How do you see meditation? What about mantras? So I'm assuming this is usually comes from an Eastern religion influence, but I don't want to read an event. So meditation and mantras, what do you think?

So yeah, it kind of depends on what you mean by meditation. Like to me, Biblically meditation is like the word means like to chew the cut or at least the the etymology of the word. It's like when an animal

chews cut and then puts it back and brings it back and choose it more. And the idea is like you're thinking something over. So like when a mathematician is working on a hard problem, you could call that meditation.

But in our culture, we usually use the term to mean something else. And it comes to Eastern from Eastern religions, it can sometimes mean something else. So let me throw out a few thoughts in case that's the direction it's going is sort of like a mindlessness kind of like.

So one of the reasons why this meditation stuff is entered in to Christian circles, one of the reasons is because there are there is a group who have said like let's go into these Eastern religions and let's borrow whatever we can.

And that's a dangerous thing to do. This is something that's happened. Many people have done this through the years. They're like, oh, the Eastern mystics like let's kind of dig in there and let's get what we can from their behaviors and Christianize it.

Let's kind of try to make it sort of Christian. And this is just a dangerous practice in general, because practices lead to beliefs and they come from beliefs. And there's reasons why they're doing what they're doing the way they're doing it and why Christians biblically aren't really doing that.

And so you want to try to make sure that your practices are consistent with what we find in scripture. It's like the blueprint God gave us. So let me give you some examples of this.

Jesus said when we pray not to think will be heard because of our many words. So some people will say mantras and they think they're going to create something with their with their words.

They're going to say it over and over and over again. They're putting it out to the to the universe or maybe they'll go, oh, no, no, no, to God. I'm Christianizing it. Right. I'm putting it out to God.

But they think they'll be heard because they're going to repeat it over and over and over again. And I think that what Jesus is showing us is that that kind of thing annoys God to put it sort of clumsily.

I think that he doesn't like it when we just say the same thing over and over and over again because we think lots of words. Now he'll hear me instead of thinking God is gracious and loving and patient and he's always listening.

That's a danger. It also is akin to what we would see in the first century with magic spells where they would use certain phrases and repeat them over and over again to try to create some sort of magical effect.

And this is something God doesn't want Christians to be involved in. And Jesus, you know, he comes into that culture and he doesn't teach us to do those things. He had the opportunity to tell us to do that.

So I think generally with meditation, I don't know exactly what they mean. Maybe they mean something that I'll consider more innocuous.

But if it's borrowing from Eastern mysticism, if it's starting to look like like magic spells, like you're repeating the phrases, if it's the kind of prayer Jesus told us not to do.

If it's mindlessness instead of being thoughtful and considering the goodness of God or looking at creation and considering that God made that, then I'm going to be wanting to probably move away from it.