Mindful Worship Meditation #15 – Guard Your Heart
My pastor recently finished a sermon series entitled Password. In this series, he talks about how we protect so much of our personal information with passwords, yet we don’t have a password to keep harmful things away from what matters most: our heart, our soul, and our mind. This meditation was inspired by one of those sermons. I hope it helps you to guard your heart.
You can download and listen to the four sermons in the Password series yourself in the Sermons area of the Rich Fork Baptist Church web site. These sermons were delivered between January 18, 2009, and February 8, 2009.
Scriptures in this meditation: Proverbs 4:20-27
Time: 20:30
File Size: 18.7 mb
Link to MP3: Meditation #15 – Guard Your Heart
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November 10th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
I was enjoying this meditation, until the “my son” part. I think it is really insensitive to women to say that, whether they we are men or women, that all Christians are “sons.” It would have been better to be more generous to use inclusive language and say “my child” as in the NRSV, CEV, NET, NCV, and NLT translations. I know that it’s a theological issue in many Baptist churches, but I think especially in a meditation, it is really jarring. It upset me enough that it pulled me completely out of the meditation and I had to stop.
I’m not trying to start a theology war, just trying to be helpful.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Ulysses – Thank you for your comments.
November 17th, 2009 at 1:46 am
I found Ulysees’ post to be a distraction from my attempt to listen to the voice of God. This is not the place to bring up this controversial subject, as it is hairsplitting. The use of the masculine gender has for centuries been understood to refer to both genders, and the original languages of the Scriptures utilize it in that way. I read his post before engaging in the meditation, and all I could think about was the issue, and not the Word. A private email would have been a more appropriate context in which to submit a complaint of this nature.
November 17th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Donald – Thank you for your response here. I wasn’t quite sure how best to handle Ulysses comment. I certainly didn’t want him to feel slighted or ignored. I also didn’t want to get involved in a theological debate here on the blog–at least not a theological debate on that particular topic.
)
We’ll see what others think and if it seems appropriate I’ll remove these comments. However, I don’t want to stifle discussion about the meditations here; I really want to encourage it. I just don’t want that discussion to distract from the purposes of the work here though.
Thanks again!