A DISSECTION OF POJU OYEMADE’S TEACHING ON MEDITATION (PART I)

“Poju Oyemade Peeps and Mutters Like Spiritists and Wizards”

By Akin Ojumu

Meditation is a subject near and dear to Poju Oyemade’s heart. 

Over the years, he has devoted at least four distinct multi-part teaching series to the subject. The number becomes considerably larger when standalone sermons, conference messages, and other teachings on meditation are included.

And he is still teaching it.

Just this month, Oyemade commenced yet another series on meditation. This time, the focus is “The Practice of Meditation,” a series that presently contains at least two parts.

What exactly does Poju Oyemade mean by meditation?

That is the question this series will examine.

MUTTERING UNTIL “LIGHT” BREAKS FORTH

In a June 17, 2015 sermon titled “Unlocking the Power of Scriptures Through Meditation,” Oyemade taught that when God reveals the intended end of a matter, the believer should meditate on the relevant Scriptures and repeatedly “mutter” them until “light”—that is, insight or revelation—breaks forth.

This is not an incidental feature of his teaching.

Muttering, repetition, inward seeing, imagination, and verbalization are recurring elements in Poju Oyemade’s theology of meditation.

The problem is that the Bible never teaches believers to employ Scripture as an incantatory device for accessing hidden spiritual information.

It does not matter that the words being repeated are Bible verses. It does not matter that the phrases being muttered come from Scripture. Biblical words do not automatically sanctify an unbiblical spiritual technique.

Scripture itself warns against religious practices involving muttering and attempts to obtain hidden knowledge:

Isaiah 8:19

“And when they say to you, ‘Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,’ should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living?”

The issue is not merely the vocabulary being spoken. The issue is the spiritual function assigned to the practice.

When repeated words, formulas, mental images, or inward techniques become mechanisms for accessing secret knowledge, manipulating circumstances, or producing desired realities, we have moved far beyond the biblical idea of reflecting thoughtfully upon the truth of God’s Word into a forbidden territory.

POJU OYEMADE’S MEDITATION TECHNIQUES

Across his teachings over the years, Oyemade has variously instructed his audience to do things such as:

1. Fix their attention on a desired destination or outcome.

2. Get into a comfortable position.

3. Close their eyes.

4. Settle or focus their attention.

5. Repeat something inwardly.

6. Employ words and imagination.

7. Form an inward picture corresponding to a desired outcome.

8. Persist in that inward exercise until insight or manifestation occurs.

Most strikingly, an official Poju Oyemade Facebook post explicitly describes the internally repeated word or short phrase as a “mantra,” explaining that it may consist of a word, sound, prayer, or short phrase.

That terminology should immediately arrest the attention of any Christian interested in biblical discernment.

But terminology is not even the most important issue. The more fundamental question is: What is all of this supposed to accomplish?

MEDITATION AS A MEANS OF ALTERING REALITY

Oyemade does not present meditation merely as careful reflection upon the meaning of Scripture.

He assigns meditation a much more expansive function.

In his teaching, meditation becomes a means by which a believer can cultivate inward perception, establish a new internal reality, discover unseen possibilities, and eventually bring about changes in outward circumstances.

Among the benefits and objectives he has associated with meditation are the following:

1. Developing insight concerning opportunities.

2. Training inward perception to recognize possibilities not immediately visible in external circumstances.

3. Using inward vision as preparation for a sudden outward “quantum leap.”

4. Refusing to identify oneself with an unwanted external condition.

5. Establishing an alternative identity on the basis of what one considers scriptural truth.

6. Detecting thoughts produced by an unwanted circumstance.

7. Replacing those thoughts with an inward image of what one regards as the truth.

8. Using words describing one’s identity or future to sustain that image.

9. Persisting in the process until external reality changes.

Notice what has happened.

Meditation is no longer simply: “What does this passage mean, and how should I obey it?”

It has become a technique for seeing beyond present circumstances, constructing an inward future, discerning the route toward it, and expecting the external world eventually to conform to the inwardly cultivated image.

That is an entirely different conception of meditation.

TURNING THE WRITTEN WORD INTO EVENTS

In his ongoing series “The Practice of Meditation,” Oyemade describes meditation as the process through which the written Word becomes actualized as events in a person’s life. His audience is instructed to meditate “day and night” and to “soak” the spirit with the Word of God.

