Three years ago, in the summer of 2021, the first episodes were launching for the podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.” The series had twelve episodes, plus several bonus episodes. In one of those, from two years ago (July 2022), the host interviewed Tim Keller, who died in May 2023.

Late in the interview, Keller is asked, “How do you account for your own longevity in ministry?” Keller answers,

Earlier on [in ministry], one of the things that helps you continue to grow in grace and . . . frankly, not get an inflated ego, not get blind spots, [is] Hebrews 3:13 fellowship (“exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin”).

In other words, Keller says,

You’ve got to have some people in your life who exhort you daily because sin will always blind you; the deceitfulness of sin always blinds you. So, who is it in your life that actually is authorized to come talk to you, look at you, really rake you over the coals if necessary?

Hopefully you’re nodding your head. I hope you’ve had it, and still have it, and you’ve even counseled others to have it. But this isn’t Keller’s last word. He continues,

As time went on, though, here’s what has to happen. You can hide even from people like that. I realized that midway. You can still do bad things. You can still have an affair, you can still do things, still getting hooked on pornography. You can hide. And also, here’s another problem: it’s very difficult to make friends like that if you lose them, if somebody dies or somebody moves away or that kind of thing. It’s very difficult in your . . . forties, fifties, sixties, to go out and get another person like that. And therefore . . . oh, the prayer life. . . . And not just praying about things. Communion with God. Read John Owen’s little book . . . Communion with God, the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. . . . It talks about the purpose of prayer is to actually have the love of God shed abroad in your heart. To actually have it, to actually see his face, to actually sense the grace of God . . . there actually has to be a genuine experiential life. Not just say your prayers, not just read your Bible.

All this sets up what he says a few minutes later:

The only real accountability that just cannot be avoided is when you’ve experienced God’s presence and his love, and it is so delicious that you say, “I just don’t . . . want to lose that; I can’t lose that.” That’s the only accountability I know. Even accountability with my wife — I could lie. There is no other accountability. And even just a prayer life in which you pray. I read my Bible and pray every day. The real question is, Are you having fellowship with God or communion with God, and do you sometimes commune with God in his love with Christ and his grace and the Holy Spirit and his comfort? Do you? And if you do, that’s the thing you say: “I cannot live without that.”

So that’s our focus in this session. How do I get that? How do I enjoy a genuine experiential communion with God that would make me say, “I can’t lose that. My soul cannot go without that. I have tasted. I have been fed.” It caught me off guard at first that Keller said “delicious,” but on further reflection, I love that he says that. This is tasting, feeding, savoring, and eating imagery. “Delicious” is surprising but right.

So, how do I get that? How do I get spiritually rooted, like a tree planted by streams of water, like the happy man of Psalm 1? Let’s get help from some old men.

First, Mueller

Someone else who talks about “experiential communion with God” is George Mueller (1805–1898), whose ministry cared for more than ten thousand orphans in England. In his autobiography, Mueller tells of a life-changing discovery he made in the first half of 1841.

In a journal entry dated May 7, he captures the insight that he found himself stumbling onto that spring. By the time he came to prepare the fifth edition for press, he added that he’d now been benefitting from this for fourteen years. The entry is one long paragraph of more than 1,500 words that rewards careful and multiple readings.

Over the years, I have read it again and again and seem to profit from it more each time I come back to it. Mueller’s life-changing insight has proved significant for me as well. As I again reread this journal entry in recent days, I noticed several distinct aspects of this one lesson and can be ordered into the following sequence.

1. Your Task: Get Your Soul in a Happy State

In short, the great discovery, Mueller said, was that “the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord.” What a business! Just about any other duty would land as burdensome, but “get happy”? Brothers, this is for every Christian, and especially true for us. That’s your job, not only as Christians but as pastors, and is the first task of every day: get your soul happy in God. That is a deeply refreshing task.

Mueller restates the point as “the first thing to be concerned about [is] . . . how I might get my soul into a happy state.” The discovery is set against the backdrop of other things that are not our first calling: “not how much I might serve the Lord,” not setting the truth before the unconverted, not benefiting believers, not relieving the distressed, not behaving in the world as fits a child of God. None of these real, vital callings is “first and primary.” None of these is “the first and primary business.” Most important is not pouring out but first being filled up. And especially for us pastors, he says, “not for the sake of the public ministry of the word, not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon.”

So, first thing first: get your soul happy in him. Find happiness in God. You wake up hungry for God. Heed your hunger and feast.

But we ask, “How? How does hunger become happiness?”

