Biblical Contemplation

[Ed Hurst]

You'll hear evangelicals warning folks against "contemplative prayer." Yet the Bible is full of references to contemplation. The problem is terminology, as usual. The evies are worried about "contemplation" in the Far Eastern sense of striving to silence the mind and the ego. We can agree with evies on that. The idea is not to silence the mind and let something else take over, because that leaves you open to demonic powers. We seek to discipline the mind as a servant of the heart. We seek to separate the ego from the intellect and become conscious of other parts of our human awareness.

The whole point of contemplation is teaching the mind from your convictions. You want your mind to learn better ways to respond to things. It's paths need to be clarified and straightened, made more consistent with where we are headed in Kingdom service. In that sense, contemplative prayer is a good thing. It's a conversation with God, who lives in your heart.

Today I didn't feel like a hard ride or walk, so I took my ball over to the old abandoned mall and stood in a shady entry way and just bounced it off the brick walls, pillars and simply stood bouncing it off the concrete floor for a while. The idea was solitude that distracted a part of my mind so that my heart could more easily dominate the conversation. In that condition, my mouth was able to express what was on my heart, and my mind was taught by the words that came out. Yes, it's possible to let your heart take over your conscious bodily functions, and the mouth in particular. That's because we can still leave the ego in charge without it being imprisoned in the intellect.

We can leave the evies to chase their straw men while we live the Word of Christ.

[jaybreak]

For all their talk about anti-pharisee-ism, evies are incredibly good at creating new sins for people to avoid. It wouldn't be so bad if the movement wasn't so large and there weren't so many people under their umbrella. Such large organizations will find impossible to let their actual members grow individually and know their calling if they continue to operate like this. I start to feel really bad for the folks stuck in that situation for one reason or another, circumstantially; they're going to persistently think there's always something wrong with who they are.