Meditation and Worry

This last weekend I spoke on the subject of meditating on God's Word. It was part two of our Basic Training series at KCF during which we are looking at the essentials of spiritual survival. I think of everything else I said, what will stick the most was a phrase that I stole from someone else (I actually read it in several places as I was preparing for the message) — If you know how to worry, you know how to meditate.

Meditation is simply the process of turning your mind repeatedly towards something. Worry is simply turning our mind towards something that we are concerned about. Because we do it in a sustained way, that thing we are worrying about often seems to grow and become larger then it really is. We do this with a lot of other things as well - the stuff that our minds keep returning to and obsessing over: money, sex, material goods, an individual in our life, an activity that we have done or want to do.

The key is for us to turn our minds in the right direction. It's easy to turn it in the wrong direction - as a matter of fact, it takes no effort whatsoever. But turning our minds towards something of value, that takes effort and concentrated focus. It takes discipline. It involves not only a desire to want to think about the right things, but then a constant redirection of the mind when we discover that we are thinking about other things.

But when we do this with the Word of God, we discover that it does something to our minds. It begins to transform us on the inside. The great thing is that if you focus on the Word of God, all the other things that we spend our time worrying about (and that we can't really do anything about to begin with), are taken care of.

Matthew 6:33 NKJV
But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.