Matthew Bingham’s book A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation was introduced to our church leadership team by our lead pastor at our annual leadership retreat last fall, who encouraged all of us to read it. It has since become a very influential book in our church, with many reading and discussing it, including our officer candidates. You can read my review of the book here, and I highly commend the book to  you.
But what is spiritual formation? Like me,  you may have heard the term, but aren’t’ sure exactly what it is. You may  have heard about friends getting degrees in spiritual formation from a Bible college or seminary. Bingham helpfully tells us that the term spiritual formation has arisen to describe the biblical process of molding the mind, heart, and life of a Christian into conformity to Christ.
In his book, Bingham introduces what he refers to as the “Reformation Triangle” of scripture, meditation, and prayer which is at the heart of historic Protestant spiritual formation.  Taken together, these three can be conceived as a conversation between the believer and God: we hear from God through his word, we reflect on what we’ve heard in meditation, and we then respond to God in prayer.

Bingham quotes heavily from the English Puritans, who devoted an incredible amount of time and attention to the subject of spiritual formation, writing at length on what it means to live and grow as a Christian.
Bingham is persuaded that a Reformed approach to spiritual formation is consistent with what the Bible itself teaches. The purpose of his book is to explore and commend a distinctively Reformed Protestant vision of Christian growth for twenty-first-century evangelicals.
Although I benefitted from the entire book, it was the chapters on the Reformation Triangle of scripture, meditation and prayer that I most enjoyed. This is the second in a series of three articles about what Bingham says about the Reformation Triangle, and will be on meditation.

Meditation: Reflecting on God
My first reaction to the term “meditation” was not a positive one. I recall the Beatles getting into Transcendental Meditation as they briefly followed Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1960’s. In addition, though many Christians participate in it, yoga is widely considered a form of meditation.
Bingham writes that meditation as practiced and commended by the early modern Reformers was instead about directing one’s attention toward God and his promises as revealed in Scripture with the aim of stirring up God-honoring affections. Meditation involves taking God’s word to heart, chewing it over, pondering it, and working through its implications for every facet of life. Godly meditation is essentially a sustained sort of thoughtful reflection.
Bingham tells us that there is a close connection between the practice of meditation and the practice of prayer, the two activities representing, in some sense, two aspects of the same underlying reality.
Bingham writes that the real significance of meditation lies in its capacity to transform mere thoughts about God and the things of God into heartfelt, soul-stirring, life-transforming convictions about the same. One might say that meditation attempts to move God’s truth from our heads into our hearts.
Bingham states that to the extent that contemporary evangelicals neglect meditation, we do so at a significant spiritual cost.
Meditation must be held in a close relationship with both Scripture intake and prayer. Meditating directly on Scripture, ought to be the bulk and mainstay of our practice. Many of the specific forms that godly meditation takes involve comparing one Scripture passage with another, and much of the practical mechanics of meditation revolves around figuring out how to apply biblical insights to our lives.
Bingham tells us that meditation in large part, is nothing more than an intentional sort of thinking. He tells us that you hear from God in Scripture, and then you think about what he has said through meditation, applying it prayerfully to your own life.

Our final article in this series will be on prayer.