2. How: By Feeding on God

Mueller’s answer is the feeding or nourishing of the inner man on God: “The first thing the child of God has to do morning by morning is to obtain food for his inner man.” He comes to God, he says, “for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul,” and as he lingers in God’s presence, he aims to “continually keep before [him] that food for [his] own soul is the object of [his] meditation.”

Next, we might ask, “Where? Where do you turn to find such food for your soul?”

3. Where: In His Word

Mueller’s answer — simple, and perhaps unsurprising, yet profound and transformative — is the word of God. To make sure we don’t miss it, he asks the question for us and answers it: “What is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the word of God.”

Now we pick up an important part of the lesson. Mueller says that for years his former practice was to awake and go straight into prayer. It might take him ten minutes, or even half an hour, to find enough focus to really pray. He then might spend “even an hour, on [his] knees” before receiving any “comfort, encouragement, humbling of soul, etc.” He had the goal right: get my soul happy in God. He had the direction right: come to feed on God. But he had the posture wrong. Or he had the order wrong. The lesson he needed to learn was this: come first to hear, then to speak. That is, come first to receive God’s word, then to pray in response.

In God’s word “we find our Father speaking to us, to encourage us, to comfort us, to instruct us, to humble us, to reprove us.” God’s word nourishes and strengthens the soul. His word leads, provides, warns, and steadies. Then in prayer, we speak to God in response to what he says to us in his word.

At this point, we might assume we know how to take in God’s word: just read it. After all, that’s what you do with a written text, right? Mueller has one more clarifying word, and it might be his most important for us today. What he’s talking about, he says, is “not the simple reading of the word of God . . . but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts.” In other words, this is what he and many other great saints have called “meditation.”

4. Pace: Through Meditation

This meditation is a crucial aspect of the lesson, and for us, almost two centuries later, it increasingly has become a lost art. Did anyone receive any significant instruction in seminary on how to meditate?

Mueller’s first mention of “meditation” clarifies what kind of reading he means: “the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the word of God, and to meditation on it.” He then makes plain that meditation concerns the heart. Mere reading might fill the head, but meditation designs to comfort, encourage, warn, reprove, instruct, make application to the heart.

He doubles back to say more. “Meditate on the word of God” means “searching as it were into every verse, to get blessing out of it . . . for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul.” Having chewed on one bite, and savored it, he says, “I go on to the next words or verse, turning all, as I go on, into prayer for myself or others, as the word may lead to it, but still continuously keeping before me that food for my own soul is the object of my meditation.”

He comes back once more to clarify. What he means is “not the simple reading of the word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts.” This series of three verbs may be the most help he gives us as to how we might meditate ourselves and not simply read.

Mueller, like the Psalms, would have us not just read the Scriptures but slow down, pause, and reread, that we might consider what we read, ponder over it, and apply it to our hearts — that is, not only or mainly to our practical lives, but first and foremost to our hearts.

Such a deliberate, affectional reception of God’s word naturally leads us into prayer.

5. Response: Prayer

Don’t think that Mueller is minimizing prayer. Rather, by putting prayer in its proper place (in response to God’s word) is he helps prayer to flourish.

Having heard from God in his word, and considered it, pondered over it, and applied it to my heart, he says, “I speak to my Father and to my Friend . . . about the things that he has brought before me in his precious word.”

“Meditation seeks joy in God today.”

Such meditation soon leads to our response — in fact, “it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer.” The time when prayer “can be most effectively performed is after the inner man has been nourished by meditation on the word of God.” Now, having heard our Father’s voice all the way down into our souls, we find ourselves able “really to pray,” and so to actually commune with God.

Communion with Jesus

You’ll find in Mueller’s May 7, 1841, journal entry that “meditation and prayer” is for him synonymous with the phrase “communion with God.” To commune with God is not only to address him in prayer; nor is it simply to hear from him in his word. Communion involves God’s speaking, and ours. This is a living, Father-child relationship. God speaks first in his word, and we receive his words with the hunger, delight, and unhurried pace that becomes the word of our Father and divine Friend. Then we speak, humbly yet boldly, in response, adoring our God, confessing our sins, thanking him for his grace and mercy, and petitioning him for ourselves, our loved ones, and even those who seem like enemies.

This hearing from God and responding to him Mueller calls “experimental communion with the Lord.” With his “heart being nourished by the truth,” he says, he is “brought into experimental fellowship with God” in meditation and prayer. And not only with God the Father but “the Lord” Jesus — the risen, reigning Christ, seated on heaven’s throne, dwelling in us by his Spirit.

