How Belief Becomes Experience - Adding Declaration to Your Meditation - Part 1
Main Post of the Week #1
If you haven’t had a chance to digest the posts on Creating Breakthrough in Your Life Through Meditation - I hope you can. No, not for my sake: for yours! If so, your results from this companion series will be strikingly better. Continue pursuing this with us and don’t get distracted.
We’re still talking about breakthrough in your life. Any takers?
Stay the Course
You will be rewarded for doing so; if you can find the resolve to keep with it. No matter how many times your mind may wander, keep coming back. It’s okay. It’s worth it. Find your place again.
I’ll be honest, many don’t end up being able to pay the price, however passionately they start. Many want the fruit of God’s deeper work in their lives without the cultivation. I am laying out part of the path for you. Keep working. Keep investing time and passion. It’ll pay off.
Meditating & Declaring
It is essential to begin meditating before, and then in conjunction with, declaring. (I’ll explain more about why as we go.) Where meditating helps us deeply align ourselves with what is true; declaring helps us apply and experience the truth in our own lives. They are inseparable.
Though we slightly touched on ‘aiming’ the Word at situations in the Creating Breakthrough in Your Life Through Meditation Series, the Lord impressed me that we must also discuss the practical steps of declaration. This is key to deeper breakthrough. So I can’t skip it.
What’s Declaring Truly Like?
Think of a songwriter learning the art of songwriting: If meditation on the Word is like studying the fundamentals of music, declaration is like applying those fundamentals to writing music. Meditation brings us into alignment with the thoughts of God. Declaration, however, involves applying the fundamentals of the Word to different situations in our lives, so we may experience it. Unless we have enough of the Word verbatim in our hearts and lives - (the ‘fundamentals’) - our declaration - (the song we write with our lives)- may end up hollow or even slightly off-base.
Yup, Discipline Takes Discipline
When I was a kid, I didn’t want to practice the fundamentals on piano - “I just wanted to play music”. So I bypassed many of the fundamentals in my haste to begin to play songs, or even write my own. Temporarily, this enabled me to do lots of things my little friends could not and appear more accomplished than I actually was, albeit on a very limited range of things. Soon though, others who had taken time to discipline themselves to master the fundamentals excelled far beyond me. Then I had to waste years unlearning bad habits. This could have been avoided by doing things right the first time.
Knowing vs. Experiencing
There is a difference between knowing the truth and experiencing it. Boy is there! In fact, some go so far as to say that when knowing becomes experiencing, that is the definition of breakthrough. But listen, we have to know the truth before we can experience it. By knowing, of course, we don’t mean ‘recognizing’ or ‘just mentally agreeing’, but holding something so deeply and closely that it displaces all other contrary ideas. As this happens, touched by the Holy Spirit, our faith grows.
Yes, this friend, is where rubber meets road.
May I suggest to you that a key connector between knowing and experiencing is declaration.
Get that in your spirit. I dearly hope this will sink into your heart, past all the other ’stuff’ going on - and get into your life.
Father, in the name of Jesus - You know every person reading these words, how they long for more. I ask you now to open up your Word, which never fails, and cause each reader to begin to experience your promises in greater measure as we proceed. May Your Spirit teach and strengthen each of us, empowering us beyond anything we have ever known. Take us higher. Closer. Make us vessels that carry heavenly things into earth, bringing divine solutions, advancing Your Kingdom. Our hearts and lives belong to you.
Meditation and declaration are success partners, but they are quite different. We’ll begin to explore this relationship over the next few posts.
Rick for Ti-MC
PS Get ready to start rocking with your business ideas, current businesses and careers - and truly extending the Kingdom in the marketplace for real. This is all part of it. Stay with us.
It is so hard to stay on track sometimes. This morning I wanted to give up. To say it is all too hard. As I drove to a lunch appointment, I began to declare who I am in God, what he is in me. My lunch appointment was amazingly refreshing after being something I dreaded. This is what experiencing what we’ve been meditating on is all about. Thanks, Rick.
It IS hard to stay on track. Hopefully we can encourage each other to believe for simple, yet powerful divine shifts as we walk with God in everyday life… thanks for sharing
This is rock solid. “passionately we start…Many want the fruit of God’s deeper work in their lives without the cultivation.” This is so true.
Lord, I pray today that you would give me and those reading this word the strength to follow through. To not give up and to just exist, that you enable our hearts and minds to comprehend the deep work you are willing to do in our lives.
Amen.
I know it may be an over-used phrase, but I feel like I’m “taking a drink from a fire hose” in applying your Biblical meditation techniques. I am finding that my inner man - by the Spirit that God has sealed in me - is being built-up in a big way through these meditation practices: especially through speaking them out. I started with a few select verses from the Word and for the first time in my Christian walk I am noticing how they are being deeply implanted in my heart - to where they aren’t words I just understand, but they are words that both have life and are changing my life. So, for example, internally, I am seeing the Kingdom of God differently than before and, externally, I’ve been able to pray differently for people (or speak God-inspired words into their life with more boldness). “The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and they are life”, indeed! All this to say I am loving the way that learning this way of meditatating on the Word is already manifesting itself in my life. And I’ve only just begun. I still often go back to Post 5 in this series to make sure I’m putting into practice everything you have suggested. Gulp, gulp………
This is why we do what we do.
Thank you Dave for your candor and detail. May God continue to bless your life as you press into Him. That is great stuff. Many will be encouraged and enlightened by your comments.