Christian Meditation for A Bigger Life with Pastor Dave Cover

Psalm 119:148 says, “My eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promise” (ESV). Biblical meditation is finding time to be alone with God. It’s using meditation to recalibrate your mind and heart and even your body with the vertical reality of God’s presence and God’s promises. Using “the eyes of your heart” — your biblically guided imagination — to experience Go...

When the Bible uses the word meditate, it’s talking about focusing your thoughts and your imagination on experiencing God’s presence and promises in a deeper way — a more vivid way — what Paul calls using the eyes of your heart in Ephesians 1:18. Meditation focuses “the eyes of your heart” to see with your imagination how God is present and acting right now in your life. This kind of meditation ca...

David meditates in Psalms 63:6-8 “I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy. My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me” (ESV). This is imagination. Mental imagery. This is what David calls meditation. It sounds attractive, doesn’t it? Let’s take the time to do something like th...

Genesis 24:63 says, “And Isaac went out to meditate in the field toward evening.” When the Bible uses the word meditate, it’s talking about focusing our mind and imagination to experience God’s presence in a deeper way — what Ephesians 1:18 calls using the eyes of our heart. In some way Isaac was going out into the field at sunset to do exactly that. Focusing his mind and imagination to be alone w...

Psalms 119:27 says, “…I will meditate on your wondrous works.” Let’s take the time to do that now. If your podcast app is set to skip silent sections of the podcast, disable that now. We want to use silence as part of our meditation. Biblically guided meditation and relaxation uses your imagination to focus on your body-mind connection. It helps you imagine and experience your connection with God...

This is a biblically guided meditation and relaxation to use any time you need to relieve stress and tension in your body and refocus and rest into God’s presence and promises. Important: If your podcast app is set to skip silent sections of the podcast, disable that now. We want to use silence as part of our meditation. Meditation is a time to listen and to speak to your whole person, including y...

This is a biblically guided meditation and relaxation to use any time you need to relieve stress and tension in your body and refocus and rest into God’s presence and promises. Important: If your podcast app is set to skip silent sections of the podcast, disable that now. We want to use silence as part of our meditation. Meditation is a time to listen and to speak to your whole person, including y...

This is a biblically guided meditation and relaxation to use any time you need to relieve stress and tension in your body and refocus and rest into God’s presence and promises. Important: If your podcast app is set to skip silent sections of the podcast, disable that now. We want to use silence as part of our meditation. You can flag these episodes on biblically guided meditation and relaxation fo...

This is a biblically guided meditation and relaxation to use any time you need to relieve stress and tension in your body and refocus and rest into God’s presence and promises. Important: If your podcast app is set to skip silent sections of the podcast, disable that now. We want to use silence as part of our meditation. You can flag these episodes on biblically guided meditation and relaxation fo...

This is a biblically guided meditation and relaxation to use any time you need to relieve stress and tension in your body and refocus and rest into God’s presence and promises. Important: If your podcast app is set to skip silent sections of the podcast, disable that now. We want to use silence as part of our meditation. You can flag these episodes on biblically guided meditation and relaxation fo...

Meditation is a very broad word. Biblically speaking, it’s a time of focused, intentional thought. Using your imagination to better see reality. Meditation embraces the importance of talking to yourself rather than just always listening to your brain’s chatter. Psalm 42:5–6 NIV5 Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior a...

We’ve been looking through the imaginative paintings of God’s life-creating power in Genesis 1-3 as we read Psalm 119. (To understand more what makes Psalm 119 so unique in the Bible, read the show notes from the Dec 21 episode.) Imagine eating the fruit from the Tree of Life. What might it have tasted like? What would you feel like afterward? Genesis 2-3 tells us that its fruit was the ultimate s...

We’ve been looking through the imaginative paintings of God’s life-creating power in Genesis 1-3 as we read Psalm 119. (To understand more what makes Psalm 119 so unique in the Bible, read the show notes from the Dec 21 episode.) What’s your attitude toward the Bible? Not your beliefs, but your feelings about the Bible’s place in your life? If you’re like me, it’s kind of mixed. My good self think...