Several times Mueller emphasizes that such communion with God is never a means to ministry and feeding others, but God often provides leftovers. Such early-morning meals, deeply savored in the soul, may “soon after or at a later time” prove to be “food for other believers,” but this is not the goal. Ministry is not the soul’s first and primary business each day but soul-satisfying communion with the risen Christ through his word.

This hedonistic approach to each new day was life-changing for Mueller. And it gave him the help and strength “to pass in peace through deeper trials, in various ways, than [he] had ever had before.” It has been significant for me too. Perhaps it is or would be so for you as well. He said, “How different when the soul is refreshed and made happy early in the morning!”

Question 1: What About Extroverted Pastors?

So much for Mueller and his life-changing discovery. Now, what I’d like to do with our remaining minutes is ask and answer four follow-up questions. One you might ask is this: “What about extroverted pastors? Some of us got into ministry because we love people! We like to be with people. Some pastors seem to want to study all the time, but what about the rest of us?”

To answer that, first, let me say: you have the rest of the day — from breakfast to bedtime. And let me draw in perspective from Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758):

A true Christian doubtless delights in religious fellowship, and Christian conversation, and finds much to affect his heart in it; but he also delights at times to retire from all mankind, to converse with God in solitary places. And this also [so, do both!] has its peculiar advantages for fixing his heart, and engaging his affections. True religion disposes persons to be much alone in solitary places, for holy meditation and prayer. . . .

It is the nature of true grace, that however it loves Christian society in its place, yet it in a peculiar manner delights in retirement, and secret converse with God. So that if persons appear greatly engaged in social religion, and but little in the religion of the closet, and are often highly affected when with others, and but little moved when they have none but God and Christ to converse with, it looks very darkly upon their religion. (Religious Affections, 374, 376)

Question 2: Can You Say More About Meditation?

Second, “Can you say more about meditation than Mueller does?” I’m glad you asked. Let me add four pieces.

First, meditation involves a process. It’s not a switch to flip on. You don’t just up and meditate. Meditation is the goal and apex of Bible intake, and as a middle (often forgotten) habit, it involves lead-up and follow-through. You move into it, and out of it.

Second, here’s more about pace of our engagement with God’s word: read at the pace of the text and of understanding and enjoyment. For most of us, this is a slower pace (perhaps a far slower pace) than we default to when reading other texts in our lives. In our age of accelerations, technology and society condition us to read faster and faster. But the Bible, as an ancient book, was written slowly and carefully to be read slowly and carefully. So, we begin with an unhurried reading (and rereading) of God’s word. The Bible is a Book made for meditation.

Third, meditation forms and shapes the soul. That is, it changes us. We will meditate (that is, spontaneous meditation). Our minds will run somewhere. The question is not if, but on what. Sports? Image and physique? Job and money? Your children? Politics? Anxiety about society? News?

Ask yourself, “What continually captures my attention?” That will shape you. In fact, it is already shaping you. And especially so with what we choose to give our attention to — what we click. What you meditate on, in time, conditions your desires. Christian meditation requires setting and resetting our minds, and particularly our hearts, on the greatest focuses possible.

Fourth, meditation seeks joy in God today. “Today” means right now (not just long-term formation). It aims to warm the heart, stir the affections, satisfy our souls right now in the one they were made for (like Mueller, who got his soul happy before breakfast!) — as in these four statements about meditation from four seventeenth-century voices, back before meditation was a lost art:

• Thomas Watson (1620–1686): “Study is the finding out of a truth, meditation is the spiritual improvement [that is, “use” or “making the most”] of a truth.”
• Samuel Ward (1577–1640): “Stir up thy soul in [meditation] to converse with Christ. Look what promises and privileges thou dost habitually believe, now actually think of them, roll them under thy tongue, chew on them till thou feel some sweetness in the palate of thy soul.”
• Edmund Calamy (1600–1666): In meditation, be like “the Bee that dwells and abides upon the flower, to suck out all the sweetness.”
• William Bates (1625–1699): Since meditation often requires persistence, especially when you’re first learning the lost art, meditate “till thou dost find some sensible benefit conveyed to thy soul.” Many of us give up far too quickly and easily. Don’t let him go till he blesses you! Keep at it “till the flame doth so ascend.”

Practically, what kind of time might you set aside? I would say perhaps half an hour for beginners. And as you become familiar with reading the biblical text more slowly and pausing to meditate on phrases and concepts that arrest your attention — and learn to find some sweetness, some sensible benefit to your soul — you’ll eventually find yourself wanting more time and space, and perhaps grow it toward an hour, or more.

