Stoop - Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life

This is not just a book to read; it is meant to be experienced. You can start slowly, but until you allow yourself to spend at least thirty minutes four times a week on this journey, you will miss out on how incredible Gods plan is for helping you to rethink how you think. Real change is possible, but it requiresand heres that word we love to avoiddiscipline. We have to be serious about transformation. It cant be a hit-or-miss program. The psalmist said that he delighted in the law [Word] of the L ORD , meditating on it day and night (Ps. 1:2). He was serious about transformation in his life.

After you have spent some time meditating on the passages listed in the previous six chapters, you may want to continue by meditating on one of Pauls letters, such as Galatians. Or you may want to meditate on one of the Gospels. Continue the process wherever you choose. You can use a translation you are familiar with, or you may want to use a different translation so it is fresh for youeither way, the benefit is in the doing, and in staying with the process. Take a few verses at a time or focus in on a paragraph or two. I use the New Living Translation and often focus on a section of several paragraphs set apart in the text by a title. Its important not to try to cover too much at a time. But its up to you to gauge how much you want to bite off at once.

As you practice discursive meditation, you will find that your questions about the Scriptures and about doctrines become secondary to simply allowing the Scriptures to speak directly to your heart. Gods Word is living, and the apostle John makes that clear in his introduction to his Gospel. He wrote, In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). It doesnt get any clearer than thatJesus is the Word. They are one and the same. When you truly encounter the Scriptures, you are encountering who Jesus isthe living God!