process information in a very holistic way. It involves thinking, creating, and the hands-on feel of doing the art.

Artists enjoy the tactile aspects of creating because it involves the senses—seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and sometimes tasting.

Current research indicates that the more senses you use, the more information you are likely to retain. This is another example of how right-brain activities can help us absorb the left-brain information.

Musicians may enjoy expressing biblical truth in song. Writing music conveys the thrust of a passage or story (even without words).

Art takes many forms. Even if you don’t consider yourself an artist, you might still find ways to “create” as a way of processing what you learn in the Bible.

What’s your thing? Do you enjoy scrapbooking? Then create a scrapbook or art journal with each page visually expressing a truth from God’s Word. Make a scrapbook that tells a story or biography from the Bible or that crates a visual re-telling of a book of the Bible.

Be creative. Engage. Enjoy.

This is an excerpt from Sweeter Than Chocolate: Developing a Healthy Addiction to God’s Word. Used by permission.

 

Chocolate Sculpture or Chocolate Swirls? Engaging God’s Word with Both Sides of Your Brain

Some people might study a chocolate sculpture to examine every detail with precision. How did the sculptor make each cut or create different textures? What holds it up? Is it one piece or sections bound together? What makes the eyes look so real?

On the other hand, some people aren’t interested in the details; they just want to appreciate the chocolate decorations, big or small, for their artistic impression and the mood they create. In a sense, they want to meditate on the chocolate art rather than study it.

What’s the difference between studying the Bible and meditating on it?

Study is a linear approach to the Bible that follows steps and organizes the material to make sense of it. It is necessary for us to dig deep to understand what the Bible teaches, but it is a very left-brain process.

• The left-brain is the logical, linear, fact-storing part of the brain.
• The right brain is the abstract, creative, holistic part of the brain.

Most of us have a tendency toward one or the other. Which way do you lean? If you’re a left-brained person, then study is a natural realm for you, but if you’re more of a right-brained person, you may find study difficult, cumbersome, and boring.

Right brain folks would rather look at the big picture of Scripture than dig up details. That’s okay. They want to express themselves. They doodle. They dabble. They see the world in pictures rather than linear structures.

Although the left and right sides of the brain serve different functions, they both want to have a part in the process. Unfortunately, most of us learn to study the Bible and that’s it. The right brain never gets involved, which is why we may tend to find studying the Bible (or anything else) boring.

You see, we have to engage God’s Word with both sides of the brain. Yes, we need the left-brain to study, organize, and analyze the Bible. That’s how we learn the substance of God’s Word. However, we also need to engage the right brain to meditate on God’s Word.

When I talk about meditating on the Bible, I’m simply encouraging you to engage the right brain to help finish processing what you’ve learned.

Christian meditation is not weird, creepy spiritual exercises designed to empty our minds. Christian meditation is simply allowing our minds some breathing space to take the things we learned with the left brain and let them have time to dance and play in our head and heart. It allows the right brain to turn the truth over in our minds, looking at it from different angles.

The problem is we’re too busy and we often lack the focus to let our minds dwell on a passage of Scripture for very long. Most of us think of meditation as a static activity in which we stare at a passage of the Bible and think about it. For me, meditating on God’s Word is a way to enjoy it and engage with it in a personal and casual way.

We need to approach Scripture with both sides of our brain. Left brainers tend to do all the left-brain work of study and when we’re done analyzing, we think we’ve mastered it. But to truly experience the Bible, we need to engage the right side of the brain to make it personal and bring us closer to living it out. Right brainers might tend to skip the study and get lost in an abstract world of finding meaning and significance in the Scripture.

• Study without meditation tends to produce lifeless knowledge.
• Meditation without study tends to produce emotional whims.

Study followed by meditation produces a depth of insight that makes the Bible come alive, making us a part of it as we experience it in our hearts, and making it a part of us as we live it out. Both study and meditation are valuable and necessary.

We study the Bible to understand it, but we meditate on the Bible to make it personal.

Applying the Bible to our lives is one of the steps of studying the Bible, but that can be a mere cognitive awareness of what we should do.

I’m talking about getting the Bible to go deep and take root so that doing isn’t just a single, conscious act of obedience, but a natural, inherent part of your being that continuously, unconsciously lives the truth for the rest of your life. Do you see the difference?

We cannot come to the Bible to identify propositions and principles for us to obey religiously. That perception holds the principles as something external to us. We identify them, study them, admire them, and obey them, but they are an external truth.

