Doing Life Together

Don’t you long to hear God’s voice? I know I have heard it on occasion. But I can’t summon it at will. I eagerly read this book in 2021, but didn’t review it then. I had to reread half of it to refresh my memory. Again, I started it eagerly.

Hearing God Through Biblical Meditation begins with wonderful suggestions. Stillness. Seeing Jesus with the eyes of one’s heart. Knowing that Jesus is always with you. “God’s voice in your heart often sounds like a flow of spontaneous thoughts.”

Virkler identifies four keys to successful meditation: Quiet down, tune to spontaneity, look for vision, and journal.

Each chapter ends with exercises, which I confess I thought about briefly, but didn’t do.

And then I got bogged down.

With virtually every chapter, Virkler gives us new points to internalize. Five ways to tell whether you’re hearing God’s voice. Four pillars of meditation. Seven steps to receive revelation knowledge through meditation. (When asking for revelation, “you are asking the Holy Spirit to unveil that which is under the surface. . .you are asking Him to shine light on what that passage means and how it can be applied.”) Twelve points to properly handling scripture. Fourteen basic principles for interpreting scripture. Four disciplines of inductive Bible study. Seven (actually way more than seven) questions about what is going on in the passage of Scripture. I can’t keep that many points in mind at one time. His process becomes cumbersome for me.

I wish Virkler would go back and rewrite this book, simplifying it, concentrating on the four keys, discussing them in detail, and including some of the rest of the material in the context of illuminating the keys. In other words, not telling us everything there is to know on the subject of Biblical meditation, but just giving us practical suggestions to facilitate hearing God’s voice.

Since Virkler doesn’t rewrite his work according to my whims, my suggestion for someone who wants to read this book is—take the journaling idea very seriously. Buy a notebook. Read this book slowly, like maybe a chapter a week. Do the exercises. Do your daily Bible reading and apply the points in the current chapter. See which points are helpful to you in your meditation, and make note of them in your notebook. When you’re all through reading this book, come up with your own points to deepening your meditation process. You can make this book work for you.