What is Chewing Bread?

Chewing Bread

What’s up, guys, my name is Austin Reese, and I’m the creator of chewingbread.com Thanks so much for checking out this podcast!
I'm guessing if you're listening right now you are asking the question what is chewing bread? So I wanted to take a couple minutes to explain what Chewing Bread is, and what you can expect moving forward.
First off, it’s a resource to help you stop and ponder the Word of God in a world where we just read, pray and go on our way. A resource. That's it. Not trying to get x amount of followers or recognition. My flesh sure does. But my soul knows it's simply an opportunity to share and point people to the gospel. I'm not trying to be anyone or a type of person to receive praise or attract a particular type of person to listen. That's just stupid. I'm just a beggar telling another beggar where I've found bread.
That being said, this resource shows itself two ways: a website and a podcast.
But the main part of the resource is the phrase “stop and ponder the Word of God”. So let me start by talking about the podcast, and then close by pointing you to some additional resources you can find at the website chewingbread.com
Well like I said, my name is Austin Reese, and I’m a high school math teacher. I just finished my third year of teaching. I’m also married to my beautiful college sweetheart and we just celebrated 3 years of marriage last month. So that's pretty awesome.
So in a weird way, I love research and am intrigued by random things. And I'm not talking like sit down for hours on end scientific report research but just like “oh hey let me google that to find out”. End of May 2017, meditation and mindfulness was put in my brain. Don't know where it came from.
Headspace App. And it was cool. Super intrigued by it and found scientific research backing up the positive health benefits of mindfulness and meditation:

• The universities of UCLA, Harvard, Oxford, and others have all undertaken studies on mindfulness meditation, proving that regular practice helps combat stress, improves focus and increases resilience.

• A study suggests mindfulness meditation boosts self-compassion, reduces psychological symptoms and burnout.

But I don't know ... I kind of got weirded out. Like I'm just sitting here breathing and focusing on my body. And I'm like, Is that wrong? I mean it's not pointing me to the gospel...
Believing that:

1. “All truth is God's Truth” and

2. Science and God are not in opposition with each other

I began to ask the question: How can I honor God in meditation?

From GotQuestions article “What is mindfulness? Should a Christian be involved in mindfulness?“
Mindfulness is a term used to describe a meditative state in which people direct their attention inward to become more self-aware. Mindfulness is self-examination of one’s thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and emotions with no judgment of their being right or wrong. The goal of meditative mindfulness is to identify thoughts and feelings about a particular issue, to live in the moment, and to accept oneself completely. When this goal has been reached, the person is said to have entered a state of mindfulness.
Overall: Mindfulness is rooted in Buddhism..The ideology behind mindfulness is to achieve stillness and balance of the mind.
Man’s efforts to calm the mind and rid the life of stressors—through mindfulness or other New Age techniques—are an attempt to manufacture peace. From a biblical perspective, we know that only Jesus gives the peace that can exist in all circumstances (John 14:27; Philippians 4:7). No human can control emotions or thoughts on his or her own because we are born slaves to a sinful nature (Romans 6:17–23). Only through the power of the Holy Spirit who sets our minds free to think truthfully can we know true peace.
When Christians think biblically, they see things defined through the lens of Scripture. The word mindful, which means “attentive,” is not describing anything inherently wrong. Christians can be mindful of Christ by taking every thought captive for Christ and renewing their minds with the truth (2 Corinthians 10:5; Romans 12:2). But mindfulness, as promoted in psychology and used as a meditation technique, is not biblical.

And I was like, uhh babe we need to rethink this Headspace App meditation thing...
So then I began to ask the question: Okay, so then what is Christian meditation/mindfulness?
Google search:

1. What is Christian meditation?

   1. 1.29 million results

2. How to meditate on the Bible?

   1. 729 thousand results

Needless to say ? There's a lot out there! But how do I know any of it is credible?
Tons and tons of articles break down the WHY of meditating on God's word, but few practically tackle the HOW other than saying “reflect on what the passage is saying” or “ask questions of the text” without giving practical questions to ask of the text.
The stuff I was finding was just way too much. Like 7 steps to unlocking God's truth. Or 6 questions to ask of God's Word, but each question had like 2 or 3 sub questions. That's way overcomplicated. I'm like, dude, I'm just trying to read my Bible and understand what it's saying. I can't spend hours on end doing that. I understand I probably should be, but I'm just being real, for me, that's not realistic.
And no one ever really taught me how to study God's Word in an effective, time efficient way. So now here I am left to the internet to teach me. Good luck! Ha but I did find a couple articles that really sparked me and got me on my way to this idea of meditating on God's Word and ultimately what led to the creation of Chewing Bread.