The process of meditation engages the truth in a different way. When the imagination gets involved, it processes the information holistically so the emotions get involved. The process engages both mind and heart.

I’m not talking about seeking an emotional experience or letting our emotions run away, but when we experience the Bible, it affects all of who we are. We are digesting the Word so it becomes a part of us.

This is an excerpt from Sweeter Than Chocolate: Developing a Healthy Addiction to God’s Word. Used by permission.

 

Making Bible Study More Fun

Wake up, you right-brained folks! If this kind of rigid, detailed study bores you, I have a few suggestions. Look for ways to do it in a more creative way.

When you do a word study, underline all the words or verses in a particular color. Later, as you look through your Bible, you’ll know that green verses are about peace, blue verses are about heaven, and pink verses are about love.

Write verses out on colored notecards. Make an outline or chart with artwork, a collage, or different colors for each section. As part of your character study, draw a picture of your character for the cover of your Bible study.

It’s okay to approach linear, logical Bible study with some creative flourishes to make it more fun. We’ll discuss much more on right-brained approaches to the Bible in the next chapter.

This is an excerpt from Sweeter Than Chocolate: Developing a Healthy Addiction to God’s Word. Used by permission.

 

Five Methods of Left-Brain Bible Study

For many left-brained students, “follow your curiosity” may not seem structured enough. For those who want a more structured approach, you might want to choose from one of these methods.

If you’re more of the right-brained type, hold on until the end, where I’ll give some simple adaptations that will make these structured methods of study a little more fun.

1. Bible Study: Traditional Method (Observation, Interpretation, Application)
2. Christy’s IDEA Method for Bible Study
3. Biographical (Character) Study
4. Bible Study Methods: Outlining and Chart Making
5. Bible Study Methods: Word Studies

 

This is an excerpt from Sweeter Than Chocolate: Developing a Healthy Addiction to God’s Word. Used by permission.

 

Chocolate Preferences: Left and Right Brained Approaches to the Bible

Do you prefer light chocolate or dark chocolate? Most people have a preference—usually a strong preference. I used to say I preferred light chocolate because I didn’t like the bitter taste of the dark chocolate. Then, a friend gave me some expensive dark chocolate and it wasn’t bitter at all. In fact, it totally changed my perspective on chocolate. While I still prefer light chocolate, I now have an appreciation for both.

In a sense, I want to give you an appreciation for both light and dark chocolate. You may prefer one or the other, which is normal, but I think you’ll see the merits of both when it comes to how we appreciate God’s Word.

First of all, each of us is hardwired as either left brained (logical) or right brained (creative), or at least we’re somewhere on the spectrum between the two. We have a built-in preference for one or the other. We approach life either logically or creatively. Consequently, we approach God’s Word either logically or creatively. That’s why one approach to the Bible does not fit all.

Bible study is a very left-brain logical approach to the Bible. It focuses on itemizing, synthesizing, and organizing the text. It involves outlines, charts, diagrams, lists, and detailed analysis. Left-brained people usually thrive on this stuff. Right-brained people want to die a little inside.

Left-brain (logical) methods of studying the Bible don’t appeal to right-brain (creative) people and, conversely, right-brain (creative) methods of studying the Bible make left-brain (logical) people uncomfortable.

For example, meditating on the Bible is sort of vague and ambiguous to most left-brained people because it defies the set parameters of rigid study. Bible teachers don’t often teach Scripture meditation, presumably because it is not logical enough for the teachers, who tend to be left-brained.

I’m going to suggest that Scripture meditation is merely a right-brained approach (or actually an infinite number of right-brained approaches) to studying the Bible.

Neither approach is right or wrong. Each provides its own unique insights into God’s Word. No matter which approach you prefer, there are benefits of integrating both methods into how you approach the Bible.

It’s important to do a little of both because left-brain Bible study methods analyze the text and its context. We need to do this to understand the text.

Right brain approaches to Bible study take us beyond analyzing the text to immersing ourselves in it and absorbing it.

This is important because logical approaches to study can analyze and dissect the Bible until it is dead. Someone could diagram every sentence of the Bible and not be transformed by the power of God’s Word.

Remember, if you don’t try the dark chocolate, you’ll never know what you’ve been missing. I hope you will learn to enjoy them both.

This is an excerpt from Sweeter Than Chocolate: Developing a Healthy Addiction to God’s Word. Used by permission.