Question: As you know, I have used and shared your meditations for the past couple of years with great success. This week a lady raised a question I could not answer, so I am turning to your for help with it.
She asked if visualization is involved with your meditations? I said yes, and mentioned about seeing troubles floating down the river or leaving with balloons. When I got home I researched visualization and saw a lot of material that I know you are opposed to.
Please help me know the difference between the visualization you include in your Christian meditations and the visualization involved other forms of meditation. What scriptures can guide Christians in selecting safe forms visualization? Or is there such? Thanks in advance for your helping me with my search.
Answer: Sometimes I think we really get caught up on semantics. We begin to want to banned any word that has been associated with another religion or movement. We forget that words have various practices and can be harmful or helpful depending upon how they are used and who is using them. Visualize is just a more focused form of daydreaming. In fact, visualization is much more powerful than daydreaming in that it is a conscious act of directing our attention on what we want to achieve.
The scriptures tell us to live a life of faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen. Everything that we see in the physical world was first manifested in the spiritual world. In fact, Jesus said whatever we bind on heaven is bound in earth and whatever we loose in heaven is loosed in earth. There is a direct correlation between what happens in the earth and the spiritual realm.
As Christians, God wants us to speak those things that are not as though the were. An extension of that would be to “see” those things that are not as though they already existed. Renewing our mind also involves renewing our vision. Without a vision the people perish. God told us to write the vision on the all and make it plan. Visualization can be a positive tool in helping us to stay focused on our dreams or alter negative or debiliating mental movies or patterns.
Yes, some of my meditations are interactive and do contain visualizations. We all absorb information in different ways. In school, we learn that we learn things easier if we are involved in the process as opposed to watching someone else show us or tell us what to do. Visualization is like a trial run of the mind and is a powerful tool for change.
Don’t get hung up on the word because it is often associated with new age philosophy. Every concept in the new age movement isn’t bad. Let’s stop throwing out the baby with the bath water and learn to distinguish between good and evil. There are some practices that we can adopt that can transform our life and relationship with God. Meditation is one of them. I say, let’s begin to look at things at face value instead of putting a good or bad label on everything we don’t understand.
I think the verse you’re looking for above is Habakkuk 2:2 “Wrote the vision, make it plain on tablets: so that he may run who reads it.” You’ve taken it terribly out of context. God was telling Habakkuk (NOT us) to write down what He was going to show him (the vision) and make it clear, so that people would read it and run away from God’s judgement. Stop proof texting to try and justify something that the bible doesn’t condone.