Why is meditation important? How does one meditate upon the Word of God? Kong Hee taught further on this important topic recently.
CN PHOTOS: Daniel Poh
Over the weekend of Jan 30 and 31, City Harvest Church’s senior pastor Kong Hee taught further on the topic of meditation after returning from an 11-day mission trip to South Korea. [Find the first instalment of his message here]
Prior to preaching the Word, Kong gave a mission report from the churches that he had ministered at, including the 30,000-member strong Gangnam Full Gospel Church. While Gangnam is known internationally for the pop song ‘Gangnam Style’, performed by South Korean artist Psy, CHC is known by the Gangnam church for ‘City Harvest style’, which is, praying fervently in tongues.
The ‘City Harvest style’ church is a church that is contemporary and engages culture without compromising on the Word of God – a church model currently being emulated by the Koreans. Showing support for CHC, the senior pastor of Gangnam Full Gospel Church revealed that his whole church is continually praying for CHC.
Going into his message, Kong established that meditation is the most important part of every prayer. While believers often “talk” to God during prayer, meditation allows God to speak directly to their hearts and minds through His Word. Kong quoted a famous pastor who said, “Prayer should be 10 percent talking to God, 90 percent meditation.”
Psalm 119 was David’s chronicle of how much meditation meant to him. The psalm showed that meditation in God’s Word gave David the wisdom as well as the power to overcome obstacles such as temptation, addiction and depression.
Quoting Psalm 1:1-3, Kong preached that believers who stay planted in the river of the Holy Spirit will receive blessings, wisdom and revelation even in the worst of times. They are tapping into the zoe life of God to thrive and succeed through every season, be it good times or bad. The key to being planted in this river is through meditation in the Word of God. “Meditation gives us the faith and confidence that God is in control and God in His sovereignty is fighting for us,” taught Kong.
The pastor told the story of Aeby Samuel, a CHC member bravely invested all his savings into starting up an IT company last year. In April last year, Samuel found himself facing the threat of a hefty lawsuit from a multinational corporation when the Forex trading platform his IT company designed failed to work properly.
Samuel was forced to start from scratch but coding such a complex platform typically takes six months to a year, and the MNC was going to launch this new platform in two weeks. Facing immense stress, Samuel turned to the Bible and felt prompted to meditate on 2 Corinthians 12:9, which says, “But he (Jesus) said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
As he meditated every day, many times a day on the verse, Samuel received a rhema word from Jesus—he felt Jesus was telling him, “My grace will carry you through. Don’t worry, trust Me.”
Soon enough, one of his employees met an expert in the creation of such trading platforms. The expert volunteered to give them all the formulas needed for the algorithm without any charge. This saved Samuel not only thousands of dollars but manhours as well. The programmer doing the coding was based in India, but by God’s grace, he was in Singapore during that precise period and the project was completed ahead of the two-week deadline. Impressed with this turnaround, the same MNC subsequently renewed Samuel’s contract, awarded three more contracts to him, and even opened up business opportunities in the Asian Pacific region to his company.
Kong reminded the Church that meditation means chewing and holding the Word of God in our heart repeatedly until the Word becomes part of them. “This is what Jesus meant when He said let the Word abide in you. Unfortunately, when we hear a good sermon or have a Bible verse jump out at us, we get very excited but we don’t spend time to digest and squeeze out all the revelation from that Word.”
Kong taught the congregation the steps to meditation:
- Find a verse (God’s promise) – to cover your situation
- Shut the world out and focus on God and the verse
- Meditate, meditate, meditate
- Don’t stop until the fulfillment of the promise
“Revelation from meditation is the thing that makes Christian living exciting,” said Kong. The congregation was reminded to keep an appetite for the Word of God in their heart and their thought life, and not have their minds preoccupied with the things of life that are fighting for their attention.
Before concluding the service, Kong gave an altar call for members with loved ones suffering from sicknesses, or are sick themselves. Hundreds of churchgoers responded to the altar call.
Desmond Chew, 41, a draughtsman, was prayed for by his cell group members during the altar call. He said, “Pastor preached on the importance of meditation and not giving up until we see the promise coming to pass today. I have stage four colon cancer but I am not giving up hope. I’m doing treatment, I’m also praying, my cell group members are praying, and I believe God will heal me and pull me out of this crisis.”
Deborah Lye, 20, an undergraduate, said, “My greatest takeaway was how we can actually meditate on our own. We can sometimes get so overwhelmed with life that we forget about the importance of meditating on the Word of God. I have a family member who’s hospitalized, and I’m really thankful to God that there was a chance to have prayers said.”