We’ve been looking through the imaginative, word-brushed paintings of God’s life-creating power in Genesis 1-3 as we read Psalm 119. (To understand more what makes Psalm 119 so unique in the Bible, read the show notes from the Dec 21 episode.) Genesis 3 is a powerful picture of the resulting dysfunctions in every human heart after the man and woman (Adam and Eve) chose to transgress God’s one comm...

We’ve been looking through the frames of the word-brushed paintings of God’s life-creating power in Genesis 1-3 as we read Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is the longest psalm and the longest chapter in the entire Bible, and every verse is a mediation or prayer about our need for the power of God’s word. So the longest psalm and the longest chapter in the Bible is about the Bible. But it’s not just informati...

We’ve been looking through the frames of the word-brushed paintings of God’s life-creating power in Genesis 1-3 as we read Psalm 119. One of the most repeated prayers throughout Psalm 119 is for God to “give me life according to your word” (Ps 119:25). The powerful imagery from Genesis 1-2 provides a compelling, imagination-filled meditation on how God’s word gives us life. (See the show notes to...

Psalm 119 is the longest of the biblical psalms and the longest chapter in the entire Bible. And it is about one thing: God’s word. It’s artistic construction begins with being arranged as a Hebrew acrostic poem in the order of the Hebrew alphabet, with each Hebrew letter having 8 stanzas beginning with that Hebrew letter. Each verse is something about God’s word, using 8 additional synonyms for G...

The first pages of Genesis are filled with powerful word imagery. Written more than 3,000 years ago, Genesis remains ahead of our time in its picture of the deepest realities in your life. And Genesis 3 explains why your most valued and important relationships are also your most painful ones. Genesis 2:8–9 NIV 8 Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man h...

The first pages of Genesis are filled with powerful word imagery. Written more than 3,000 years ago, Genesis remains ahead of our time in its picture of the deepest realities in your life. And Genesis 3 explains why you are constantly feeling out of place in this world. No matter how much good happens in your life, there’s always the sense that more is still missing. In this episode, we talk about...

The first pages of Genesis are filled with powerful word imagery. Written more than 3,000 years ago, Genesis remains ahead of our time in its picture of the deepest realities in your life. And Genesis 3 explains so much about why you are constantly feeling the need to hide yourself. Hide yourself from others, from God, and even from yourself. But are you really safe to be vulnerable? Let’s talk ab...

Too often western culture is reductionistic in our “truth” about reality. And Christians are too influenced by this materialistic reductionism so that it limits our ability to live by the power of our imagination. Are you reducing your faith to just information? But God’s word gives you imagination because imagination is far more powerful than mere information to speak life into your desires. Gene...

Genesis 1:26-28 is a kind of thesis statement for the entire rest of the Bible’s story. You can’t fully understand the gospel’s bigger story if you miss what Genesis 1:26-28 means. This is God’s blueprint for humanity and the whole world. Everything else in the Bible is the unfolding of these 3 verses. And when you understand it that way, it becomes a powerful script for your life right now. 2 Cor...

Genesis 1:26-27 is the intellectually consistent basis to why human dignity and human rights are real. Genesis 1:26-27 explains Jesus’s radical value of women, children, the poor and the weak. And the more you can understand Genesis 1:26-27, the more you will become a glorious, embodied image of God in your relationships and our world. 2 Corinthians 3:18 NIV And we all, who … contemplate the Lord’...

Genesis 1:1-2:3 is a complex, highly sophisticated, poetic prelude to the rest of the Bible. It’s a kind of microcosm of the Bible’s bigger story; a window through which we can see God’s ultimate plan for our lives. Let’s look through that window together in this episode. Jesus seems to indicate that Genesis was part of the writings of Moses. Luke 24:27 NIV And beginning with Moses and all the Pro...

Genesis One is an amazing, highly sophisticated “painting” that in many ways is truer than a “photograph” would be. In just the first three verses, we see an illustrative portrait of our life and our need for God’s Spirit that no propositional statement could equal. Let’s meditate on that image together in this episode. https://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/starry-night.html (The Starry Night )b...