Question 3: Will It Work for Me?

Mueller says the result for him has been that “my inner man almost invariably is even sensibly nourished and strengthened” such that he is “in a peaceful if not happy state of heart.” “I scarcely ever suffer now in this way.” What if that’s not been your experience?

Keller mentions John Owen (1616–1683), and here I’d like to draw what he says about learning to take hold of and direct your own heart. Now, Owen is especially out of step with modern assumptions. Owen would not be so quick to grant the excuse, “I’m just not feeling it today.” In fact, he likely would respond forcefully — and many of us might be better for it.

He would at least challenge whether our initial feelings determined anything significant at all. He surely wouldn’t say to skip God’s word (or prayer or church) to cater to whatever unspiritual inclination you woke up feeling. Rather, he might say, as Keller summarizes, “Meditate to the point of delight.” Don’t give in to your heart’s first inclinations. Rather, take hold of them, and direct them — like Martyn Lloyd-Jones saying not to listen to yourself but talk to yourself, in fact preach to yourself. But there’s a particular point in Owen that’s not in Lloyd-Jones. So, back to Owen. Open the Bible and turn your attention to the one who is supremely worthy, and keep your nose in the Book, and your mind on Jesus, until your sluggish heart begins to respond like it should.

How often do we hear even Christians (even pastors) concede, as a veiled excuse, to be “wired” a certain way? Indeed, God has wired us in certain ways. But how often do we resign ourselves to being hardwired in ways we’re actually far more pliable? And the world’s not helping us with this. Our society has come to feign plasticity in precisely the places we’re hardwired (like biological sex) and to pretend hardwiring in the places we’re actually plastic (desires and delights).

Long before anyone talked about neuroplasticity, Owen believed in what we might call “affectional plasticity” — that is, your desires and delights are not hardwired. They are pliable. You can reshape and recondition them. You can retrain them. You may be unable to simply turn them with full effect in the moment to make yourself feel something, but you can reshape your heart over time. Oh, can you. Your desires, good and bad, are not simple givens. Stretched out over time, as the composite of countless decisions, they are wonderfully (and hauntingly) chosen.

I realize there may be all sorts of responses to this in this room. Some might be thinking, Well, duh. How else would I survive in ministry without communing with God like this through mediation and prayer? And others might be totally blown away by this. You read quickly, pray your lists, move on with your busy ministry day. So, if you’re among the number that this lands on heavily, and you think, This is impossible. I know my sluggish soul. I can’t direct my heart. I can’t “get my soul happy in God,” Owen offers hope for you. He says,

Constancy in [this] duty will give ability for it. Those who conscientiously abide in its performance shall increase in light, wisdom, and experience until they are able to manage it with great success.

As Keller comments, we “listen, study, think, reflect, and ponder the Scriptures until there is an answering response in our hearts and minds” (Prayer, 55, emphasis added) — which leads us to prayer. According to Keller,

Meditation before prayer consists of thinking, then inclining, and, finally, either enjoying the presence or admitting the absence and asking for his mercy and help. Meditation is thinking a truth out and then thinking a truth in until its ideas become “big” and “sweet,” moving and affecting, and until the reality of God is sensed upon the heart. (162)

Question 4: What About Jesus?

For Christians, the final focus of our meditation is personal, and both perfectly human and fully divine in the person of Jesus Christ. Not only is he the final focus of our meditation, but also our supreme example.

Have you ever considered how the God-man knew Scripture so well? They didn’t have their own copies in the first century. If Jesus isn’t simply drawing upon his divinity to quote texts and use concepts his human mind had never learned and considered, then how is it that Jesus knows Scripture so well?

I want to close with these words from Sinclair Ferguson’s chapter on “The Spirit of Christ” (in his book The Holy Spirit). There he addresses our question:

Jesus’s intimate acquaintance with Scripture did not come [magically from heaven] during the period of his public ministry; it was grounded no doubt on his early education, but nourished [!] by long years of personal meditation. Later, in his public ministry, it becomes evident that he was intimately familiar with its contents . . . and also possessed in his human nature a knowledge of God by the Spirit which lent freshness, authority, and a sense of reality to his teaching. (44)

That’s what I want, brothers, and what I want for you in your ministries: freshness, authority, and a sense of reality to your teaching — that would come not just from coming to this Book to read and study, but from our coming to obtain food for our own souls through unhurried, hedonistic meditation on the word of God.