From GotQuestions article “What is Christian meditation?”
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). If the Bible is sufficient to thoroughly equip us for every good work, how could we think we need to seek a mystical experience, or any experience for that matter, instead of or in addition to the Word of God?
Christian meditation is to be solely on the Word of God and what it reveals about Him. David found this to be so, and he describes the man who is “blessed” as one whose “delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2). True Christian meditation is an active thought process whereby we give ourselves to the study of the Word, praying over it and asking God to give us understanding by the Spirit, who has promised to lead us “into all truth” (John 16:13).

From Desiring God — Warm Yourself and the Fires of Meditation
Meditation or mindfulness doesn’t entail emptying our minds, but rather filling them with biblical and theological substance — truth outside of ourselves — and then chewing on that content. For the Christian, meditation means having “the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16). It is not, like secular meditation, “doing nothing and being tuned in to your own mind at the same time,” but it is feeding our minds on the words of God and digesting them slowly, savoring the texture, enjoying the juices, cherishing the flavor of such rich fare. Meditation that is truly Christian is guided by the gospel, shaped by the Scriptures, reliant upon the Holy Spirit, and exercised in faith. In meditation, we pause and reflect over his words.
At the end of the article he quotes 3 old dead dudes that know their theology:

1. Thomas Manton — The word feeds meditation, and meditation feeds prayer. What we take in by the word we digest by meditation and let out by prayer.

2. Thomas Watson — The reason we come away so cold from reading the word is, because we do not warm ourselves at the fires of meditation.

3. William Bridge — Begin with reading or hearing. Go on with meditation; end in prayer.

Western culture Christianity for most of us is this: Reading the Bible and then Praying.
From this article and what I was finding, meditation is the missing link between the two. So it moves from Read then Pray to Read, meditate, then pray. Or Read, chew, pray.
But a lot of us are so scared of meditation, (myself included!), because of the weird, crossed legged voodoo stuff we think of when we think of meditation. And I mean if I'm being honest, others give me some weird looks when I start talking about meditation. But the reality is that for the Christian, “the mystical, finding your zen meditation” is not Biblical meditation founded on the Word rooted in the gospel. So we need not think of it that way. It's simply taking time to stop and ponder deeply the reality of the word of God.
So now what does this practically look like. I think it looks like asking 4 super simple, super practical questions that pull our attention back to the Scripture we're reading:

1. What, if anything, stuck out to me?

2. What do these verses say about God and His character?

3. From these verses, what moved me to love Jesus more?

4. What do these words tell me to believe and do to faithfully follow Jesus today?

That's it. Rooted in the text. Pointed back to the Cross. Yes about me, but first about God.
Moving forward, my goal for the podcast. Not commentary. Not exegete.
Read a section of Scripture.
Ask those 4 questions.
Insert pauses between the questions to allow you, the listener, to stop and ponder and chew on the Word of God.
That's the podcast. A guided Christian meditation.

• The website:

  • Articles - Three gospel-centered articles a week pulled from various sources such as Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, Ann Voskamp, Jennie Allen, Paull Tripp, and others.

  • Bible Reading Guides - A way to read the Bible in a more manageable way.

That's what Chewing Bread is. A resource to help you stop and ponder the Word of God in a world where just read, pray and go on our way.
Lastly, from the article I mentioned before from Desiring God, David Mathis closes by saying
“In our restless and stressed-out society, it very well may strengthen our brain and lower our blood pressure to practice the art of Christian meditation. But even more significant will be the good that it does for our souls.”
That's my hope for Chewing Bread, that your soul would be strengthened by the Word of God and the hope of the gospel. And you would find rest in the only source of true joy and satisfaction: Jesus Christ.
And I hope you join me.
Thanks for listening.