When non-Christians practice meditation, they often try to blank out their minds, erase their inner selves, merge with the universe, achieve an altered state of consciousness, or they try to somehow unleash their human potential.

Christians mean something different by meditation. To us “meditation” is just another word for thinking. So we meditate by engaging God’s word and applying it to our hearts. This is not a mystical procedure, and we do not repeat God’s word as a mantra without thinking about its meaning.

Instead, we think through the meanings and implications of the biblical passages, relating it to other passages, and then apply it to our beliefs and actions. This involves serious intellectual effort, and it is often uncomfortable to face one’s own defective thinking and lifestyle. Therefore, Christian meditation is not a way to escape from the self, to lose the self, or to accept the self, but to confront it by the only power that can transform it.

Do not be deceived – even those seemingly gentle Buddhist monks are corrupt to the core. Some of them make a superficial acknowledgement of this, and have written about it. But their writings and exercises lack the truth, and the converting and transforming power that is available only from God through Christ, conveyed by the Scripture, and applied by the Spirit. Non-Christian religions are frauds and failures, and non-Christian meditation is a snare of Satan.

Eastern religions want you to lose yourself. Psychology urges you to accept your wicked self. In contrast, the Christian faith teaches you to confront and examine yourself by the word of God, and it is by means of this word from God that he will empower and transform you (see Joshua 1:8, 1 Corinthians 11:28, 2 Corinthians 13:5, Philippians 2:12-13, and James 1:21-25).