Now, that leads me to the fourth very
important guideline for the study of the Scriptures,
and that is, meditate on the Bible.
Meditate on the Bible.
Meditation is something that God taught His people.
The Word of God was to be before
the children of Israel all the time so
that they could meditate on it.
And let me give you that passage of
Scripture over in the 6th chapter of Deuteronomy,
verses 6 through 9.
Listen to this very carefully.
And these words, which I command thee this
day, shall be in thine heart, and thou
shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and
shalt talk of them when thou sittest in
thine house, when thou walkest by the way,
and when thou liest down, and when thou
risest up, and thou shalt bind them for
a sign upon thine hand, and they shall
be as frontlets between thine eyes, and thou
shalt write them upon the posts of thy
house and on thy gates.
You see, the Word of God was to
be kept before them.
It was to be written in their homes,
on the doorposts and the lintel over the
door.
It was to be that which they talked
about when they ate, went down at night,
and probably had a little difficulty getting off
to sleep.
And it presented this is the most amazing
statement that so far we've considered that the
Lord has given.
He told them to write the Word of
God everywhere, and it would be burnt into
their hearts and lives.
Now today, we've forgotten about that.
Oh, every now and then you see a
verse of Scripture stuck up, and unfortunately today,
written in a way that's difficult to read,
and it's not presented in a dignified way.
Somebody comes down the street in an automobile,
an old beat-up jalopy, and a verse
of Scripture written on it.
You can hardly read the thing.
I always feel humiliated when I see that.
And then I look at the liquor advertisements.
My, how dignified they are given out.
And I rode out Wilshire Boulevard with a
friend and called his attention to the number
of billboards that are liquor signs.
That's all they are.
And I said, no wonder so many people
in Southern California drink.
This thing is burnt into their minds and
hearts.
Everywhere they turn, why, here it is, right
there before them.
Drink this, drink that.
And it all adds up to one thing.
There is something wrong with you if you
don't drink liquor.
That's what they're trying to tell you.
They give you the impression that the intelligent
are the ones who drink, and the oddballs
do not.
Now, when I was growing up as a
boy, it was the opposite, that there's something
wrong with the drunkard.
Today he's just sick.
He's not a sinner at all, and that
he just needs a little revamping of a
few of his axons and dendrites, and then
he'll be in a position to drink in
a normal sort of way.
And after all, what is normal drinking?
This is something that I think is very
important to see.
Meditate on the Word of God.
And there was the man that was formerly
in my church down in Cleburne, Texas, and
this man, he owned the Coca-Cola plant.
He owned it there and in two other
places in Texas.
And one day I was riding across the
square in our little town, and I was
going down to his place, and I went
over to him and I said to him,
you know, I said, I counted 13 Coca
-Cola signs on the square.
I said, do you have to tell people
13 times on the square about Coca-Cola
when everybody already knows about it?
And then he said this to me.
He said, when was the last time you
saw a package of Arbuckle coffee?
Well, I said, I don't recall of seeing
a package of Arbuckle coffee since I was
a boy.
He said, that's it.
He said, years ago, Arbuckle coffee was advertised
as much as Coca-Cola.
And then the people who made the coffee
thought, well, everybody knows about Arbuckle coffee, and
they quit talking about it.
They quit advertising.
They cut down on it.
And he said, now, he says, nobody knows
about Arbuckle coffee.
And he says, Coca-Cola feels like that
a certain percentage, and you'd be amazed how
much out of each bottle of Coca-Cola
they sell, how much of that goes into
advertising.
Now, they feel like they've just got to
keep saying it.
And certainly certain soap products feel like they
have to keep saying it.
And certainly cigarettes, they have to keep saying
it with the silliest type of advertising.
May I say to you, God says His
Word ought to be given prominence.
Now, if you and I are to understand
the Word of God, we must meditate on
the Bible.
I know a great many people.
Family is, of course, divided during the day.
The wife listens to the program at home.
The husband listens to it at work.
And of the evening at the dinner table,
they discuss what was covered that day in
the Bible.
May I say, that's meditation.
Go back over it again and again.
Well, what do you think about when you
don't have anything else to think about?
Now, I find riding along in the car
alone, and I make quite a few trips
by myself, I find out that's a good
time to take a passage of scripture and
to think about it, to give thought to
it at that time.
Someone asked a man once, says, When you
can't sleep at night, do you count sheep?