Yet the fundamental concepts appearing in this new series are largely a reworking of ideas he has taught for years:

1. Fill the interior life with the Word.

2. Continue with the Word rather than merely reading it.

3. Obtain “light,” insight, or instruction concerning what to do.

4. Convert the written Word into lived or event reality.

5. Connect meditation with the actualization of a desired future.

Across more than a decade of teaching, seven recurring themes repeatedly feature in Oyemade’s doctrine of meditation:

1. Repetition and muttering — repeatedly speaking or rehearsing Scripture.

2. Speaking and confession — verbalizing the Word concerning oneself or one’s circumstances.

3. Thought replacement — rejecting thoughts and images generated by present circumstances.

4. Visualization and imagination — forming inward pictures of the desired or supposedly scripturally promised outcome.

5. Internalization — moving the Word from the printed page into the “heart” or “spirit.”

6. Receiving “light” — obtaining revelation, insight, direction, or instruction through meditation.

7. Manifestation — expecting the inwardly cultivated reality eventually to become an outward event.

Where does Scripture teach Christians this system? Where are believers commanded to form mental pictures of desired futures until those pictures become external realities? Where are Christians instructed to employ repeated words, inward images, and altered identification with circumstances as mechanisms for changing their material conditions?

Nowhere.

These ideas are not derived from biblical exegesis. They bear a striking resemblance to the techniques historically associated with New Thought, mind science, creative visualization, positive confession, and related New Age metaphysical systems—only expressed in Christian vocabulary and decorated with Bible verses.

VISUALIZATION: THE CRITICAL DISTINCTION

Poju Oyemade explicitly connects meditation with visualization and imagination. It is therefore necessary to make an important distinction.

Visualization, by itself, is not inherently occultic or sinful.

Got Questions defines visualization as:

“The process of forming mental images. Often, visualization involves envisioning events or situations that don’t exist or that have not happened yet. Visualization can be spiritually healthy or spiritually unhealthy, depending on the situation and the reasons for the visualization.”

Human beings naturally picture things mentally.

A basketball player may visualize making a difficult shot. A skier may mentally rehearse navigating a slope. Musicians, actors, writers, architects, and countless others mentally picture what they intend to do before doing it.

We imagine conversations before they happen. We picture furniture in a room before rearranging it. We envision a finished project before beginning it.

There is nothing mystical about this.

As Got Questions explains, visualization can simply function as a normal method of preparation:

“Visualization is a way we prepare ourselves before taking action. There is nothing unbiblical about the tendency for humans to visualize in this way. In fact, it is wise to consider outcomes before taking action (Luke 14:28).”

The problem begins when visualization is assigned metaphysical power. That is the crucial distinction.

Modern self-help, New Thought, and New Age teachers frequently promote what is sometimes called “creative visualization”—the idea that sustained mental images, thoughts, affirmations, and inward states can somehow attract, materialize, or produce corresponding external realities.

Got Questions summarizes the distinction:

“However, modern self-help gurus often promote visualization as a means to alter reality and get what you want. Through a technique they call ‘creative visualization,’ they promise everything from financial success to a better love life based on the power of the human mind to ‘materialize’ one’s thoughts, ‘attract’ success, and ‘create’ a preferred reality.”

That is something altogether different from an athlete mentally rehearsing a jump shot.

And Got Questions correctly identifies the theological problem:

“This is nothing but New Age humanism that relies on a nonexistent power of the mind, and it is completely unbiblical. This type of visualization is related to the false teachings of the Law of Attraction, the power of positive thinking, and Word of Faith. The human mind has no power to create reality or reshape the world to one’s liking, no matter how focused the thoughts or clear the visualization. God alone creates, and every good and perfect gift comes from Him (James 1:17).”

That distinction is indispensable.

Visualizing yourself performing a task is ordinary mental rehearsal.

Visualizing a desired reality while repeating words, rejecting contrary external circumstances, constructing an alternative inward identity, and persisting until the outward world supposedly conforms to the inward picture is something else entirely.

The former is ordinary cognition. The latter bears the unmistakable conceptual fingerprints of mind science metaphysics.

And simply inserting Bible verses into the process does not make the underlying technique biblical. Christian vocabulary does not baptize an unbiblical practice.

Scripture is not a mantra. 

Meditation is not a mechanism for manufacturing reality. And the human imagination is not a spiritual laboratory in which believers construct tomorrow before causing it to materialize today.

In Part II, we will place Poju Oyemade’s teaching side by side with New Thought, Science of Mind, creative visualization, and related New Age “mind science” meditation practices and examine the similarities in their concepts, methods, and promised results.