He said, No.
He says, I talk to the shepherd.
Well, that's what God's people are asked to
do.
That is, God asks His people to meditate
on His Word.
Now, what does it mean to meditate on
the Word of God?
Well, there's a very graphic statement that's made
in the first psalm.
Let me read the first two verses.
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, but his delight is
in the law of the Lord, and in
his law doth he meditate day and night.
Now, that word meditate, I'm told, is actually
a picture of a cow chewing her cud.
Now, you know the old cow goes out
of a morning, and while the grass is
fresh with dew, she eats the grass.
Then when the sun comes up and the
grass is warm and the weather is hot,
the old cow gets under a tree and
lies down or stands there in the shade,
and you see her chewing, and you wonder,
What in the world that cow is chewing?
Well, they say that she's chewing her cud.
Well, she's actually meditating, my friend.
You see, we're also told that a cow
has several stomachs, so of a morning she
eats the grass rather hurriedly, stores it in
one tummy, and then in the afternoon when
it's hot, she meditates upon it.
She chews the cud.
She transfers it from one tummy to another,
and she chews it over again.
May I say to you that we need
to learn to do that in our thought
processes in studying the Word of God.
We need to take that which we've read
and that which we've studied and meditate upon
it.
And that's one of the most valuable things
that you can do.
Now, of course, as a preacher, I've had
some advantage here over most of you, and
I think here's where a preacher, a teacher
of the Word has a tremendous advantage over
other folk, is this, that in preparing a
message, many times I'll take a verse of
scripture and spend hours doing nothing in the
world but just reading it over and over
and reading what others have said and just
keep reading it.
And finally, it's a marvelous thing that I
find that new truth will break out from
that particular passage.
I remember hearing Dr. Harry Ironside years ago
say that he had heard a lecturer in
a seminary in Chicago, a lecturer on the
Song of Solomon, and he gave quite a
liberal interpretation, which put Solomon in a very
bad light, by the way.
And even the record that is clear makes
Solomon bad enough, and we do not need
to paint him any darker than he really
is.
But he was not satisfied, and he said
that he went and read the Song of
Solomon again, got out on his knees and
asked God to give him an understanding of
it because he didn't have, and he did
that again and again.
In fact, he did it for weeks and
months.
And finally, new light broke from that book,
and I generally give his interpretation of the
Song of Solomon for two reasons.
It satisfies my mind and my heart more
than any other interpretation that I have heard.
And then the second thing is, I know
the man who did it spent a great
deal of time in meditation.
And meditation is really a lost art today.
And again, may I say, that we let
it go at devotions, and 30 minutes after
devotions, a man riding to work and the
housewife sweeping the kitchen or washing the dishes,
I have a notion if you'd ask either
one of them what it was they read
at the breakfast table, they couldn't tell you.
We need to learn to meditate on the
Word of God, how important that is.
That Ethiopian eunuch riding along, reading Isaiah.
He was actually studying Isaiah because he's in
a passage with which he's having trouble, and
he didn't know what it meant.
He went over it and over it again.
And here comes along this man, Philip.
And Philip, guided by the Spirit of God,
it says he began at that scripture and
he preached unto him Jesus.
And just think of when he got to
that particular passage of scripture that he was
a sheep led to the slaughter.
All we like sheep have gone astray.
We've turned every one to his own way,
and the Lord hath laid on him the
iniquity of us all.
I'd love to have been there that day
and heard Philip.
How we need to meditate on the Word
of God.
And that is, frankly, where television is absolutely
blotting out and changing the spiritual life of
many families.
There are a great many boys and girls
today that formerly in the home they would
have known John 3.16, and they could
have sung Jesus Loves Me, but now they
can sing that silly TV commercial about a
certain soap or about a certain something else.
They know that and even the tune of
it as well as the words, but they
can't sing Jesus Loves Me.
May I say to you that one of
the reasons today that our churches are becoming
colder and colder and more indifferent to the
Word of God is just simply because there
is that lack of meditation upon the Word
of God.
And as we go through the Bible, this
time again, learn to meditate upon it.
And I trust that you will continue to
meditate on the Word of God.
By the way, these folk who write in
a long time after I've made a certain
tape on a certain passage of Scripture, and
they ask a certain question or some suggestion
someone makes, reveal that folk are meditating upon
the Word of God.